I never intended for the hiatus between record reviews to be this long, but now I'm back, I'll do my best to catch up: at irregular intervals over the coming weeks, I'll report on new theatre and theatre-related CDs, of course, but I'll sprinkle those with a survey of recent CDs that have been heretofore neglected in these cyber-pages. And so to business:
Not strictly a theatre CD, but one its publicist has been pushing enthusiastically is the jazz combo album called "Pure Imagination" (Impulse! IMPD-244), which features jazz treatments of theatre standards arranged by Eric Reed, who also tickles the ivories (accompanied by Reginald Veal on accoustic bass and Gregory Hutchinson on drums). The album is worth the energy to promote it, as Mr. Reed's treatments are smart, tasty and unusually artful re-examinations of the familiar. For those who have record collections (or memories) going back this far, the Reed album is a worthwhile latter-day companion to the similar albums that a pre-Hollywood Lalo Schifrin used to produce in his early years, those working wonders with movie and classical themes. Like Schifrin, Mr. Reed is far too savvy a musician to merely apply a standard jazzhead genre to the various tunes he chooses to develop...rather, he seems to have analyzed their component parts, melody, harmony and rhythm, to extrapolate arrangements that exploit some fundamentally jazzworthy element buried in the native material. A fairly obvious one is the jazz waltz he creates out of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Hello, Young Lovers"; but there are subtleties and surprises aplenty too, such as the ultra-cool near-samba sculpted out of the harmonies in Bernstein and Sondheim's "Maria", and the languid "noodling" he creates out of the Leslie Bricusse-Anthony Newly title song (a tune not often, if ever, covered outside of its source, the soundtrack for "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"). And there's a delightful sense of whimsy--and irony--in the way Mr. Reed offsets the syncopations in the Gershwins' "I Got Rhythm". If you're into this kind of crossover fare, its an album that you'll keep going back to.
I'm not sure the same can be said for the album of the recent Broadway revival of "1776" (TVT 8150-2)...and not because it isn't a perfectly accurate representation of the production, or a nicely theatrical experience. It is both those things and then some. But the album seems so desperate to make up for the shortfalls of the 1969 Broadway original (an often bombastic delivery and some vocal glitches) that the effort shows in the choice of curiously edited script excerpts (by Peter Stone) that attempt to give a sense of the whole. On the other hand, this rendition of the Sherman Edwards score allows for some intimacy with the characters, so it's a nice complement to the original, in terms of painting a fuller picture of the show's potential for one who has never seen it. The album was produced by Robert Sher, but the man running the operation while the vocals were being laid down was musical director Paul Gemignani, who, by all accounts, holds the show dear and counts it an intensely personal favorite. Standout performances include the pro-slavery Edward Rutledge of Gregg Edelman and the warmly wise Abigail Adams of Linda Emond. And a guffaw-producing cameo by Daniel Marcus in the smaller role of Robert Livingston (the track is "But Mr. Adams"). The artfully reduced orchestration by Brian Besterman comes off far more well than most such reductions, but also adds to the feeling that this is somehow a less grand affair.
There's also not much grandeur in the new album of "Saturday Night", (RCA Records/First Night Records 09026-63318-2) but then, it's a university production of Stephen Sondheim's very first, heretofore unproduced, professional score, about young men and women in pre-depression Brooklyn...so youthful simplicity is more the order of the day. Indeed, the performances (Birmingham University actors, presented by the small, but flourishing Bridewell Theatre Company in London) are largely unvarnished. There is no single track on this album that is up to its equivalent track on any of the various Sondheim compilations (e.g. Anna Francolini's rendition of the southern belle teaser "Isn't It?" doesn't compare to Victoria Mallory singing the same song in "A Stephen Sondheim Evening")--but that is somewhat mitigated by the fact that, at last, all the songs are in one place, that there is a significant amount of previously unrecorded material, and that there is a sense of dramatic context (but only a sense; these early songs are too traditional to advance plot very far, and there is no synopsis in the CD booklet). The record provides a fascinating glimpse into early Sondheim--in some respects, much more sophisticated and like his then-future self than his lyrics-only scores ("Gypsy" and "West Side Story") would have lead one to think...and yet there is an undeniable youthfulness in the score's desire not only to show its composer off...but in Sondheim's connection with a younger generation, even more genuine here than in the later "Merrily We Roll Along". Because, of course, at this moment in time, he was writing about age-contemporaries. The album is a modest affair, the tiny-ensemble orchestrations by musical director Peter Corrigan have a 1960s off-Broadway feel to them, and even if the album is not one you return to often, your curiosity will be well rewarded.
