If the two most glorious words in the English language are "musical comedy," certainly the next three have to be "original cast album." "Growing up [in Pennsylvania in the '60s and '70s], I didn't see very much live theatre. I came to know musical theatre by listening to every cast album I could get my hands on," says composer Stephen Flaherty. And so, for the existence of such shows as "Once on This Island," "Ragtime," and "A Man of No Importance," we have a certain circular vinyl disc, 12 inches in diameter, concentrically grooved, and punctuated with a hole dead center, to thank.
For this look at the process of creating original cast albums, Back Stage spoke with six experts in the field -- record producers Phil Ramone, Jay David Saks, and Tommy Krasker; artists and repertoire director Bill Rosenfield; and the songwriting team of Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens -- all of whom have extensive recording credits (see list at the end of this article). Together they create a lively conversation about the joys, challenges, and artistic rewards of making an exciting and definitive documentation of a theatrical experience, so that audiences can relive their favorite shows again and again, or discover great material and classic performances they were never able to enjoy live. Our six recording veterans also speak candidly and passionately about the economic problems besetting the recording industry today, and mull over possible solutions designed to make the continued production of cast albums an ongoing reality in an increasingly difficult marketplace.
Blitzstein Began It
It's generally agreed that the first American original cast album was of Marc Blitzstein's "The Cradle Will Rock," the incendiary Orson Welles-directed socialist "opera" that famously opened on Broadway at the Venice Theatre on June 16, 1937 despite the federal government's attempt to shut it down. This was the first time anyone tried to record a Broadway score in a relatively complete form with the company and musicians who performed it every night in the theatre. (Long out of print and highly prized by collectors, this legendary recording is once again available, having been rereleased on CD by Pavilion Records Ltd. on its Pearl label.) But the first cast album to achieve widespread recognition and commercial success was Decca Records' recording of the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein smash hit "Oklahoma!" With the success of that recording, the floodgates were opened, and almost every subsequent Broadway hit (along with an increasing number of less-than-hits as the years went by) would be immortalized in audio form for the ages.
1940s recording technology allowed only approximately three and a half minutes of music to fit on one side of a disc (made of acetate, not vinyl, and usually only 10 inches in diameter), known as "78s" because they were played at 78 revolutions per minute. Thus, to record all the songs in a Broadway score required multiple discs, which were then sold in a package containing multiple sleeves that resembled a photo album, hence the name "original cast album." Naturally, this forced the truncation of most scores, with songs frequently shortened, and songs for minor characters often omitted from the recording. The invention in 1948 of the "long-playing," or LP, disc, allowed between 20 and 25 minutes of music per side (with technology eventually inching that up to 30 minutes) of a 12-inch disc, which played at a slower 33 revolutions per minute. (1949's "Kiss Me, Kate" was the first LP cast album.) Now most scores could fit with reasonable completeness on a single record. Still, time constraints forced the foreshortening or elimination of dance music, as well as the occasional song or song reprise. With the introduction of digital recording technology in the early 1980s, vinyl LPs were replaced with startling speed by the compact disc, or CD, a mere 4 and 5/8 inches in diameter, which could contain up to 80 minutes of music, allowing the most complete preservation of scores yet, plus such things as "bonus" tracks of demo recordings, pop covers of potential hits, and cut songs.
The First Step
So what, exactly, does a record producer do? According to Tommy Krasker, he's "the person who oversees everything. I always say that in any other medium, he'd be called the director. You have meetings and conversations with the authors about what is to be recorded. You set up the schedule, run the sessions in the recording studio, oversee the editing, mixing, and mastering processes. You're basically running the show, and the responsibility of seeing that everything comes in well and on time and on budget is on your shoulders. Artistically, I believe the producer's work should be intuitive and invisible. I think my best work is done when I have a very strong point of view towards material, but my work is not supposed to call attention to itself."
The first step is creating what Lynn Ahrens refers to as "the recording script." It's extremely rare that a show is documented note for note on a CD. After all, the task is to translate a work from a visual medium to an aural medium, usually condensing it from a 120-150-minute experience to a 60-80-minute one. Even when a two-CD set is recorded, the result is rarely note for note. As Stephen Flaherty recalls, "We don't have every measure of 'Ragtime' on the Broadway cast recording. There's dance music that's missing, there's underscoring that's missing, and a lot of scene work. You have to be a good editor thinking what will be the best listening experience, and tell the story."
