Don't underestimate the power of musical cast recordings

Does anyone care to hazard a guess as to what was the first LP to sell more than a million copies? Something by the Beatles? Frank Sinatra? Elvis Presley? Nope, it was the original 1956 Broadway cast recording of My Fair Lady.

In the UK, it topped the charts for 19 weeks and was the year’s top-selling album. But that’s nothing compared to its history in America, where it stood resplendent in the Billboard charts for a staggering 480 weeks: almost nine-and-a-half years. Imagine how happy that made the record label CBS.

CBS had bankrolled the show’s entire original production in return for the rights, and initially agreed to spend $375,000, but the show came in close to $500,000. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $5.4 million – a not-inconsiderable sum. But it’s peanuts compared to the profit. By 1973, when the opulent 1964 film version was finally shown on TV, CBS had already netted in an excess of $20 million. In today’s terms, that’s $132 million.

In the days before streaming, when it was vinyl or nothing, if you wanted to know if someone was a musical theatre fan, all you had to do was check out their record collection. (And if, like me, they owned more than was strictly plausible and were also unmarried, it might have told you something else too – but that’s for another day.)

But I was certainly not alone. My show-tunes record collection may have been eyebrow-raising, but my purchasing power doesn’t account for the genre’s eye-popping sales figures, with its peaks also matched by movie-musical soundtracks. The original 1961 West Side Story was No 1 in the US for 54 weeks and, over in the UK, South Pacific maintains the record for any genre, sitting at the top spot for 115 weeks – the first 70 of which were consecutive. The second longest-ever stay at No 1? Step forward, the soundtrack of The Sound of Music.

But while music executives might argue that original cast recordings are, like almost all other acts they sign, simply there to make money for the company, those who listen to them – on disc or online – want them for other reasons.

They were a record in every sense. Back then – before performance capture and NT Live – when a play closed, that was that. All that remained was the text, a handful of analytical reviews and destined-to-fade memories in the minds of those who worked on it and the audiences who saw it. Musicals, however, had cast recordings.
If you were theatre-struck and living in the Outer Hebrides or Ames, Iowa, the joys bestowed by an original cast recording gave you a great deal more than a glimpse of a show, and it’s Oklahoma!, back in 1943, that we have to thank for that.

Oklahoma! was the first time an original cast and orchestra went into a studio to record a show. And although that recording was highly successful and single-handedly created the whole original cast-recording genre, it’s important to recognise that, in truth, it’s a collection of excerpts. It’s only the show’s songs. Much of the music is missing. And, astonishingly for so groundbreaking a work, it has never received a complete recording.

Until now. In September this year, I can reveal, Chandos Records will release the first-ever complete recording of the musical, with every note of the rich and zesty original orchestrations lovingly restored by the late, great musical historian Bruce Pomahac, alongside the snappy Sinfonia of London orchestra and a hand-picked musical theatre cast conducted by John Wilson. I was at some of the recording sessions, and I warn you: it’s a zinger.

Wilson’s richly rewarding command of detail demanded a week to record the score. At the other end of the spectrum comes the newly released cast album of Cabaret, which took three days – or rather nights – to record. Instead of attempting to recreate the unique atmosphere of Rebecca Frecknall’s utterly arresting Kit Kat Club production in a featureless recording studio, they stuck with the real deal and, across consecutive performances, recorded the show’s songs live.

The result is nothing short of a triumph. Gone is the over-bright, neutered studio sound that has wrecked many recent cast recordings and, via musical director Jennifer Whyte, sound designer Nick Lidster and album producer Ben Robbins, in comes mood, atmosphere and genuine audience laughter, awe and delight. All that and the thrillingly musical and dramatic Olivier award-winning performances of Eddie Redmayne, Jessie Buckley, Liza Sadovy and Elliot Levey leading the knockout company. As the song says: Willkommen!