"Bright Star" Original Cast Recording

This article was first published at Blogcritics.

Were it not for all the hoopla surrounding the musical Hamilton, no doubt the star power of its creators Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, if nothing else, would have garnered the Broadway bluegrass musical Bright Star a greater share of the hype. Not that the production does not deserve it. It does. It has a fairy tale-like book following two stories separated by some 20 odd years—thwarted love in the 1920’s and a young man’s search for his bliss in the 1940’s. Both, of course, come together by the final curtain. It has a fine tuneful score more often Broadway tinged with bluegrass than it is bluegrass tinged with Broadway. Moreover it is filled with fine musical performances by an excellent though perhaps underrated cast, led by Tony nominated Carmen Cusack.

And on May 27, those performances will be available in CD format on Ghostlight Records’ original cast recording.

Cusack, it is true, has much the best material to work with, but also true is that she knocks every chance she gets out of the park. Beginning with a dynamic performance of the show’s opening number, the character defining “If You Knew My Story” through her bravura take on the anthemic ballad that leads to the finale, “At Long Last,” one of the tunes attributed solely to Brickell. The other is another blast for Cusack, the lovely, wistful ”Way Back in the Day.” She joins with Paul Alexander Nolan for a rousing take on “Whoa, Mama,” a tune that reminds me in parts of the classic “Pick a Bale of Cotton.” Nolan also takes the lead on the duet “What Could be Better” and retires some on “I Can’t Wait.”  “Heartbreaker” is a melodramatic showpiece for him matching the ensemble piece in the first act, “Please, Don’t Take Him.”

“Bright Star,” the title song, is a pleasant centerpiece for A. J. Shively, who joins with Jeff Blumenkrantz and Emily Padgett for the jazzy “Another Round.” “Asheville” is a country ballad for Hannah Elless who joins with Shively to do their best with the somewhat treacly “Always Will.”

Bright Star, as the cast recording makes clear, is Carmen Cusack’s show and she makes the most of it.

The album comes with a booklet that includes a synopsis of the story by Bill Rosenfield, complete lyrics, and notes from Brickell, Martin, Rosenfield and album producer and music supervisor Peter Asher.

CD Review: Original Cast Recording - 'Forbidden Broadway: Comes Out Swinging!

This article was first published at Blogcritics

If it is true that parody works best when its audience is familiar with the material being parodied, the more you know about the Broadway musical and the season just passed, the happier you’ll be with the latest edition, the twelfth, of Forbidden Broadway. The less you know about the Broadway theater, the less likely you will be to get most of the jokes and even the less likely to care.  Forbidden Broadway: Comes Out Swinging! now available on CD from DRG Records certainly has comic moments that don’t depend on prior knowledge, but they are few and far between. Clearly, the show and the album are aimed at the Broadway maven. If the name Jason Robert Brown doesn’t mean anything to you, you are not the audience for this album. That’s not to say that if you are acquainted with Jason Robert Brown you are necessarily going to love the show and find it funny, but at least you’ll have a shot.

What the show has going for it is an impressive cast of four talented singer/comedians who know how to sell the material, and have the chops to get the job done. Their impressions are spot on: Carter Calvert as Jessie Mueller playing Carole King, Scott Richard Foster as Frankie Valli, Marcus Stevens as Mandy Patinkin, Mia Gentile as Teresa Brewer. Their comic timing is impeccable. Hey are engaging performers, together, they make the most of the material they’re given.

Highlights include Mia Gentile’s powerful send up of Idina Menzel, “Let it Blow” with the obligatory shout out to John Travolta and her Audra MacDonald to Carter Calvert’s Carrie Underwood in a send up of the NBC production of The Sound of Music. And that’s a good thing, since both are parodies that would be familiar to a much wider audience. Most people would get the joke, certainly more than got the point in the number about Pippin. The ensemble work on juke box musicals and the revivals of Les Miserables and Cabaret, also more familiar, was effective. The general critique of the formulaic Disney musicals that have become a Broadway staple is a point well made. Less effective was the material on unsuccessful shows that quickly closed—Rocky, Bullets Over Broadway, and The Bridges of Madison County.

Forbidden Broadway: Comes Out Swinging is a must for the cognoscenti. For the rest of us, especially in the light of the charismatic performances, it may turn us on to what we’ve been missing.

Music Review: Christiane Noll - Gifts

This article was first published at Blogcritics

Christiane Noll joins Patty LuPone and Norbert Leo Butz in Broadway Records’ 54 Below live cabaret performance series with her album Gifts. Perhaps best known for her role as Emma Carew in the musical Jekyll and Hyde, the talented singer has established herself as a legitimate member of the Broadway aristocracy, and her cabaret act demonstrates why that is.

Of course a good cabaret act assumes a fine voice, but a great cabaret act demands more. The best acts have a theme; they have a narrative arc. In the popular jargon of the trade, there must be a journey. “Gifts,” as Noll explains in a liner note, “from my father I now share with my daughter.” ”Music,” she continues, “was not only our family trade, it was how we expressed ourselves and our inner most emotions.” Family and music are her theme.