According to Jay David Saks, "I usually see the show three or four times, just trying to enjoy it, and something subconsciously sort of seeps in. Then I sit at home for three, four, five days with just the music and the script, and make up my own plan of what the album should be. It's my point of view. Cut this, transpose this, do we need that? Perhaps that dialogue should be rewritten to be shorter. But that doesn't mean I have the final say. It's not my show. So we have a big planning meeting: the authors are there, the director's there, the musical director, the conductor, the orchestrator. They've thought about how they want the album to be, too, and sometimes my ideas are not as good as theirs. We have these roundtable discussions and little by little we work our way through until we have a cohesive plan that incorporates everyone's input."
Of course, such a cumulative vision requires agreement as to the primary goal of the album. And people can have differing views on that. According to Phil Ramone, "You vary it depending on the project. 'The Boy From Oz' is an impressionistic approach; 'Passion' is a storytelling response. The musical experience that goes with it is probably the most important to me." For Flaherty, "The thing that really differentiates an original cast album, besides delivering wonderful performances from both the actors and the musicians, is really to tell the story. Ideally, when you're listening to the album, even if you haven't seen the show, you should be able to understand the story." For Krasker, storytelling is not a key purpose. "I think it's to preserve great performances and great musical material. You want people to understand what's special and distinctive about the show, but to get the story, my answer often is, 'Read the synopsis!' "
Bill Rosenfield, who, as an executive producer, is the lone interviewee who comes from the business side of the equation, looks at it this way: "For me as a fan, it's about going home and recreating the show in my living room. For the authors, it's about stock and amateur rights, so that the show will have a life beyond its original production. For the rest of the creative team, it's to preserve their work."
Don't Speak?
Which all means that differing goals can lead to differing approaches. Is the album about the songs or about the story? As Jay Saks puts it, "You have two camps: 'I don't want to hear anything but music' versus 'I want to hear a little bit of book.' And you can never satisfy them all. I do feel that song to song to song can be unrelenting." He likes to include "a few little bits of dialogue, not enough to bog it down, but enough to give you the thread of the story." Phil Ramone asks, "What is the record of a Broadway show? It's a radio broadcast of that idea. And so pivotal dialogue is important. But here's another side to the philosophy: Once you've heard the dialogue once, it's like a joke -- it doesn't work the second time. And the third time you want to shoot it."
Rosenfield thinks, "If the dialogue is clever and witty, it's fun, because those become catch phrases you use for the rest of your life. When the CD arrived on the scene, all of a sudden there was all this time, and there was a huge movement on the part of cast album producers and authors to have as much dialogue as possible. We've since gone the other way. Most of the time when I do albums now, people say, 'Let's just have the songs, and if it's 45 minutes, great; let's have a great 45 minutes rather than a mediocre 58.' I think it's wrong to leave everything up to the liner notes, though, because liner notes tend to be something that people read once."
Ironically, Flaherty, for whom storytelling is primary, says, "Personally, I am not a fan of a lot of dialogue on an album. I prefer to just have the experience of the score as long as that can support the story." That said, he notes a show on which he and collaborator Ahrens made a different choice. "For 'A Man of No Importance,' the texture of the piece was something that really went from spoken word to sung word and back to spoken word. Spoken text and poetry were woven throughout the score. So we chose to have more of the book work on the album than for a standard original cast recording. And I think, for that particular show, it was the right choice."
Sometimes something new is created specifically for the album. Recalls Krasker, "For the entire last number of 'Footloose,' the authors and I basically jettisoned about half of what was onstage. There was a lot of plot going on, and we determined that at that point on the album, you didn't need to reveal all the inner workings of the plot and all the denouements of the show. You could just have a good time. So we basically created a new finale, which conveyed a sense of fun and joy, and really captured the spirit of the show."
Krasker warns against " 'dry' dialogue, in other words, non-underscored dialogue. I personally don't want to listen to it again and again. But on the 'Nine' revival recording, we put dialogue in some key places because I felt it aided the storytelling, and Maury Yeston had underscored it so beautifully that I didn't think it would be troubling to listen to over and over again. I thought it would actually be illuminating."
