Cast Recording
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A cast recording (or cast album) is the studio- or live-captured document of a stage musical performed by its theatrical cast, the primary way audiences relive a show and the record by which scores enter the wider culture. Musically it presents the show's songs in performance order with the pit orchestra, prizing the theatrical voices, orchestrations, and dramatic pacing of the stage over pop reinvention. Producers sequence overture to finale, sometimes trimming reprises, to make an album that stands on its own. The mood mirrors the show itself, and a great cast album can outlive its production for generations.
History
Decca's Oklahoma! (1943) is generally credited as the first original cast album of a book musical to document a show largely intact, and producer Goddard Lieberson at Columbia Masterworks turned the cast recording into an art form through the 1950s and '60s with My Fair Lady, West Side Story, and Gypsy. The LP made Broadway scores national hits, and later labels (RCA Victor, later Masterworks Broadway and Ghostlight) sustained the tradition. Streaming revived the form's reach in the 2010s, with cast albums from Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen charting like pop records; the cast recording remains musical theatre's essential archive and export.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- Till There Was You(1957) — Barbara CookSpotifyYouTube
- Ya Got Trouble(1957) — Robert PrestonSpotifyYouTube
- Getting to Know You(1951) — Gertrude LawrenceSpotifyYouTube
- If I Were a Rich Man(1964) — Zero MostelSpotifyYouTube
- Matchmaker, Matchmaker(1964) — Original Broadway Cast of Fiddler on the RoofSpotifyYouTube
- Wouldn't It Be Loverly(1956) — Julie AndrewsSpotifyYouTube
Sources
- Robert Kimball & liner notes, Columbia Masterworks cast-album series
- Ethan Mordden, Anything Goes (Oxford, 2013)
- Goddard Lieberson production files and album liner notes