 Brought up in a house filled with music, her father was a conductor and music supervisor for CBS, her mother a soprano, she was, as she describes it in her two part medley “Growing Up,” even as a baby enthroned atop a grand piano in the family apartment, inundated with music. Her father would play; her mother would sing, and she gives us a taste, a little Puccini, a bit of Mozart, some Victor Herbert, and some Gilbert and Sullivan. As she grows, she looks to develop her own sound, leaping from “Whistle While You Work” to “What I Did for Love.”

She goes on to run through her career, from poorly chosen audition material to her Broadway success and her father’s pride in her Jekyll and Hyde debut, of course with appropriate musical examples. Then moving on to her pride in her own daughter, whose singing it turns out can tame a playground bully. It is an endearing, if perhaps a mite sentimental journey.

Along the way there is the music. She opens the set with “Somewhere Out There” from “An American Tale.” Highlights include “The Sound of Music,” an intense version of “Send in the Clowns,” and an unexpected choice in “Some Enchanted Evening.” There is a nice change of pace in the “Museum Song” from Barnum, and an homage to her Ella Fitzgerald period in her encore (in an arrangement by her father) “Mr. Paganini.” Of course, no performance would be complete without “In His Eyes,” her Jekyll and Hyde show stopper, and while composer Frank Wildhorn isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, listening to her sing his music, it is enough to make you wonder why.

Christiane Noll is as versatile a singer as you’re likely to come across, and her versatility shines through on this album. She can sing opera and art songs. She can do patter; she can swing. And if it looks like she’s found a permanent home on the Broadway stage, her cabaret act gives her the opportunity to show off her other talents.

You can check out Noll singing “The Sound of Music” and doing a promo video for the show on YouTube.

Music Review: Patti LuPone - Far Away Places.

This article was first published at Blogcritics

Who better to headline the opening of 54 Below, a new night club adjacent to the heart of Manhattan's theater district, than perhaps the reigning Broadway diva, Patti LuPone? What better way to inaugurate a new series of recordings of live cabaret shows that with that diva's performance? No better way, given the critical reaction to the LuPone show, no better way by a long shot. Fans will get their chance to hear the set on January 15^th when Broadway Records releases the debut disc in their "Live at 54 Below" series, Patti LuPone's Far Away Places..

From the moment LuPone opens her mouth, she has her audience in thrall. These are people, friends and fans, who know what she's selling and can't wait to buy. Their excitement is palpable and she feeds on it. It is an excitement that comes through even on the CD.

Wanderlust is the theme of the evening, as the singer takes the audience on a journey over water to far away places, interspersed with the kind of clever banter you've come to expect from a cabaret performer. While the clever jokes can get old with the repeated play the album is likely to generate, whether she is talking about her talent for accents or even her Sicilian heritage, they are certainly entertaining enough in the moment.

Still no one is going to buy the CD for the incidental comedy. The music is the thing, and the music can be 'fabulous.' She opens by setting the theme with "Gypsy in My Soul" and follows with a swinging jazzy take on Willie Nelson's "Night Life" in which she redundantly introduces herself and welcomes her audience. The first of four Kurt Weill tunes, "Bilbao Song" is next. According to the liner notes, LuPone was especially keen on performing Weill and her versions of "Bilbao" and later "Pirate Jenny” are among the evening's highlights. Somewhat surprisingly, she ends the show with "September Song" in spite of its opening lines.

Variety is the key to the set list. There as atmospheric, smoky "I Cover the Waterfront," a bluesy "Traveling Light," and a sprawling disco attack on the Bee Gee's "Nights on Broadway." There is a playfully cheeky version of "By the Sea," from Sweeny Todd and a dramatically stylish performance of Edith Piaf's "Hymn to Love." She does some jazzy phrasing on "I Wanna Be Around" before turning in a comic direction. Cole Porter's "Come to the Supermarket in Old Peking" takes her on a romp all over the musical world, ending in an homage to "New York, New York." A sweetly yearning treatment of the album's title song "Far Away Places" and an exotic version of Friedrich Hollaender's "Black Market" that will make you forget Marlene Dietrich round out the album.

Accompanying LuPone are Antony Geralis (accordion and keyboards), Larry Saltzman (guitar and banjo), Andy Stein (violin and saxophone) and Paul Pizzuti (drums and percussion). Music director and arranger Joseph Thalken plays piano and helps with vocals.

Music Review: Liza Minnelli - Live at the Winter Garden

This article was first published at Blogcritics

There are those performers, not all that many, who can take the stage all on their own with an orchestra and maybe a dancer or two and keep an audience enthralled for an evening.  Liza Minnelli is one of the few.  In January of 1974, after award winning successes on TV with Liza With a Z and on Broadway with Flora the Red Menace and Cabaret, Minnelli came to Broadway with a one woman show, Live at the Winter Garden, a show that sold out its month run in 36 hours, and has since become the stuff of legend. 