Nevertheless, Saks daringly broke the "dry dialogue" rule on his recording of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's "Assassins," including the entire 11-minute Texas Book Depository scene wherein the various presidential assassins materialize to convince Lee Harvey Oswald to kill President John F. Kennedy. "We made the choice for three reasons," explains Saks. "First of all, without it there was no ending, because 'Another National Anthem' cross-fades into a country-western song on Oswald's radio. So Steve would have had to write an ending for the song. Second, the record would have been very short, barely 40 minutes, and there is criticism for short CDs. And the third reason is I thought it would make a better, more interesting record. When I mentioned it to the authors, John Weidman said, 'Great!,' and Steve said, 'Fine with me.' We set it up like a radio play, then we built a ton of sound effects, little subtle things like traffic sounds in the background. Some people hate it, and that's fine. It's the next-to-last track; they can program it out. Or pop the CD out of the player. Nobody's chained to the player."
Musical Choices
There are also musical choices to be made. Ramone discusses the importance of deciding upon tempos for the album. "I've sat with writers many a time, days and days of stuff, collaborating on what tempos to use. Some writers are philosophically against the tempo that's created in the theatre versus how they hear it as they originally wrote it. Generally, things are very bright tempo-wise on the recording. But if there's a ballad, you may want to take a little more time. You wouldn't do that in a theatre; it won't get the applause, or it won't make the transition into the next scene."
Saks tells of recording "The Worst Pies in London" on the original cast album of "Sweeney Todd" (on which he assisted producer Thomas Z. Shepard). "I clearly remember how the first take was so lusterless and dull and boring. The tempo that Angela Lansbury did it in the theatre turned out to be too slow. Steve, Hal Prince, Tom, everybody thought it was too slow. And Angela agreed. Because, in the theatre, they have to hear the words, and she's doing all this stuff, smacking dough with a roller. They got her to do it much faster. It was funny to watch her do it, because actors will mark physically while recording. They still have to do it in some way. But it was amazing how much better it was. It's a little more frenzied, and for the record, it's better."
There's also a decision to be made regarding whether or not to add players to the orchestra. Says Ramone, "We've done it to make the strings sound a little richer. The balance from a pit when there are nine instead of 14. The difference in adding two celli, two violas, and some extra woodwinds. And I always bring in a spare trumpet player." Flaherty admits, "Every composer wants a larger string section." And he agrees about the trumpet player. "I remember on 'My Favorite Year,' the last note played, I believe it was at one or two in the morning, was the last note of the overture, which was a high C trumpet." He laughs, "I remember thinking, 'I don't think the guy who started at 9 am that morning would have been able to hit that note.' " But Flaherty also notes, "Sometimes, for the recording, you might want to thin out something that needed to be beefed up in the theatre to fill the physical space that the show inhabits, to make it a little more intimate."
On the recording of the Off-Broadway production of Sondheim's "Saturday Night," Krasker relates, "Jonathan Tunick had scored it for a full orchestra, but because of the demands of the particular venue in which they were performing, it was primarily keyboard, brass, and woodwinds. But you were sitting with this orchestration that was scored for a full string section -- of course you were going to restore those for the recording, to present the score the way Jonathan and Steve Sondheim had envisioned it being heard."
Sometimes musical moments are dropped, even though there might be room for them on the CD. In "A Man of No Importance," Faith Prince's character had an important dramatic moment in a reprise of her introductory song, "The Burden of Life," near the end of Act One. Says Flaherty, "It was a wonderful moment for Faith in the theatre, but the reprise wove in and out of a much larger dialogue scene, and musically it doesn't have an ending, it just goes into the next scene. I thought that on an album it might seem somewhat frustrating, unless we could have included the scene, which Faith did so beautifully. But it was a long scene."
The Union Rules
Once the form of the recording is decided upon, it's time to go into the studio. Due to the Actors' Equity Association requirement that an actor must be paid a full week's salary for each day he is called to record (no matter how short his recording time may be), almost all original cast albums are recorded in a single day, which generally begins at 9 am and ends at midnight. For each actor, Equity defines a "day" as nine hours, with a one-hour break that must be continuous. If an actor goes overtime, he gets one-eighth of a week's contractual salary for each additional hour, up to a cap of 250% of Production contract minimum (which is currently $1,354). Equity also has a "half-day" option for a second or subsequent days of recording of four hours or less, for which actors are paid half of a week's contractual salary, with the same 250% cap as above. If the producer chooses that, Equity increases the portion of the producers' royalties that the actors share from 15% to 20%.
The American Federation of Musicians, Local 802 requires that no more than 15 minutes' worth of music be used from a three-hour session, and the day is defined as consisting of four sessions. There is the option of paying musicians overtime for additional sessions.
