969 stories by "Michael Portantiere"
Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1956 (Painted Smiles) The vibrant overture on this recording tells us that we're about to hear one of the tangiest revues of the 1950s. Ben Bagley produced the sh…
Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1982 (Geffen) Who would have thought that Roger Corman and Charles B. Griffith's campy 1960 horror flick about a bloodthirsty plant out for world conquest would m…
Original Broadway Cast, 1973 (Columbia/Sony) A Little Night Music is emblematic of composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim's work in that it sounds very different from his other scores and yet is…
Original Broadway Cast, 1962 (RCA) This album starts with one of the most exciting overtures ever and takes off from there, thanks largely to orchestrator Ralph Burns. With Cy Coleman's terr…
Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1959 (Capitol/Angel) Not too long after Sandy Wilson proved with The Boy Friend that audiences enjoyed spoofs of old musicals, Rick Besoyan wrote the book, music,…
Original Cast, 2003 (Midder Music, 2CDs) Skillfully programmed and directed by Mark Waldrop, this revue had a brief run Upstairs at Studio 54. Happily, it yielded a "live" cast album that wi…
Film Soundtrack, 1994 (Walt Disney Records) The mega-hit animated Disney movie The Lion King spawned this mega-selling soundtrack recording, which includes the Oscar-winning best song "Can Y…
Original Broadway Cast, 1956 (Columbia/Sony) The cast album of this hit, faithfully adapted from Al Capp's deep-fried comic strip, has a complicated history that's worth telling because the …
Original Broadway Cast, 1997 (Sony) The Life opened just as Times Square was being cleaned up and turned into a tourist-friendly theme park. It captured the Best Musical prize from the Drama…
Original Broadway Cast, 1961 (RCA/no CD) Apologies to songwriters Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, but here's the show with arguably the worst title song in the history of Broadway " and that i…
New York Concert Cast, 1987 (Sony, 2CDs, paired with Of Thee I Sing) This performance doesn't vary much in character from the dully dutiful reading of the Gershwins' Of Thee I Sing that acco…
Original London Cast, 1985 (First Night/Relativity, 2CDs) Claude-Michel Schönberg ("musique") and Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel ("textes") originally created Les Misérables as what…
Original Broadway Cast, 1989 (RCA) This show did not work onstage, but some of the songs and performances on the cast album are fun. Peter Allen, though woefully miscast as a tough-guy g…
San Francisco Cast, 2001 (42nd Street Moon) With political satire a mainstay of 1930s musicals (the Gershwins' Of Thee I Sing, Rodgers and Hart's I'd Rather Be Right, Irving Berlin's Louisia…
Off-Broadway Cast, 1959 (Strand/AEI) The "Princess Theater" musicals of Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and P. G. Wodehouse form an important chapter in musical theater history that is badly underr…
Studio Cast, 1988 (Original Cast Records) No stars; not recommended. This vaguely autobiographical musical by composer-lyricist Brian Gari, with a book by Allan Knee, lasted for only 15 prev…
Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1970 (RCA) Three years after their debut show, Now Is the Time for All Good Men, which was studded with well-crafted lyrics and lovely ballads, composer Nancy For…
Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1997 (EMG) By the mid 1980s, plays about AIDS began to surface and continued to emerge thereafter, but with only a few musicals among them. Nevertheless, this one…
Original Off-Broadway Cast, 2002 (Ghostlight) Although The Last 5 Years received mixed to negative reviews and closed quickly Off-Broadway in 2002, it has received many subsequent production…
Original Cast Recordings, 1941 (Platinum/Wave) Gertrude Lawrence had a reputation as a poor singer; Kurt Weill was quoted as saying that she had "the greatest range between C and C-sharp." P…
Original Broadway Cast Reconstruction, 1977 (Smithsonian/Hallmark) Here is one of the great artifacts of the American musical theater " and it's also a great listen. One of a series of Smith…
Original Broadway Cast, 1983 (RCA) Harvey Fierstein's book for this musical closely follows Jean Poiret's stage farce, the film version of which became a huge hit, about the chaos unleashed …
Original Broadway Cast, 1961 (Capitol/Angel) So, which Broadway composer stretched himself the most in writing a score that no one would have guessed he had in him? Jerry Herman with Dear Wo…
Off-Broadway Cast, 1998 (Slider Music) Avrom Goldfadn's Yiddish farce The Two Kuni-Lemls is all but forgotten today. Even so, New York's Jewish Repertory Theatre (JRT) commissioned a musical…
Original Broadway Cast, 1938 (Joey/AEI) Boiled-down radio broadcasts of Broadway musicals were not unheard of in the 1930s, and the few that have been released commercially in subsequent dec…
