Original Broadway Cast, 1965 (United Artists/Kritzerland) 
(3 / 5) What Robert Wright and George Forrest had previously done successfully with Grieg and Borodin, they did with Rachmaninoff in creating a musical based on the play Anastasia, the story of the woman who claimed to be the only surviving member of the Romanov family assassination. Rachmaninoff’s music was well suited to a piece with action that takes place shortly after the Russian Revolution, and while fans of that music in its original form might find this adaptation hard to take, it’s a lush, beautifully sung, latter-day operetta. Although the show was plodding onstage, the recording is very entertaining. Constance Towers and Michael Kermoyan are excellent in all of their songs, particularly in “My Kind of Love” (the melody had previously served as the basis for the popular hit “Full Moon and Empty Arms”) and the dramatic “Six Palaces” (in which Anya is drilled on the “facts” of her life). Irra Petina, the grande dame of the “floperetta” genre, is a joy in the comic “Leben Sie Wohl” and “On That Day,” and she also leads the haunting “Homeward.” For camp value, there is Lillian Gish as the Grand Duchess, “reciting” lyrics to a vocalise sung by Towers as Anya. Billed as “The Musical Musical,” the show was one of the late-career flops of director George Abbott, who also collaborated on the book with Guy Bolton. (This was Bolton’s final Broadway credit.) The cast album notes detail which Rachmaninoff pieces have been adapted for each song. There are also two songs listed on the back of the original LP jacket that are not actually on the album; they were cut from the show during previews and, from all reports, weren’t recorded. — Jeffrey Dunn
Studio Casts, 1992-1998 (Bay Cities/Original Cast Records) 
(2 / 5) These recordings are not just Anya with two pianos. When it became clear that the 1965 production was going to close on Broadway after 16 performances, director and co-librettist George Abbott graciously ceded all of the rights to Wright and Forrest. The musical was revised and produced regionally as A Song for Anastasia and The Anastasia Game. A recording titled The Anastasia Affaire, based on a production at the Merrimack Theatre in Massachusetts, was released in 1992 and quickly went out of print. In 1998, with the title now changed to Anastasia: The Musical, the CD was reissued with bonus tracks of six “premiere recordings” of Wright and Forrest songs from other shows. The majority of the Rachmaninoff melodies used for Anya were used again in the revisions, but most of them were given new lyrics and made to serve new dramatic functions. While the Broadway score leaned heavily toward “nouveau operetta,” the final version is definitely a chamber musical with two-piano accompaniment, well handled by Albin Konopka and Seth Rudetsky. The principal singers are Judy Kaye, Regina Resnik, Len Cariou, Steve Barton, George Lee Andrews, Walter Willison, and David Green, all in top form. The story of Anastasia is more clearly discerned from the songs in the new version; still, the original Broadway cast album of Anya, with its grand orchestrations and operatic singing, is a more enjoyable listen. — J.D.
(1 / 5) Cole Porter’s Aladdin was never adapted for presentation on Broadway, but the London stage production — tarted up as a Christmas pantomime — yielded this unfortunate recording. It includes a few songs interpolated from other Porter shows, none of which fit the spirit and tone of the original; they’re too jazzy and out-of period. Doretta Morrow displays a wonderful voice on the recording, but it sounds, shall we say, too mature for the character of the princess. (She does offer a first-class rendition of “I Am Loved,” interpolated from Out of This World.) Cyril Ritchard is sorely missed on this recording, as is the maturity and authority of Dennis King. And whereas the original TV production had great orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett, this one features more “mod” arrangements that haven’t withstood the test of time. — K.B.
(0.5 / 5) New York, New York is destined to go down in musical theater history books for its creative team, which includes the legendary composer John Kander as well as director/choreographer Susan Stroman and lyricist Lin Manuel Miranda, who spearheaded the two most Tony-nominated musicals of all time. Unfortunately, the show itself will be remembered as a colossal disappointment: Rather than a love letter to the city that doesn’t sleep, or even to the post-WW II era in which the action takes place, what we have here is a misguided mishmash of weaker items from the Kander & Ebb repertoire forced into a stage musical with the number of main and featured characters greatly expanded from the film on which it is very loosely based. The plot largely concerns the troubled romance between struggling musician Jimmy Doyle and struggling singer Francine Evans, but the creators seem to have determined that these characters weren’t interesting enough for an entire show. As a result, also on hand to clutter up the proceedings are an Hispanic immigrant and his abusive father and loving mother, a cleaning woman turned opera singer, a Jewish immigrant and his violin teacher, et al. “A Quell ‘Amor,” performed by the newly minted opera singer, is perhaps the nadir of the show; it makes no sense in or out of context, we never hear from its singer again, and the song’s title is 50% of its lyrics. Indeed, lyrics are not the primary concern of this production, as shown by the inclusion of six extended instrumental pieces titled “Morning in New York,” “New York in the Rain,” “New York in the Summer,” “New York in the Snow,” “New York at Night,” and “New York Concerto.” (Orchestrators Sam Davis and Daryl Waters have done an admirable job of creating a period feel and an excitement that’s lacking in the plot.) One of the oddest aspects of the show and this album is the fact that Colton Ryan, who portrays Jimmy Doyle, sings every song as if he were being strangled, emitting some of the ugliest vowel sounds ever heard. On the other hand, Anna Uzele as Francine raises the roof with her big numbers, but her acting is not quite at the level of her vocal ability. The only two pitch-perfect performances are from Emily Skinner, as the aforementioned violin teacher, and the sadly underused Clyde Alves, as the leading man’s best friend. Four demo recording are appended to this album, and in the tracks where you can hear Fred Ebb singing his own material, you start to understand what this show could’ve been if that great lyricist had lived longer: a unique, biting, entertaining final curtain call for Kander & Ebb. Instead, listeners may end up, to quote one of the show’s stronger songs, sorry they asked. — Charles Kirsch
(4 / 5) The first (and better) of Shaina Taub’s pair of Shakespeare-inspired scores for the Public Theater’s Public Works program, Twelfth Night marvelously marries Taub’s distinctive blues-inflected funk pop vocabulary with Mike Brun’s New Orleans brass arrangements. Taub turns Shakespeare into an ideal collaborator; spoken excerpts of the play’s text weave seamlessly in and out of the songs, and Taub finds the germ of each song in Shakespeare’s language. A well-constructed opening number, “Play On,” musically stresses the story’s love triangle. Nikki M. James (Viola), Nanya-Akuki Goodrich (Olivia), and Ato Blankson-Wood (Orsino) all sing terrifically, and Taub frequently throws her characters into sinewy, climactic counterpoints that capture the play’s tangled romantic webs. The comic material for Sir Toby Belch (Shuler Hensley) and Malvolio (Andrew Kober) is slighter stuff, but Taub adds in a few fun ensemble numbers (example: “Word on the Street”) for Illyria’s gossipy citizenry. Best of all is “Is This Not Love,” a ballad sung yearningly first by Taub herself as the clown, Feste, and then reprised powerfully by ensemble member Vivian Jett. — Dan Rubins
