My rant on the original OKLAHOMA OBCR

[Josh Freilich]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 12:58pm

Despite everyone having great voices and a great sound from the orchestra, for the sake of continuity, it is the BIGGEST SCREWUP OF A CAST ALBUM EVER!!!! Everything is completely out of sequence from the action on stage, and that stinks.

Like in "Oh What a Beautiful Morning". THAT'S THE WRONG INTRO!!! I know it was vinyl and they couldn't use up all that space, but they decided to replace the whole pastoral french horn/woodwind section in the beginning with the ostinato that plays under the verses.

"Farmer and the Cowman": After the "Lock up your wife and daughter" verse, they go back to "Territory folks" and then slow down on "Rancher's Gaaaaaaaaaals"... only to start back up again! I know that they couldn't simulate the gunshots in the studio, but the best thing you could've done was to go from "Lock up your wife and daughter" into "Farmer and the cowman should be friends" then "And when this territory is a state" and lost the break in the middle.

"Finale": This is the biggest mess of all. Let's hope you're listening, because what I'm about to say to y'all is so dang twisted. The orchestra starts off with this grand flourish using the "Corn is as high as an elephant's eye" motif THAT ISN'T EVEN WRITTEN IN THE DANG SCORE!!! Then Laurey and Curly start singing "Oh what a beautiful morning" like usual. Okay, there's no problem there. But then they start singing "All the sounds of the earth are like music". THAT'S NOT IN THE SCORE EITHER!!! But then, this is real messed-up -- they go back to a song that was supposed to have been put in the scene JUST BEFORE "Oklahoma" -- the reprise of "People will Say We're in Love". Immediately after their reprise is finished, the chorus continues with what's supposed to be sung at CURTAIN CALL: "Sweetheart, they're suspecting things/People will say we're in love!" How weird is that?

Is there a reason for all this?

It was just something I wanted to vent about, and if it offended somebody, I am very sorry in advance.

[jv92]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 12:59pm

It was the first cast album. Ever. Leave it alone.

[BrodyFosse123]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 1:02pm

Um, like it was NOT the first cast album ever. Broadway has been releasing recordings since the 1920's.

Ever heard of a little one called THE DROWSY CHAPERONE which starred that era's famous "Oops" Girl?

Geez.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 1:05pm

Actually the original Follies is the biggest cast recording screw up ever.

[ljay889]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 1:05pm

^ Agreed.

[BrodyFosse123]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 1:06pm

As is the Original Broadway Cast Recording of DREAMGIRLS.

[Josh Freilich]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 1:08pm

Follies is another one.
The order is all wrong.

As jv92 states, OKLAHOMA was the first cast album ever. Because it was, there are a lot of screw-ups with the order.

[jv92]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 1:09pm

It was the first official OBCR where the orchestra, chorus and leads of a musical came into a studio and recorded the songs of the show. Of course, Merman made a record of the hit songs from Anything Goes and Todd Duncan did an album of Porgy and Bess' hits, but not on the scale of Oklahoma!'s OBCR.
And seriously, the first OBCR that really captured the show was South Pacific. Most of the ones before it put songs out of order, screwed with tempi and orchestration and hired new singers to perform roles that the producer thought needed to be recast due to the stage actor's inability to sing well (Howard DaSylva does not perform Lonely Room on the Oklahoma! album, for example). Cast album producing reached its zeineth, however, in 1956 with the splendid Candide, Most Happy Fella and My Fair Lady albums all from the master- Goddard Lieberson. It was smooth sailing from then on.

[jv92]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 1:11pm

And despite the brilliant performances of the OBC, the Follies cast album is AWFUL! I don't care as much about Dreamgirls because I don't love the show, but I suppose it could have been a much better album as well.

[ljay889]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 1:12pm

Well the order is right for FOLLIES. It's just terribly truncated. Extremely truncated. Missing songs, missing dance breaks, missing verses.

[jv92]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 1:14pm

Yes, it is in order, but it's missing a lot. The Carousel album is similar, although it is understandable that that album is so truncated since cast albums were so primative then (Soliloquy is there fully, though :) !). But in 1971? Please.

[ljay889]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 1:20pm

I'm shocked they even recorded some of Weissman's opening speech. Yet they couldn't record the full opening of the prologue. ugh. It sounds so weird only hitting like one of the chords.

[Gothampc]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 1:31pm

Obviously some of you have never heard the "Rags" cast recording where on the Cherry Street Cafe number they hit a few odd chords and fade the song out.

