A historical trek down the street of dreams

Broadway:

The American Musical

(Columbia and Decca)

***

This sumptuous five-CD set is a companion to the documentary series of the same name that was broadcast on PBS this month. The CDs include 106 recordings, arranged mostly chronologically and featuring, when possible, the voices of the shows’ original Broadway casts -- although vintage off-Broadway also gets a nod, with songs from “The Threepenny Opera” and “The Fantasticks.” A lavish 54-page booklet offers comments on each song.

Only two musicals are represented more than once. Both are on the first disc: “Ziegfeld Follies of 1919” and “Show Boat.” From the 1919 show, Bert Williams sings “When the Moon Shines on the Moonshine” -- probably the most obscure song in the whole set -- and tenor John Steel sings “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” with an antiquated, ornate style (he rolls the “r” in “pretty”) that would be unthinkable today except as parody. The women of that era also sound frilly and fluttery, even Fanny Brice (in “My Man”) -- who is often unthinkingly assumed to have sounded like Barbra Streisand’s rendition of her in “Funny Girl” (you can compare them because Streisand sings “People” on disc three).

It’s fascinating to listen to the singing become rhythmically looser and less afraid of the lower register as the decades pass and the musical moves further from its roots in operetta and vaudeville and closer to jazz and, later, rock. The instrumental arrangements also evolve -- the raucous blast of “New York, New York” (from “On the Town”) opens disc two like a herald from a more modern age.

In Michael Kantor’s introduction to the booklet, he calls Broadway “a place where we allow our optimistic, childlike selves to remain undaunted by the disturbing daily news.” Yet these CDs demonstrate that this is hardly true all the time. Even some of the early entries -- “Ten Cents a Dance” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” -- are far from “optimistic” and “childlike.” Kantor later refers to the “the incredibly vast range of music that has been sung on Broadway” -- a much more apt observation.

Throughout the five CDs, individual listeners will quibble at particular selections (is “Wunderbar” really the best choice from “Kiss Me, Kate”?). But only in the last couple of discs, covering the most recent decades, does the producers’ apparent preference for the optimistic become glaringly apparent.

No compilation of this era should ignore the darker viewpoints of “Sweeney Todd,” “Into the Woods” and “Ragtime,” yet these great musicals go unrepresented. Instead, we get a lot of dross (“Come Follow the Band” from “Barnum,” “The Bells of St. Mary’s” from “Nine,” “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from “Les Miserables,” “Le Jazz Hot” from “Victor/Victoria”).

Near the end, we also get some pop songs that were interpolated into musicals only as an afterthought (“Dancing Queen” from “Mamma Mia!,” “Movin’ Out” from “Movin’ Out” and “I Go to Rio” from “The Boy From Oz”).

Still, the sheer quantity of this package is something to salute, even if the quality isn’t always consistent.

A single CD, “The Best of Broadway: The American Musical,” has also been released. Nineteen of its 21 selections are also in the five-CD package. But “America” replaces “Tonight” as the “West Side Story” representative on the single CD, and the title song of “Cabaret” fills in for the larger package’s “Willkommen.”

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