Obscure musicals

My friend criticized me the other night for not being familiar with more obscure musicals. So now I'm trying to expand my knowledge. Which ones would you guys recommend I look at?

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Or you could watch this, a video about a song whose lyrics consist almost entirely of obscure musical titles.
Monkeys and Playbills

For as low as $0.98 you can own the original cast album on CD of a true train wreck, the Peter Allen vehicle from the same season as Carrie, Legs Diamond. Not a boring listen.
Legs Diamond on RCA

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Haha! I've thought about buying many copies of it off eBay and Amazon and covering a wall with them as an installation piece.

I'm serious, though, I'm never bored listening to that score.

Plus, I read in another thread there's a Broadway revival heading our way with Hugh Jackman in the lead. =)

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Agreed. Legs also has some of the most amusingly incompetent lyrics ever written for the Broadway stage. The orchestrations are lovely and have professional polish with an 80s flair. "Speakeasy" is among my favorite guilty pleasure songs as is the dreadful "I Was Made for Champagne"--a lyric followed by "but don't get me wrong I'm still glad I came."

I was fascinated by Legs after reading Ken Mandelbaum's article "The Final No-Fooling Last Word On Legs Diamond," in Theater Week. Of course his piece in Not Since Carrie fired my interest as well.

I read those in 1996 or so and had no idea there had been a cast album, as Ken makes no mention, and that is was LONG out of print. I assume it was produced with Peter Allen money because I can't imagine how else it exists being one of the biggest embarrassments of 80s Broadway. Well, consider my shock when I came across a copy at a closeout CD sale around that same time.

Arkiv has made it available on-demand, but it can be found for less than a dollar. So odd.

The artwork is still among my favorites. Ooh, and Julie Wilson is always fun.

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Blackbeard. Obscure and surprisingly good. Don't get the highlights CD. Get the double disc one.

http://www.spiremusic.net/servlet/Detail?no=51

I don't know how obscure you'd consider it, but you simply MUST get Floyd Collins! It doesn't feel obscure to me, because HELLO, it's an Adam Guettel show, why WOULDN'T I know it? But I do often get met with Looks when I bring it up, so it probably counts. Even though half of those Looks are probably just responses to the way I tell it: "it's a brilliant musical! It's about a man who gets stuck in a cave and [SPOILER]! 8D".

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Updated On: 9/18/10 at 06:30 PM

Personally I love GUYS NAKED FROM THE WAIST DOWN and HELLO AGAIN. I had a pretentious teacher in school who claimed to know every musical ever written. Well he was less than pleased when I showed him up by bringing in songs from these two musicals for class. He made my life hell the rest of the semester.

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Did your friend truly mean "obscure" musicals or just that you only seem familiar with current blockbusters?

Where do you live? If you're able to go, I'd strongly recommend trying to see at least one show Encores does. They're not necessarily obscure, but they're very often shows you might never see produced again. I sometimes have a hard time listening to full albums of shows I've never seen, which is why I recommend the Encores series as an introduction to shows.

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I too like The Good Companions. Judi Dench and Christopher Gable are delightful. DRG reissued many interesting obscure cast recordings from the West End, my favorite perhaps being Sandy Wilson's Valmouth.

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I'm equating "obscure" with "flop" since most hits are fairly well known.

Here are a bunch (I'm limiting this list to shows that had legit production, as opposed to merely concept albums):

Welcome To The Club
Prince Of Central Park
Doonesbury
A Change In The Heir
To Whom It May Concern
Metro
Chu-Chem
Mail
Got Tu Go Disco
Dude
Romance In Hard Times
Bring Back Birie
Tom Sawyer
Roza
Cantebury Tales
Honky Tonk Nights
I And Albert
Grind
Teddy And Alice
Legs Diamond
La Strada
Flowers For Algernon
Goodtime Charley
Hannah...1939
I Can't Keep Running In Place
The Chosen
Now Is The Time For All Good Men
One Night Stand
Bar Mitzvah Boy
Rex
Oh! Brother
Blood Red Roses
The Goodbye Girl


There are of course dozens more, but that's all I can think of off the top of head.

And I also LOVE the recording of 3 Guys Naked From The Waist Down. Never got into Goblin Market, but I can appreciate the artistry of it.

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Depends who you're talking to, but I would say so. Are Take Me Along, New Girl In Town, Carnival and Henry, Sweet Henry obscure? To Bob Merrill fans, probably not but most people are only familiar with Carnival.

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