Listening to cast recordings ...

Not exactly the same but thinking of the story of David Carroll valiantly trying to record GRAND HOTEL practically on his deathbed always puts a shudder through me when I listen to it.

I just recently listened to Company and it finally hit me that Elaine Stritch is really gone.

I'm listening to The Girl Who Came To Supper at this exact moment and feel nothing but giddy glee even though José Ferrer and Tessie O'Shea are no longer with us.

If you felt depressed every time you listened to a recording that features a performer who is no longer with us, then cast recordings would make you miserable all the time. Be grateful we have these wonderful documents to celebrate their performances!

Agree about Natasha Richardson in Cabaret. It's not just that she's no longer with us (for if that were the case, as Whizzer said, this kind of emotional response would happen often listening to cast recordings).

It's for a combination of reasons: her Sally is so stunningly vulnerable, she achieved an outright smash success in the role and that Cabaret was perhaps the triumph of her career was, similar to her death, markedly unexpected (so there's, at least for me, this strange symbiosis association between her Sally and her death). Because she died so very young. Because I very clearly remember myself being so stunned and saddened when she died. And because she was someone whom a great many people who knew her personally, clearly genuinely adored. She seemed to be, in every way imaginable, a class act. A great loss for the theatre; she was destined for a long, illustrious career and, it seems, many years of happiness.

Updated On: 9/3/16 at 08:44 AM