The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) also claims jurisdiction over the recording of cast albums. AFTRA minimum is usually calculated per "side," with a "side" being defined as three and a half minutes of singing (said definition going back to those 78s again). The other factor for AFTRA is how many people are singing on the side. There are staggered rates for solos, duos, three to eight, nine to 16, 17-24, 25-35, and 36 or more. To figure out the AFTRA minimum for a performer, you list the songs that performer does, divide them up into the various size categories, then calculate the minimum based on the number of songs in each category and the appropriate rate for that category. On rare occasions, though, the minimum can be decided per hour. The rate is the same as per side, but if a performer is called for, say, six hours, and only records a single side during that time, the per-hour rate would be greater and thus apply.
Ultimately, AFTRA and Equity have an agreement that the higher of the two rates must be paid to the performer. Usually, for a cast album, that turns out to be the Equity rate of a week's salary. Exceptions can happen, for example, in the case of recording musical revues, such as "Ain't Misbehavin'," where a small cast of principals sings a large number of solos or duets.
Bill Rosenfield laments that this twin jurisdiction can lead to confusion. "It's one of those situations where it's an AFTRA contract, but they bow to Equity's rule. But if you go to Equity wanting a concession or something, they say 'No, no, no, you have to go to AFTRA.' So we don't know what the answer is. And the answer is that they need to get into a room and make a decision. Something that they don't seem to be willing to do."
Making the Schedule
What Rosenfield refers to as the "onerous" union requirements make scheduling the day both difficult and of paramount importance. Lynn Ahrens describes it as "a jigsaw puzzle." Flaherty adds, "You almost never record in sequence. You have to create a schedule that will allow someone not to sing all of their big numbers in one three-hour session. Pacing is very important." Ahrens cautions, "You try not to burn people out, but also not to keep them there all day waiting, recording something at the beginning of the day and something else at the end. And you try to get the ensemble stuff done fairly at one time."
Saks recorded the current "Gypsy" production in two days, but notes, "We didn't incur any additional costs of significance, other than the studio for a second day, because the second day we saved just for Bernadette Peters. So that she wouldn't have to sing her big numbers on the first day of recording. That gave her an extra day of rest. We didn't have to bring back the ensemble or other principals."
Time is inevitably the enemy in the studio. "You're always thinking about the clock," laments Krasker. "I try to have something on tape within the first 15 minutes. On one album, we had enormous technical problems in the studio for the first hour and 15 minutes. And so you had a very carefully thought-out, intricate schedule that was shot to hell, and you're basically trying to gain ground for the rest of the day. That was a challenge." Or, as Ahrens wryly puts it, tension mounts as "the overtime begins to loom." Ramone is philosophical: "There's a certain amount of strain about not getting behind. I try to plan the trouble right off the bat. Fortunately, the artists and the band are really prepared, since they are playing the show eight times a week, and that makes a huge difference. And you've got to pick up a break somewhere. Someone's going to sing a song in one take."
Setting the Stage
Which studio is used and how it is to be set up are also important. As Ahrens puts it, studio choice "has to do with the size of the company and where they'll fit with the musicians. And whether you're recording musical tracks separately and then having the singers come in, or whether they all have to be together in a big room. I personally like a warmer-sounding room than a bright room. But it often isn't a matter of choice. It's a matter of what's available and what's affordable and what's physically right for the number of people involved." Flaherty adds, "The studio has to fit the psychology. If you have a two-character musical, you don't want to put them on a huge soundstage."
It's not necessary to try to reproduce theatrical staging in the positioning of actors and microphones. Thanks to digital technology, that can be done during the mixing process, if required. Instead, creating as much separation as possible between orchestra and performers, and isolating actors with individual microphones, is crucial. Unless the voice is isolated from other voices and from the orchestra, digital "tweaking" later on (to fix bad notes, pitches, late or ragged entrances, etc.) will not be possible. That's not to say physical arrangement is unimportant, however. Ramone says he will put "the whole cast in the back end of the studio so that they can clearly see the conductor and the band. There are some screens, but they can see the conductor when he jumps up and down on his conductor's platform. They get video; they get everything of him. There's no difference for them. I believe in making sure they see what they see every night at the theatre." And Ahrens is concerned that "actors need to face one another when playing a scene together or singing a song together" in order to play off one another and get a truly theatrical performance.