Another album that amasses obscurer Sondheim into a single, convenient disc is "Sondheim at the Movies" (Varèse Sarabande VSD-5805), produced by Bruce Kimmel and orchestrated by Larry Moore. The suites culled from the film "Stavisky" don't stack up to the original soundtrack (which is a bonus feature on all formats of the "Follies in Concert" album except vinyl); but the songs from "Dick Tracy", "The Bird Cage" and "Singing Out Loud" are fine enough to be definitive. And it's nice to finally hear a commercial release of the four-song "Evening Primrose" score that doesn't crack under the weight of Mandy Patinkin's excesses--here exuberantly sung by Gary Beach and Liz Callaway. (The original TV soundtrack from Sondheim's private archives--orchestrations by Norman Paris, sung by Anthony Perkins and Charmian Carr--is probably unreleasable as an album unto itself; it's technically substandard and even artistically wanting in the musicianship; but Perkins sings his role brilliantly, and Sondheim's pre-"Stavisky" underscoring is fascinating. It would be nice if some enterprising record producer could convince unca Steve to allow its appearance as bonus track appendices to some future collection.) Other familiar voices on "Sondheim at the Movies" include Danny Burstein, Susan Egan, Jane Krakowski and Christiane Noll...among more still.
"More still" is what's in store for afecionados of the current revival of John Kander and Fred Ebb's "Chicago", which, under the direction of Walter Bobbie, is so phenomenally successful that it has spawned five English speaking companies worldwide. One of those is in London, its original cast preserved on the RCA Victor CD (09026 63155-2) produced by the legendary Thomas Z. Sheppard. (Ironically, it was his protégé, Jay David Saks, who produced the Broadway counterpart disc.) The London album has as much theatricality and "liveness" as the Broadway album, which is saying something...but what it doesn't have are performances that are as charismatic--not without the visual. For those familiar with the new Broadway album, listening to the London--which toplines Ruthie Henshall, Ute Lemper, Henry Goodman and Nigel Planer--is a bit like listening to a recording of replacements. Nothing wrong with them, and they certainly acquit themselves honorably...but the wattage is always a klik or two less bright.
There is no shortage of star wattage on the new "Cabaret" album, showcasing the original cast of the current Broadway revival. Produced with remarkable ingenuity by the aforementioned Jay David Saks for RCA (09026-63173-2), it somehow manages, with the use of ambient sound and "canned" audience laughter and applause between appropriate numbers, to precisely convey the ambience of the Kit Kat Klub--the real one on 45th Street where the show is playing, that is...which I suppose means the fictional one within the show too. There is only one relatively "polished" voice in the cast--that being Broadway veteran Mary Louise Wilson as Fraü Schneider--and all the others are rough-hewn and "civilian"...but as in the show, it adds to the verisimilitude, the sense of a decaying society as a storm cloud approaches. The stalwart blindness of Natasha Richardson's Sally Bowles is preserved in painful detail...as is the stark decadence of Alan Cumming's Emcee, and the adorable courtliness of Ron Rifkin's Herr Schultz. When future generations study how a score-only recording can be used to freeze the experience of being in the theatre for listeners, this album may well be one of the sacred texts.
Just as sacred, in its way, is the very original cast album of the Hal Prince Broadway production. One of the Goddard Lieberson classics, it is among a number of vintage albums that Columbia Records is re-releasing, digitally re-mastered, in batches of five at a time. As nearly always in these matters, the digital enhancement works miracles in terms of "cleaning up" the performances and making them sound more present and vibrant than before...but the more compelling reason to add some of these to your library is the previously unreleased material that has been added. The "Cabaret" disc, for example, contains songs from an early demo of the score, sung and introdued by the lyricist and composer (who also plays piano). These are all songs that were dropped from the show--except for one, "I Don't Care Much", which was added to subsequent incarnations. (It is, in fact, fascinating to hear it sung coolly by Fred Ebb, as originally intended--as a jazz waltz for a hooker--when you've just heard it sung in a more ironic fashion on the new revival album, as a sultry ballad, by Alan Cumming.)
Among the other Columbia re-releases of the first batch are the original cast albums of "Kiss Me, Kate" (whose single bonus track is the unabridged overture); the London (aka the first stereo) recording of "My Fair Lady" (whose single bonus track is an instrumental, "The Embassy Waltz"); "Camelot" (no bonus tracks), and perhaps most significantly--
"A Chorus Line". There isn't much new material in this recording of the Marvin Hamlisch-Ed Kleban score (the first montage has been expanded to a whopping running time of 2:27, and that's it), but the remix makes an enormous difference. As some of you know, when the original album was recorded, director Michael Bennett insisted upon a mix that, to his ear, recreated the environment of the empty Broadway theatre in which the show is supposed to take place. But he went so far overboard that the cost of this conceit was an album that sounded as if it had been recorded in a public lavatory. When Bennett died, the authors of the score wasted no time in re-mixing the album for the first CD, and that mix is even further enhanced here. It hasn't entirely lost the Bennett imprint--obviously some of the effect he wanted was arrived at "live" rather than electronically created--but what remains is just enough of a taste to make Bennet's concept believable rather than distracting.
That's it for this week. More soon.