Reviving Broadway’s Golden Age With Remastered ‘Original Cast Albums’

A musical would open on Broadway. If it lasted more than a week or two (and sometimes even if it didn’t), the cast and orchestra would be shoe-horned into a New York recording studio.

There, often in a single tumultuous day, the show’s songs would be recorded, or at least as many of them as were judged to be of interest and could fit onto a vinyl LP. Then, just as quickly as the records could be pressed, usually a mere couple of weeks, the album would find its way into stores, onto the airwaves and into the national consciousness.

Thus, from the 1940s onward--until rock ‘n’ roll broke up the old world order--did the “original cast album” come into the marketplace. Speedy dissemination, rather than the concerns of posterity, was the driving force.

Today we have somewhat different sensibilities. The golden age of Broadway is now art, and original cast albums now qualify as cultural artifacts rather than as quickie souvenirs.

So it is more than just industry news that the record label that pioneered the idea of the cast album and held a virtual monopoly on it for decades, is reissuing--and in some cases reconfiguring--its vast catalog of Broadway cast albums.

That label is today called Sony Classical, although the company that actually produced most of these records was Columbia, which Sony acquired in 1988. The reissue project thus carries the cumbersome moniker Sony Classical/Columbia/Legacy. The first five titles in the new series recently arrived in stores: “Cabaret,” “A Chorus Line,” “Kiss Me, Kate,” “My Fair Lady” (the 1959 London production, with the ’56 New York edition promised for later) and “Camelot.”

The new CDs feature digitally remastered sound, new liner notes and photographs and, most tantalizing of all, new musical material not previously released. The discs will carry a list price of $11.98.

Eventually, Sony says, the project will run to as many as 50 or 60 such albums, released at the rate of 10 or 15 a year. Included will be not only such certified hits as “Gypsy,” “West Side Story” and “Fiddler on the Roof” but also such forgotten gems as “Subways Are for Sleeping,” “Kean” and “Juno,” which have never been issued on CD.

“We’re going back to the original source material, show by show, to see what we’ve got,” says Thomas Z. Shepard, Sony’s artistic consultant for the project and himself a veteran producer of Broadway show albums. “It’s a very costly and intensive process. We want to be sure we do it right.”

Even the Sony brass acknowledges that the initial CD versions of some of these albums were less than aesthetic or engineering triumphs. For instance, as with a number of early pop CD reissues, sometimes the show discs were not taken from the master tapes.

“They would take the LP mix, or whatever was available,” says Jeff Jones, vice president of Columbia/Legacy, the arm of Sony that oversees the care and management of its extensive Columbia heritage. “In one case we discovered that the mix used for the CD was taken from a quad [four-channel] mix. I’m afraid many of these titles were rushed into the marketplace just to fill the pipeline.”

This time around, we are being promised a more thoughtful, measured effort. But in addition to enhanced sound (which many a consumer may be hard-pressed to discern), the reissues promise something even more intriguing: additional material. For instance, the new “Chorus Line” restores roughly three minutes of material that was excised from the original LP, and subsequent CD, for reasons of length. (Or so it’s been claimed: As it happens, some of the restored material is a little racy, even by “Chorus Line” standards.)

Similarly, a true overture to “Kiss Me, Kate” (though recorded some years later) is now in place, rather than the entr’acte that opened the previous recording. The “Cabaret” album includes four songs dropped from the show before New York, sung in a demo version by the creators, John Kander and Fred Ebb. And the “My Fair Lady” disc offers a performance--separately recorded by the Percy Faith Orchestra--of the instrumental “Embassy Waltz.”