Like many a “show queen”, I grew up, in every sense, to my collection of cast albums – I can still remember the very first one I bought, the Broadway recording of A Chorus Line, as a young teenager of about 14 in Johannesburg, South Africa (where I grew up) and falling in love with it on my record player, long before I ever got the chance to see it! (By what turned out to be a rather wonderful bit of symmetry, seeing the London production of A Chorus Line at Drury Lane – at its final Saturday matinee in March 1979 a couple of years later – was also the first show I saw in the West End after my family emigrated to Britain). I still have that album; as I do the South African cast recordings of shows like Pippin, Godspell, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris and Maltby and Shire’s Starting Here, Starting Now – and the indigenously created South African show Ipi Tombi that became an international hit. Not only did I develop a sophisticated palette through them early on, but also, I realise now, we saw some fairly sophisticated shows in Johannesburg back then…
But the important thing about all of those albums for me is that they were albums, not CDs (that we didn’t even know about then, imagine that!), with their large sleeves into which the vinyl disc, protected by a dust cover, would gently slide, producing an eager glow of anticipation as you drew them out of their berth to play, or of satisfaction as you put them back away again afterwards. The rush of that nostalgic memory came flooding back to me this week when I received a special limited collectors’ vinyl edition of the cast recording of the current Broadway hit The Drowsy Chaperone – reportedly the first cast album to be released on vinyl in nearly twenty years!
The show – which comes to London’s Novello Theatre in May, prior to opening on June 6 – is a valentine to old Broadway musicals and the kind of people who love them in which a devoted fan plays a 1928 cast recording in his living room and finds it coming to life right in front of him. When I saw it in New York last year, I blogged about it here and wrote, “it strikes a unique chord amongst those, like me, who have found a particular kind of consolation in musical theatre over the years”. Referring to the fan, I said, “I absolutely identified with his passion, and felt a keen prick of recognition over his obsession to make sense of a particular moment in the second act whose meaning isn’t entirely clear on the album. I am exactly the same over ‘The Babylove Miracle Show’ number in The Grass Harp, a seven-performance 1971 flop that I never saw, but I re-live constantly through the album, wondering again and again what it’s all about….!”
And to now have The Drowsy Chaperone on vinyl (with a CD version helpfully included inside, in case you don’t have the equipment to play vinyl anymore), is to be able to re-live it as authentically as possible. The vinyl version of this show-within-the-show has been beautifully packaged to resemble a vintage album of the period, with some lovely credits on the back that include its original opening night (September 18, 1928) and theatre (the Morosco – long since demolished, in fact to make way for the modern monstrosity where The Drowsy Chaperone is playing on Broadawy, The Marquis). This version of a valentine to Broadway musicals will make the perfect valentine’s gift for lovers of the genre when it officially goes on sale tomorrow.
But cast recordings, though they’re part of the heritage of musical theatre that has kept it alive across the decades, are an increasingly endangered species. They cost so much to put out, and the returns on them are so low, that lots of musicals simply no longer get recorded. One of the US labels with the most distinguished pedigree in cast recordings, RCA/BMG, has long disbanded the dedicated department that used to look after them, and Sony have recently followed suit.
The big labels only want the big hits now. The record industry awards, the Grammys, still recognise cast albums – at this year’s awards, presented on Sunday, the 49th annual Grammy for Best Musical Show Album went to Jersey Boys (beating out, coincidentally, The Drowsy Chaperone and other Broadway nominees, The Color Purple and recordings of revivals of The Pajama Game and Sweeney Todd) – but its becoming harder and harder to persuade anyone to record them. Rising ticket prices are, of course, the biggest threat to the future of original musicals – but they won’t have a past, either, if they stop being recorded.
