On Cast Albums
Kurt Deutsch of Ghostlight Records promised that he’d be recording Little Women. Harvey Evans said that Angela Lansbury’s fur coat was stolen the night before she stepped before the microphones to record Anyone Can Whistle. Stephen Flaherty reported that no recording exists of the first musical he ever wrote: Pitts, a not-so-flattering look at his hometown of Pittsburgh. Gerry Alessandrini opined that cast albums looked much more dramatic when they were 12-by-12-inch LPs. David Finkle noted that Columbia’s first-ever LP was not a pop record but an original cast album. Michael Portantiere related that Marni Nixon, whose voice is heard on the soundtrack albums of The King and I, My Fair Lady, and West Side Story, got a flat fee for all but WSS; Leonard Bernstein felt she should get more, so he gave her a piece of his piece. I said that, since the soundtrack was on the best-seller charts for more than five years — impossible as that sounds! — Nixon must have done well no matter how tiny that piece was.
And so went the panel discussion of cast albums (and soundtracks) at the Drama Book Shop on Monday night. It was spurred by the TheaterMania Guide to Musical Theater Recordings, to which David, Gerry, Michael, and I contributed reviews along with 12 other writers; Michael, the editor of the volume, moderated. He started things off by asking all of us how we first discovered the wonderful world of cast albums, a question that I’m always happy to answer. I told how, as the quintessential baby boomer (I was born literally nine months after World War II ended), I was among the first rock ‘n’ roll kids. When that new music emerged in 1955, this nine-year-old religiously followed the Top 40. That lasted until late 1960, when, by an accident of fate, I heard the soundtracks of Gigi and South Pacific and the cast albums of The Music Man, Paint Your Wagon, and The Sound of Music at my parents’ friends’ house. I immediately dropped out of rock ‘n’ roll and became interested in any recording that sported the words “original cast album.” I went to the wonderful Robbins Library in my hometown of Arlington, Massachusetts and took out every one I could find.
But, typical American that I am, I preferred to buy rather than rent. So, later that year, when I discovered the Columbia Record Club, I sent away for my six-albums-for-a-penny selections: Camelot, Flower Drum Song, Gypsy, Kismet, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music. The following day, I learned of the RCA Victor Record Club and ticked off Damn Yankees, Do Re Mi, Finian’s Rainbow, New Girl in Town, Paint Your Wagon, and the soundtrack of South Pacific. The following day, I became a member of the Capitol Record Club when I ordered The Music Man, the soundtracks of Carousel, The King and I, and Oklahoma, and two Kingston Trio records — because, alas, they didn’t have six theatrical recordings to offer me. Four would be better than none, and I did like the Kingston Trio; they’d recorded “They Call the Wind Maria” from Paint Your Wagon and “The Merry Little Minuet” from John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.
As it happened, all 18 albums arrived one Friday afternoon. For the rest of the weekend — one of the best I ever had — I left my room only for meals. Everything was great until I went to bed on Sunday night and realized that I was now into these clubs for — without a pencil and a pad, I figured it out — $128. That was a lot of money for a kid of 15 who wasn’t yet working and who always depended on the kindness of his allowance. There I was, a teenage Ivan Boesky, sweating as I realized that I didn’t even have the money for the four-cent stamps I’d need each month to send back the card to say, no, I didn’t want that copy of Hugo Winterhalter Goes Latin but could you please send the cast album of Take Me Along instead?
I didn’t want to hog any more time during our discussion on Monday, so I omitted what I hated about the record clubs: You were at the mercy of the copy that they sent you, and the lettering on the album’s spine might not be dead-centered. How I hated seeing the letters printed slightly off to the left or right, or sometimes so far to the left or right that they were actually on the front or back cover. I resigned from all three clubs the moment I fulfilled my obligations — which took me until my second year of college. Before, during, and after that time, I could be found in record stores the moment that a cast album was released, picking up a good dozen at a time (it’s the closest I ever came to working out) to find the one spine that had the most-centered lettering. (Sound a little extreme? Well, I view the original cast album as one of man’s greatest achievements.) For a kid who lived in Boston and traveled to New York maybe once a year if I was lucky, the cast album was my link to Broadway. I never got to see The Happiest Girl in the World, Let It Ride, or A Family Affair, but I could at least get the next best thing: the cast albums.
Of course, we all mourned that we’re no longer in The Golden Age of the Original Cast Album. David pointed out how companies used to be rabid to have them in their catalogues and that Columbia entirely bankrolled the production of My Fair Lady to earn the privilege. I stated that there are three statistics I really love: 1) There are more Jews in New York than in Israel; 2) The script of Bambi has only 938 words; 3) When the cast album of Tenderloin, an eventual Broadway flop, was released in 1961, it was the 14th best-selling record in the country. Boy, have times changed! I mentioned that Ben Bagley wrote in the notes for one of his Revisited albums that he sold 9,000 records in the first two weeks of their release, but when I asked him about that, he admitted that he fibbed and that 2,000 was all he could count on. I added that Bill Rosenfield, late of RCA Victor, told me that his reissue of Happy Hunting sold fewer than 1,000 units — but Kurt said that his albums sell at least 3,000-5,000, and that The Last 5 Years has done 30,000. He did tell us that his recording of Hair with the cast of The Actors’ Fund benefit concert and his cast album of Bright Lights, Big City are both rarin’ to go, but distribution problems are holding them up. Then Kurt said that all of us on the panel could come up to his office and get copies. (Memo to these recordings: I’ll be down to get you in a taxi, honey!)
Harvey said that he wasn’t sure things were getting better. He noted that when he was in the recent Broadway revival of Oklahoma, he was horrified to find on the day that Adolph Green died that a good number of the young people in the cast had no idea who he was. I maintained that the Internet is helping kids to learn about musical theater history, now that information is so accessible on websites, in chat rooms, and on various boards. As I concluded, “I get e-mails from kids 13, 14, and 15, asking questions like, ‘Will you tell me all about Illya, Darling? What was it like?’ And I answer every one of them.” (Though I’m sure that what I have to say about Illya, Darling isn’t what they’d hoped to hear!)
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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]
