Original Broadway Cast Albums: The Market That Would Not Die

You can remove original cast albums from the endangered species list--at least for now.

The market for cast albums--which has been steadily shrinking during the past two decades--has received a much-needed boost from compact discs. Collectors are buying classic show albums on CD in much the same way that pop fans are buying the CD versions of favorite albums by such top acts as the Beatles and Pink Floyd.

Two new cast albums--”Les Miserables” and “Phantom of the Opera”--have also sold well this year. The cast album to Stephen Sondheim’s new production, “Into the Woods,” is expected before Christmas, and a reworked version of his 1971 hit, “Follies,” is due early next year.

There is other evidence of interest in Broadway music. Barbra Streisand’s “The Broadway Album,” a collection of theater songs, reached No. 1 on the pop charts in 1986. Liza Minnelli’s “Carnegie Hall” CD has sold briskly. And artists ranging from cabaret singer Michael Feinstein to opera star Kiri Te Kanawa have had success with this repertoire.

Peter Elliott, director of sales and marketing for RCA Red Seal--RCA’s classical and theatrical division, which is releasing “Into the Woods”--said that how you evaluate the market depends on your frame of reference.

“In relation to the ‘60s, it’s definitely a much smaller market,” he said. “(But) in relation to recent years, it’s very healthy, very steady.”

In the ‘50s and early ‘60s, cast albums and sound tracks dominated Billboard magazine’s pop album chart. At least one cast album appeared in the year-end Top 10 each year between 1956 and 1965--and a cast album was the year’s No. 1 seller in five of those years.

The peak year for cast album activity was 1964, when 14 Broadway cast albums--including such blockbusters as “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Funny Girl” and “Hello, Dolly!”--hit the pop chart. But just four years later--when Barbra Streisand and Andy Williams had given way to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin--only two cast albums made the survey. It has been pretty much like that ever since.

One reason for the slowdown is that theater songs are almost never played on pop radio. The most celebrated “show” song of the ‘80s, the ballad “Memory” from “Cats,” has never been a Top 40 single--despite recordings by such pop stars as Barbra Streisand and Barry Manilow. Several other key theater songs of the past dozen years have also fallen short of the Top 40. Among them: “What I Did for Love” from “A Chorus Line,” “Tomorrow” from “Annie,” “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” from “Evita” and “The Best of Times” from “La Cage aux Folles.”

But RCA’s Elliott noted that in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, “the music on the air was the music of Broadway. . . . Johnny Mathis had a big hit with ‘Small World’ from ‘Gypsy.’ A few months after ‘Hello, Dolly!’ opened on Broadway, Louis Armstrong had a No. 1 record with the title tune. A song that Barbra Streisand sang in ‘Funny Girl’--’People’--(became a Top 5 hit). We also had variety shows on television which helped to expose the music. We don’t have those built-in promotional opportunities on radio and TV anymore. The music of today is the pop (movie) sound track and MTV. That’s where today’s kids are getting their music.”

Many record companies prefer to invest their time and energy in movie sound tracks because the upside potential is so much greater. One blockbuster sound track, last year’s “Top Gun,” has sold more than 4 million copies in this country alone--roughly the same as all of the major cast albums of the ‘80s combined .

In fact, several labels have quietly gotten out of the cast album business. Others--such as RCA and MCA--have moved cast albums from the pop side of the company to the classical side, which specializes in marketing music to a small but upscale audience. And several classical labels, including Telarc and Angel, have entered the show-music field.

Three of the most successful cast albums of the ‘80s--”Dreamgirls,” “Cats” and “Les Miserables”--were released by Geffen Records, which has replaced Columbia Records as the leader in cast album activity.

Yet David Geffen, who heads the label, is blunt about problems with the cast album market. “As a rule, you make no money in Broadway cast albums,” he said. “The number of albums that have done well in the last 10 years is even smaller than the number of shows that have done well. People aren’t going to buy the record to a flop show--and there have been almost no successful shows.”

Geffen stressed that the softness of the cast album market is directly linked to the troubled state of Broadway in general. “Only a handful of shows in the ‘80s have really returned something to their investors,” he noted. “If you invested in all the shows on Broadway in the last 10 years, you would have lost a fortune. Ninety percent of the shows lose money. These shows cost $5 million and up--and you can close in one day.

“A lot of movies don’t make money when they first come out, but they make money in the long run because of videocassettes, TV, foreign rights, etc. In the theater business, there are essentially no ancillary rights. You have nothing to fall back on.”

Economics come into play in other ways, too. RCA’s Elliott noted: “The cost of recording cast albums is absolutely astronomical. It’s comparable to recording a full-length opera.”

Elliott added that high ticket prices have frozen many people out of the theatergoing experience.

“At $47.50 to $50 a ticket, today’s musicals are for the very rich--or for taking somebody out on an expense account. We’ve lost a couple of generations of theatergoers--and ergo record buyers--to this economic situation. It’s very difficult to entice somebody to spend that kind of money for a two-to-three-hour entertainment when they can see their favorite rock star for $20.”