Working with the Actors
Reproducing that exciting sense of a theatrical performance is one of the crucial things any successful original cast recording must accomplish. And a good deal of that will come from the actors' performances in the studio. Says Flaherty, "A lot of stage performers have not done a lot of recording, or they're not familiar with the recording process. So just trying to teach them how to relate to all of that technology and make them comfortable can be daunting. A lot of cast album recording is pure psychology, in terms of when to push a performer, when to lay back, how to get the best performance out of the actor. And it's important not to say, 'This is for posterity.' You have to psych yourself out of that. I think you just have to say that you want the purest version of who the character is."
Ramone relies on "a little pet thing I say to people: I talk about what a close-up camera does in motion pictures. Isabel Keating, who plays Judy Garland in 'The Boy From Oz,' had never been in a studio. But two words of encouragement, a couple of moments of how to stand at the mike and where to perform -- making the microphone, the control room, and me the focus -- was all she needed. She was incredible. Amazing." He continues, "You don't want them reaching for the Ethel Merman back row in the studio. Still, how do you tell Hugh Jackman he's got to play it down when he's playing the role of Peter Allen? When he goes for the big notes, I want him to go from the bottom of his whole body to get there. You mustn't take the excitement out of it."
Krasker recalls working with Sutton Foster on "The Maury Yeston Songbook," recording the song "I Want to Go to Hollywood" from "Grand Hotel." "It's not a cast album, but it is a theatre song. And it was something she knew she would take much further if she were doing it onstage. In the middle section, which got intensely dramatic and desperate, we both knew if you were going to listen to it within the context of an album, she needed to walk a very fine line between being emotional and being overemotional. You face those challenges with every song you record. Will the way it was performed onstage work exactly for a recording, or does it in some way need to be shaped for listening?"
Saks actually worries more about the actor not going far enough. "A general comment I often give is to overdramatize when you're singing. Because there's no visual information for the listener, what may seem the right amount of characterization in the theatre can come across on a record as bland. I never tell them this in advance. We do a take and then we see where we are. But I'll say 'go too far.' I mean, don't be ridiculous, but go too far. And if it's too much, then we'll back away from it. But you're going to find nine times out of ten, if you do something just a little more, it's going to be just right for the record." Saks also advises, "Never watch the actors as they're recording. That's the worst thing to do. You're totally fooled by watching them."
As the Day Goes By
One of the most important things a record producer does during the recording day is to make sure that he is totally "covered" on every song. That is, he won't get into the postproduction studio only to discover he can't edit together one terrific take of each song, with no cracked notes, missed lyrics, off-pitch notes, or weak acting performances.
Says Ahrens, "You're listening very hard and you have to pick up mistakes. You have to judge when to let them keep going because the rest of the take is great, and what to know about going back to fix something, or whether to stop them right then and there so they don't get exhausted. It's a constant process of listening and thinking on your feet." She prefers to make editing choices "as you go, to a certain extent. I'm making choices and starring things as we go along so that when I get into the mixing process and the selecting process, I'm pretty clear about what I want, and don't necessarily have to listen to everything."
Ramone always does at least two full takes on every song, always recording the first run-through complete no matter what. "And I'm a believer in playbacks. I let them hear it. Let's hear the rhythm; let's feel the voice. I'm out to get the confidence of the artists."
Saks refuses to "make editing plans during the session. I don't even think about, 'Well, I'll use take three, and then I'll use take five.' None of that. I just keep filling up hard disks, filling up hard drives. I never throw anything out. All I do at the session is make sure that when we finish a song, we've covered it."
Krasker takes a similar approach. "I do multiple takes only. I was trained by John McClure, who produced for Leonard Bernstein, and he did it before you could punch in vocals and things like that. I do multiple takes, then I edit in the postproduction stage. When I started doing cast albums in the early '90s, we didn't have nearly the kind of isolation we have now. Everybody was pretty much in the same room with very little isolation around them. And that's the way I enjoy doing it, because I like the excitement that happens when singers and the orchestra are performing at the same time."