Listeners will soon have the opportunity to judge for themselves.  The show's recording long unavailable because of the inclusion of a medley from Cabaret which conflicted with the release of the show's sound track album will be available for digital download on April 3^rd from  www.MasterworksBroadway.com and more widely from retailers in May.  While there is clearly something of the live performance vibe lost in any recording, Liza Minnelli's magical touch with her audience is apparent. 

The repertoire is a mix of show tunes, standards, some specialty numbers written for the star by Kander and Ebb and a song or two that would have been contemporary back in '74.  And while Minnelli is the kind of singer who can take a "mouldy oldie" like "Shine on Harvest Moon" and make it her own, who can invest a novelty piece like "Exactly Like Me" with the power of her personality, she can be less at home with some of the more contemporary songs.  It's not that her pop performances are inadequate; it is simply that they don't quite rise to the level of her treatment of the music in her wheel house.  Songs like "I Can See Clearly Now" and "If You Could Read My Mind" are well done and even exciting, but they are not the singer at the top of her game.

Unquestionably the show tunes, the standards and the Charles Aznavour songs show off the singer at her best.  They are the highlights of the evening.  There is "A Quiet Thing" from Flora the Red Menace and of course the show stopping climax of "Cabaret."  It is not strange that she has a special connection with the music of Kander and Ebb, but there is also that same kind of connection with the dramatic eloquence of the Aznavour pieces, "And I in My Chair" and "There is a Time."  They give the star an opportunity to show her acting chops.   The Edith Piaf/ Fred Ebb composition "The Circle" stands out in much the same way.  "More than You Know" and "It Had to Be You" show what she can do with a standard, and "Shine on Harvest Moon" gets the audience standing.  This is Liza at her unmatchable best.

The new release features three previously unreleased encores not originally included in the song list for the show's Winter Garden run: Stevie Wonder's "You and I," "My Shining Hour," and the above mentioned "It Had to Be You."  Altogether, including the overture, the album has 17 tracks put together for the singer by Kander and Ebb.  The musical coordinator was Marvin Hamlisch. "The thing about doing a show like Liza is that every song means something," Minnelli explains. "Fred and John were so brilliant at building a show, plus I had Marvin, so we tried all kinds of different rundowns and finally came up with what you hear on the album, and thank God it worked! But you keep trying, and don't get satisfied with anything but the best."

2011 Tony Awards Show: Hits and Misses

Article first published as 2011 Tony Awards Show: Hits and Misses on Blogcritics.

Sunday night's Tony Award show seems to have been as much an infomercial intended to advertise the Broadway product as it was an occasion to reward the best of the 2011 season. The inclusion of musical numbers from last year's winning Memphis, the Lincoln Center production of a concert version of Company which will be appearing in theatres across the country, and the disaster prone yet to officially open Spiderman to the exclusion of the actual presentation of what some must have considered the "lesser" awards may have been more entertaining for the TV audience, but it clearly demonstrates someone's priorities, and those priorities aren't exactly awards.

That said the four hour show had both its highlights and its lesser moments. First the hits:

The musical number from Kander and Ebb's The Scottsboro Boys gave viewers an opportunity to get some idea of what this innovative show which had closed before its time was like. Presumably it will tour, and perhaps this taste will help it find an audience.

The energetic tap number from the Anything Goes revival was a convincing demonstration of why Sutton Foster was soon to be a Tony winner.

Andrew Rannells' "I Believe" from The Book of Mormon was a show stopper and only one of a number of highlights associated with the multi-award winning production, including Trey Parker's shout out to Joseph Smith and Nikki M. James' endearing excitement over her award for featured actress.



As far as acceptance speeches go John Larroquette was nicely ironic and low key about his featured actor award for How to Suceed. . . ., and Mark Rylance may have mystified some viewers with his acceptance via prose poem recitation. Although it seems he's done it before, it still feels fresh.

Neil Patrick Harris, from beginning to end, is just about everything anyone could want in a host. Whether entering on the War Horse puppet, reeling off Spiderman jokes against the clock, or doing his end of show rap, he is nothing short of the latter day Bob Hope.

Brooke Shields showed that beneath that ideal beauty beats a real human being.
Frances McDormund's fashion statement was refreshing if nothing else. It certainly distinguished her, if not from The Edge, at least from the rest of the crowd.
Now for some of the lesser moments:

The dramatic actors' little introductions to their nominated plays were weak substitutions for a glimpse or two of the production.

Too often the remarks written for the presenters were so pretentious that you had to admire the presenter's ability to read them with a straight face.

Actors shouting their thank-yous over the music telling them to get themselves off the stage leave something to be desired. There has to be a way to get them off the stage that is less intrusive, a hook perhaps.

Of course the most annoying thing about the show for theatre lovers had to be the relegation so many awards to announcements around the commercial breaks. It is important to entertain the audience, but it is equally as important to celebrate the award winners.