[stagescreen]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 1:43pm

Josh,

Cast Recordings from the 1940's often don't resemble the actual show on stage. jv92 is right in that they often recast singers, and it wasn't until around the time of South Pacific and the glorious cast recordings from the 1950's that shows were recorded mostly intact (Columbia Records introduced the modern LP record in 194. Sometimes orchestrations were different, with the record labels wanting a more "popular" sound that might chart better on the Hit Parade/Top 40, and because these shows were originally released on 78 RPM records, in which each record side held only one or two songs, the format also made it necessary to re-arrange/truncate songs to fit onto the extremely short album side.

The original 78 RPM recording of Carousel had the Soliloquy on TWO sides. The side ended just before the "My Little Girl" section and continued on the next side!

Unfortunately, OKLAHOMA! is left with a rather disappointing original cast recording. But thankfully, there are about 30 other recordings of this show, including the Original London Cast, which solves some of the issues you have about the songs being different.


I also concur with ljay, Brody, and Phyllis about the OBC of FOLLIES. It's really a dismal recording, and as much as I adore FOLLIES and particularly the legends that have spawned about the original production, it pains me to listen to the original cast.

[stagescreen]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 1:45pm

Gothampc,

I've always wondered about that bizarre track on the RAGS cast recording. How did that number sound in the theater? And why does it sound so weird on the recording?!

[temms]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 1:45pm

Remember, too, that the OCR of "Oklahoma!" was released on 78 RPM discs, as long-playing vinyl was still a few years off. They had a maximum playing time of 3-5 minutes per side. A cast album would be a box set with several of those big heavy discs.

So the strict timing requirement meant the show had to be chopped down into four minute chunks, leading to shortened intros, cuts, faster tempos, songs being presented out of order to double up short songs on one side of vinyl, etc.

No one at that point in time was conceiving of "cast albums" as documents of productions. There were hardly even any full-length opera recordings at that point, for the same reason. (The first, sort of a novelty, was "Ernani" and was released in 1903 on forty single-sided discs.) LPs weren't developed until the late '40s.

There's also the issue that, at the time, musicals were generally seen as throwaway entertainment, so I'm sure it never even crossed anyone's mind that you'd want to preserve the song order or the show arrangement; the only thing was to make a good record. "Preservation" was something people weren't really thinking about just yet, at least in terms of musicals.

[Gothampc]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 2:01pm

"I've always wondered about that bizarre track on the RAGS cast recording. How did that number sound in the theater? And why does it sound so weird on the recording?!"

Unfortunately, I didn't get to see Rags because it closed so quickly. I'm not sure what happened with this song.

[stagescreen]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 2:13pm

Oh, Stephen Schwartz, if you're lurking, could you please enlighten us?

[jimmycurry01]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 2:59pm

Oklahoma IS the first cast recording ever, and it was a new thing at the time and I say leave it alone. For those that disagree about it being the first cast recording of a broadway musical, take a theatre history class. Show recorded before were recorded on a song by song basis and not complied onto one album until after Oklahoma was recorded.

[BobbyBubby]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 3:24pm

With so many other Oklahoma! recordings, the OBC doesn't bother me.

Can we ban performers from singing "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" on their solo discs?

And to repeat, Oklahoma! was not the first cast recording ever. Not even close.

[ray-andallthatjazz86]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 3:29pm

The FOLLIES OBCR is indeed a travesty, what makes the whole affair so sad is that there was someone willing to bring all the actors into the recording studio, have them do the WHOLE score, and release the cast recording in a double disc. So for us to have merely a ghost or shadow of what could have been (how appropriate for the show) is just sad. Oh well.

[philcrosby]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 3:34pm

With the exception of the Jay Masterworks editions, there are virtually no "note-complete" or "note-accurate" OCRs out there. All have made concessions to the recording technology and the listening tastes of the time.

Even the fabled Goddard Lieberson recordings -- he often made cuts, changed tempos, and almost never included dialogue. He believed that listening to a recording was an entirely different sensory experience than experiencing a show live, and the recording should "reinterpret" that material in the best possible and most advantageous way.

The idea of a cast album which "documents" a production is a fairly recent invention, and only began to occur after Broadway lost its position as the source of most American popular song.

[jv92]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 3:35pm

We can blame Capitol all we want for the Follies album, but it's really Hal Prince's fault. Columbia was willing to do it on two discs. Goddard Lieberson, I believe, expressed an interest in it. However, Hal was not pleased with the way Columbia marketed the Company album and refused to let them record Follies.

[PUPPETMAN]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 4:57pm

In the musical history books, OKLAHOMA is listed as the first OCR no matter what some posters think. Were you there?

[BobbyBubby]

Posted: 2/19/08 at 5:18pm

Excuse me, but MANY shows got a cast recording prior to Oklahoma!, so these so-called "Musical History Books" are wrong. Show Boat had several recordings prior to Oklahoma!, Something for the Boys was recorded, Anything Goes was recorded, etc, etc, etc.