Editing, Mixing, and Mastering -- The Digital Age
Digital technology has revolutionized how the raw material of the recording session is assembled into a finished album. The music is now in the form of computer files, which can be manipulated using a program known as Pro Tools. Seamless edits between sections from different takes can be made with practically the click of a mouse button. If you get it wrong, you just click "undo" and try it again. And during the mixing process, off-pitch singing can be corrected, raspy notes made smoother, even tempos altered without affecting pitch. Mastering is the final, and perhaps least artistic, part of the process. It basically makes sure that the sound quality and levels throughout the recording are consistent. Track marks are inserted where desired, allowing the listener to skip electronically through the CD, and the amount of silence between tracks is decided upon. Once all three processes are complete, a CD master is burned and sent to the factory for use in manufacturing discs.
Editing is the first order of business: choosing which takes, or which parts of different takes, to use on the finished album, and cutting it all together. Jay Saks remembers working on the 1974 original Broadway cast recording of "A Little Night Music." "My job was to sit in this little studio and, as they finished recording things, they would hand the tapes to me and the engineer and we'd sit there and edit with a razor blade. And you have to be careful about what you choose to do, because if you start cutting up the tape and the edits don't work, you've got to put it back together. And sometimes‌" He leaves the deadly consequences unverbalized. Still, Saks sees digital technology as "a double-edged sword. There's nothing destructive. You can do any kind of editing you want. On the other hand, you're now tempted to do 10 times more editing than before. You can spend forever on something. I usually spend three or four days editing. I could go through it note by note, but then you're losing track of the theatricality of it, the spontaneity. I don't want it to be filled with flaws, but I don't want to lose its life and sense of theatre."
Bill Rosenfield echoes Saks concerns. "Because a lot of people like to overdub, the organic life that happens to a show when it's being performed is dissipated. Once you lay a track, and then the actor comes in on a Thursday and overdubs it, that actor is hitting the notes and maybe giving a good performance, but he's not giving a theatrical performance -- he's giving a performance for the microphone. A younger audience demands that level of perfection. They don't want Carol Channing missing a cue on 'Put on Your Sunday Clothes.' You know, I was not around, but in the old days, you went in, you did the album. When I was looking at the session tapes for 'Happy Hunting,' there were four songs that Ethel Merman did in one take. And she said, 'That's it. Let's move on.' That doesn't happen anymore. For me, digital technology is the end of spontaneity."
For Phil Ramone, digital technology is good because "it's given me far better edits. And more room on the hard drive for not stopping. I hated stopping for a tape change."
Tommy Krasker thinks things have changed "infinitely for the better. We agonize less and worry less. The truth of it is the studio is an incredibly torturous experience. There's a lot of pressure on everybody, a lot of eyes watching you, and I've frequently seen singers who have no problem on a stage freeze up. When you're trying to get 79 minutes of music recorded in one day, you don't want to stop for 10 minutes to help a singer get past a point of fright to be able to sing a note absolutely properly. Now pitch adjustment is infinitely easier. If the singer is simply having trouble getting right on a note, rather than agonize in the studio and put them through torment, you're able to say, 'We can fix that. Let's move on.' "
After editing is done, mixing is the process of creating the sound of the album: creating spacial distances by placing voices in the sound field, creating voice movement, balancing levels between voices and orchestra, finding the right amount of reverberation, adding sound effects and special effects, etc.
It's rare that a CD attempts to reproduce exactly a theatrical staging in sound terms. Says Saks, "You can have an entire scene or song played with somebody standing stage right. On a record, a voice coming just from the right speaker is going to be weird. I try to arrange it in what we call the stereo sound field, so that you hear things coming from something that's logical. If it's an ensemble number and different people are singing different lines, they shouldn't all come from one place. I try to make it interesting, but not so interesting that it draws attention to itself. The means aren't the end."
Krasker discusses the differences in mixing his albums of "Titanic" and the revival of "Nine." " 'Titanic' had a much larger orchestra and cast, so you were going for a much vaster sound, a large wall of sound. 'Nine,' because of the intimacy of the piece as it was played onstage, the way the show is actually acted and sung, and the smaller size of the orchestra, you went for the sound of a chamber piece." In his studio cast recording of the Gershwins' "Pardon My English," "it was deliberately farcical, so I made use of people making entrances and walking across stage."
