Little words packed with meaning

Various artists

“Caroline, or Change”

(Hollywood Records)

***

Get a magnifying glass if you want to read the lyrics as you listen to this two-CD recording of Tony Kushner’s semiautobiographical tale about a Jewish boy in 1963 Louisiana and his family’s black maid. Seldom have a CD’s lyrics been printed in such small type.

Reading them is worth the effort, however. The CD booklet contains the whole libretto of this almost entirely sung show. The narrative consists of only a few simple incidents; the focus is on characterization and nuance. Kushner’s language is lively and accessible, with the characters’ plain-spoken realism enhanced by flights of fantasy in which laundry room appliances and a radio form a kind of Greek chorus.

Jeanine Tesori’s score draws on sources as disparate as classical chamber music (the boy’s -- and Kushner’s -- parents were classical musicians), klezmer and ‘60s soul. But the elements blend well.

Tonya Pinkins is a smoldering furnace as the deeply depressed maid. Anika Noni Rose repeats her Tony-winning performance as the maid’s rebellious daughter, and Harrison Chad plays the young boy.

With the stage version now at the Ahmanson Theatre, theatergoers may want to hold off on listening to the CD until they have experienced the full shock of the script’s most incendiary moment in the theater.

Doing justice to a story about killers

Various artists

Assassins (PS Classics)

***

A cast album from this year’s Broadway premiere of this amazing Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical has joined the original off-Broadway cast album from 1991.

The newcomer isn’t conspicuously better or worse. But it does justice to this perverse creation, which masterfully connects the motives behind a host of presidential assailants to some of our most cherished cliches about the American Dream.

The most interesting improvement is that the Broadway production transformed one actor, Neil Patrick Harris, from the innocent, folk-singing Balladeer of the first part of the show into Lee Harvey Oswald in the last part, thereby making a statement about how detached observers can go bad. In the original, separate actors played those roles.

The new recording offers a song inserted after the original production (but heard in the L.A. premiere in 1994), “Something Just Broke.” It’s nice to have it recorded for archival purposes, but the song’s attempt to depict anonymous “normal” Americans, as they recall the day of JFK’s death, is a small retreat from the show’s cutting edge.

We also get several previously unrecorded spoken introductions to songs, as well as an amusingly pathetic monologue by would-be Nixon assailant Sam Byck, played by Mario Cantone -- but a lot less of the climactic dialogue between John Wilkes Booth and Oswald than on the original recording.

Perhaps in an attempt to create more of a brass-band sound, in accordance with the music’s riffs on Americana, the new CD’s orchestra has no strings.

Adding to Ensler’s body of work

Eve Ensler

“The Good Body”

(Random House Audio)

**

An audio recording of Eve Ensler’s performance in her own “The Good Body” went on sale last week, just days before the monologue opened on Broadway. The timing was probably related to a plan to sell CDs (and a book version too) in the theater.

Still, it’s a risky move. Unless you’re an Ensler groupie -- the kind of person who had to see her “Vagina Monologues” with several casts -- why would you pay $80 to see Ensler on Broadway when her aural performance is available for $19.95?

Yes, there will be design elements on stage, and presumably Ensler uses the rest of her “good body” -- besides her voice -- in the live performance, but will these visual components be worth an extra $60?

The CD is mildly engaging, along the lines of a long NPR essay. Ensler discusses her politically incorrect obsession with her stomach, blames her parents as well as herself for this state of affairs, and compares her hang-up to other women’s obsessions with other body parts.

She assumes the voices of other women, some fictional. She plays Helen Gurley Brown, Isabella Rossellini, several Weight Watchers women, a Brazilian model, women who pay to have body parts altered, and Masai and Indian woman who feel more comfortable with their bodies. She ends up in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where women slurp ice cream in secret.

The piece has more breadth than depth -- recent medical alarms about obesity are barely mentioned. Ensler’s subject is so familiar and her conclusions so predictable that it’s unlikely this will create the kind of taboo-shattering buzz that accompanied “The Vagina Monologues.”

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to four stars (excellent). The albums are released unless otherwise noted.