One of the biggest problems facing Broadway is that the generation that was raised on rock tends to view theater music with suspicion--or at best, indifference. Eddie Rosenblatt, who runs Geffen Records on a day-to-day basis, acknowledged that resistance. “We want to take away the negative mystique that younger people have towards the theater,” he said. “We’d like to lower the demographics if we can.”

One way that the label hopes to do that is by releasing two different versions of the music from “Miss Saigon,” the upcoming show by the creative team behind “Les Miserables”--composers Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg and producer Cameron Mackintosh.

“We are initially going to put out an album by a repertoire company of rock ‘n’ roll stars playing most of the roles,” said Rosenblatt. “That will come out before the show opens, and afterwards we’ll put out the original-cast album.”

MCA tried a similar tactic six months ago with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Starlight Express.” Instead of releasing an American cast album, it issued an album featuring such pop acts as El De Barge, Harold Faltermeyer and Richie Havens performing songs from the show. The album was not successful, even though Webber is one of the few Broadway figures who is known by record buyers. In fact, two of his earlier hits--”Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita”--started life as record albums and only later became live productions.

Thomas Z. Shepard, who heads MCA’s classical/theatrical division, credits Webber with opening up the theater to a younger audience. “Most Broadway writers don’t seem to reach the younger audience, but he certainly does,” said Shepard. “He seems to reach people of all ages.”

So who is the typical cast album buyer? Shepard’s “educated guess” is that it’s a 30- to 50-year-old who lives in Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles or San Francisco. “It is basically an urban sale,” he said, “and at least 60% Eastern seaboard and probably 30% West Coast.”

Many argue that Broadway is living off past glories. Many of the biggest hits of the past dozen years are revivals of time-tested crowd-pleasers, including “Oklahoma!,” “West Side Story” and “Sweet Charity.” Others--such as “Sophisticated Ladies”--are so-called “composer-themed musicals,” which are anthologies of old songs.

This mining of Broadway’s musical heritage also exists in the album market. Labels are aggressively rereleasing old cast albums, often keyed to show anniversaries. Also, they are recording new studio versions of old hits. Kiri Te Kanawa has turned this into a cottage industry, releasing, on different labels, new recordings of “My Fair Lady,” “South Pacific” and “West Side Story.”

The trend is a reaction to the huge costs--and tremendous risks--of mounting new shows and recording new songs. But that doesn’t quell the controversy.

“We have a creatively bankrupt American musical theater,” charged Geffen. “The biggest problem for the future of the theater is that there are very few creative people working in it. As a result, they keep on going back to old chestnuts. It’s a very bad situation. I’m not interested in re-creating the past. I’m interested into recording new artists and new shows and moving forward.”

Shepard, who recorded such revivals as “The King and I” and “Oklahoma!” while at RCA--and who just released a new studio version of “Carousel” featuring Barbara Cook--expressed mixed feelings about the trend.

“I don’t think that one more revival means one less new show,” he said. “Broadway is just not that crowded right now.” But he later acknowledged that there is a problem. “I guess there are producers who are just going to try to play it safe. It’s the economics of the theater. It’s just so expensive to put something on that fewer risks are taken.”

RCA’s Elliott made a related point about the dearth of new shows. “The fact is that in the last year and a half, damned few musicals that have opened have stayed open for even five days. You can’t control what happens on Broadway, so we’re embarking on a reissue campaign of our classic show albums to keep a flow of product.”

If the cast album market is as soft and problematic as most say it is, why do major labels even bother with it?

“You never know when another ‘Cats’ or ‘Les Miserables’ is going to come along,” said Geffen chief Rosenblatt. “ ‘Cats’ is like owning your own cash register.

“Also, it takes us out of the world of hit records and CHR (contemporary hit radio) and that whole song-and-dance. It gives us a chance to let our marketing creativity take hold. It’s a different kind of project, not just another album by four English kids in tight jeans and tight T-shirts.”

The Solid Gold Original Cast Albums Nineteen original cast albums have been certified gold--signifying sales of 500,000 copies--since the Recording Industry Assn. of America was formed in 1958. The tally includes three albums by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and two each by Lerner and Loewe, Jerry Herman and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Title Year Composer(s) “South Pacific” 1949 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II “My Fair Lady” 1956 Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe “The Music Man” 1958 Meredith Willson “West Side Story” 1958 Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim “Flower Drum Song” 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein “The Sound of Music” 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein “Camelot” 1961 Lerner and Loewe “Oliver!” 1962 Lionel Bart “Hello, Dolly!” 1964 Jerry Herman “Funny Girl” 1964 Jule Styne and Bob Merrill “Fiddler on the Roof” 1964 Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick “Man of la Mancha” 1966 Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion “Mame” 1966 Jerry Herman “Hair” 1968 Galt MacDermot, Gerome Ragni, James Rado “Godspell” 1971 Stephen Schwartz “A Chorus Line” 1975 Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban “Annie” 1977 Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin “Evita” 1980 Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice “Cats” 1983 Andrew Webber