Sometimes the mixing process helps create an aural equivalent of a moment that, in the theatre, is strictly visual. In the recent Broadway revival of "Cabaret," the show's stunning finale revealed the MC in Nazi concentration-camp garb. Jay Saks had to find a way to do that in sound. A train announcement in German was added at the end of the famous long cymbal crash that ends the show. But that wasn't enough. "I got to that moment in the mixing, and I thought to myself, I'm not getting the moment across. This will not have the impact to the listener that it does to the viewer who is in the theatre. We tried a lot of different things. Finally, after several hours of experimenting, we came up with a certain kind of lengthy, artificial reverb tail attached to the cymbal crash. We experimented with the quality of the sound, with the length of the crash. We found just the right moment in which to bring in the train station announcement. We created it totally spontaneously. Sometimes you play around with crap like that and you have to throw it away because it just doesn't work. But sometimes it does work. For me, that moment still gives me goose bumps. It just makes my skin crawl. I feel really happy that we found the right moment."
Saks also notes that "Cabaret" was the only time he tried to recreate the sound ambience of being in a theatre. "You wanted to feel like you were in the Kit Kat Club, and we couldn't record it live. But otherwise I don't think about trying to create the ambience in the theatre, because in the theatre it usually sounds very dry and harsh. You just don't realize it, because you're there in a live environment."
A Shrinking Market
Before pop music and theatre music split apart, shows like "My Fair Lady" or "West Side Story" sold huge amounts of records. According to Saks, "In the '40s, '50s, and early '60s, you'd see cast albums listed as top sellers in the top 10, top 20. It doesn't happen anymore, except on very, very rare occasions. I've had cast albums that struggled to make 10,000." Says Krasker, "When I started in this business, they used to say that there were 20,000 devoted fans that would always buy a theatrical album. Today, I think maybe 10% of those people are still buying every single album. So we're down to 2,000."
But Rosenfield thinks cast albums can still at least make their money back "if you can keep costs under control. There's a huge difference between when an album breaks even and when it recoups. Kind of like Hollywood, where we hear about movies that gross $300 million but never make a profit. That happens in the recording industry as well."
Still, why take the risk? Ramone thinks the CD is "a hell of an advertisement" for the show. And that it should be marketed in newer, more aggressive ways. "It has to be the philosophy of how good the album is, and what an experience it is. I think you have to start a listening habit. A car is a great place to start, and families are a cool place to start. And we need a DVD video and audio for the future. I still believe that a version of a show that could be shown in a short form on local TV news stories would help the show. Why do people go to see the same show on Broadway that they've seen on tour? Obviously, it's important enough that if you see a piece of it, you go and take your family. I think the critical thing is we need people who have young philosophical ideas to spread the rumor that theatre is a really cool place to go."
Lynn Ahrens calls the album "a valuable tool. It can be sent out to producers, it can be used to promote stock and amateur rights. It keeps your show in memory." Flaherty points out that their show "Lucky Stiff," which played Off-Broadway in 1988 at Playwrights Horizons, didn't get an album recorded until five years later. Before the 1993 album, there was only one significant other production, which was done at Maryland's Olney Theatre, located just outside of Washington, D.C., and won the Helen Hayes Award for best musical. Notes Flaherty, "It was amazing. All of a sudden, people knew what the show was and knew what the score was like, and we started getting new productions both here and abroad. All from that record."
Both Krasker and Rosenfield believe that smart producers should start building the album budget into the capitalized budget for the show itself. Says Rosenfield, "If you're raising $10 million for a musical, you could raise $300,000 more and own your album and sell it through your website and at the theatre. The additional amount of money that you make per disc would far outweigh the fewer number of discs that you would sell."
Hoping for Change
And there was virtually unanimous agreement that the economic costs of making the album also need addressing. Rosenfield is adamant: "Something has to happen, and the change has to be that everybody, and I mean everyone, has to walk into a room willing to give up something significant. And that means record company, authors, directors, producers, managers, actors, orchestrators, copyists, musicians -- everybody. There are shows that are going unrecorded, there are classic shows that have been revived in major revivals and struggled to get a record deal, and that shouldn't be the case. It's just too damn expensive because everybody, and I underline everybody, is too greedy. They all have to stop and say, 'What are we trying to accomplish here?' And if they all agree that they're trying to accomplish a recording of that show, they should move backward from there. Right now, the single person that makes the most money from the recording of a Broadway show that doesn't sell well is the orchestrator. And that needs to be evaluated and examined, because it's just not fair."
Ramone would like to see the Equity rule of a week's salary for each day an actor is called in to record rethought. "I'm happy to pay the cast their full week, but if you want to bring the cast in to do some of the songs on Monday, and then bring in some of the people on Thursday to do some fixes, that would be so reasonable to me. To go into jeopardy after eight hours! I've never done a show that people, after opening night and all the tension of the last six weeks of their life, don't come in to record with sore throats and colds and everything else they've been able to prevent up to that night. Why shouldn't they have a chance to re-fix it? Give the person a chance to do the whole show within five days, a week. That's reasonable."
Krasker agrees. "I think that's an awful rule. It backfires on actors. That's one of the ironies, because it's there to make things better for the actors. But when you end up structuring the entire session in one day, it's tremendously grueling. It makes it torturous for the actor."
Krasker also has thoughts about the musicians' union rules. Clearly, the 15 minutes of music per three-hour session was devised in the days when an album could only hold 60 minutes' worth of music, as opposed to the 80 minutes on a CD today. Krasker praises the union for "coming up with alternate pricing structures. If something is going to be done on a very low budget, you can put in for 'low budget' scale. And there's a scale called 'limited pressing,' if you know something isn't going to sell more than 10,000 units. That said, the union has said that cast albums cannot be done under the limited pressing scale. They are still holding to the idea that cast albums sell 500,000 units. I think there's going to become an awareness over the next couple of years that it's simply not true, and they will have to apply lower pay scales to cast albums as well. I think that's going to help enormously."
In the immortal words of Johnny Mercer, something's gotta give. Bill Rosenfield sums it up eloquently: "I love making these albums and, more than that, I love the fact that all these years later, the work still exists and you can put it on and relive it. It would be a shame if everybody let this one particular art form die, an art form that has done so much to feed all these other art forms and get people throughout the country to fall in love with the theatre. It's only through small independents and people putting egos aside that it's going to continue to live."
FOR THE RECORD
Phil Ramone's canon includes the 1968 original Broadway cast of "Promises, Promises," and continues through the original productions of "Pippin," "Chicago," and "Little Shop of Horrors," up to Stephen Sondheim's "Passion" and the 1996 revival of his "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," Michael John LaChiusa's "The Wild Party," and this season's "The Boy From Oz." Ramone's nontheatrical recording credits include collaborations with a who's who of the music world, from RenĂŠe Fleming to Barbra Streisand to the Rolling Stones, garnering numerous Grammy Awards along the way.
Jay David Saks, of BMG (which owns RCA Records), also has numerous Grammys from a list stretching from 1977's "Starting Here, Starting Now" to the current revival of "Gypsy" (for which he won the 2004 Grammy), with such titles along the way as the original production of "Into the Woods"; "Jerome Robbins' Broadway"; Broadway revivals of "Anything Goes," "Guys and Dolls," "Cabaret," and "Chicago"; "Assassins"; and even Peter Allen's "Legs Diamond." He also served a long apprenticeship to the highly respected record producer Thomas Z. Shepard, and has a parallel career as a producer of classical CDs for BMG.
Tommy Krasker has been producing records since 1990, beginning his career with studio cast recordings for the Gershwin estate, then moving on to such shows as "Titanic," "Floyd Collins," "Saturday Night," "My Life With Albertine," the recent Broadway revival of "Nine," and the upcoming recordings of Sondheim's "Bounce" and the current Broadway revival of "Fiddler on the Roof." Krasker has even gone so far as to create his own label, PS Classics (in collaboration with his life partner, singer Philip Chaffin), devoted to recording both new shows and neglected titles in the canon.
Bill Rosenfield is the former head of the cast album division for RCA at BMG (until the company closed it down), where he was responsible for deciding what shows would be recorded and serving as executive producer on them. Thanks to Rosenfield's discerning eye, work by new writers like Michael John LaChiusa ("Hello Again" and "Marie Christine"), Jason Robert Brown ("Songs for a New World," "Parade"), Lawrence O'Keefe ("Bat Boy"), Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis ("Urinetown"), Bobby Lopez and Jeff Marx ("Avenue Q"), and Andrew Lippa ("The Wild Party") was preserved, alongside more mainstream titles like "Thoroughly Modern Millie," Broadway revivals of "Candide," "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," and "Man of La Mancha," and rereleases of long-sought-after shows like "Darling of the Day" and "The Golden Apple." Rosenfield currently works on a freelance basis.
The Tony Award-winning writing team of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty have served as producers or co-producers on recordings of their own shows like "Lucky Stiff," "A Man of No Importance," and their animated film musical "Anastasia," as well as working closely with Rosenfield and Saks on "Once on This Island," "My Favorite Year," and "Ragtime," and with Ramone on "Seussical."