CDs: Attend the Tale
SWEENEY TODD Nonesuch
The new Nonesuch recording of Sweeney Todd is the third double-disc New York cast album of the Stephen Sondheim masterwork. RCA Victor's recording of the 1979 Broadway original, with the unbeatable star team of Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou, is a terrific album. A 2000 New York Philharmonic concert version produced a solid live recording co-starring Patti LuPone and George Hearn, the latter Cariou's strong Broadway replacement as well as the national tour Sweeney.
But of course, that's to overlook two other complete or near-complete Sweeney recordings, both available not on CD but instead on DVD. The first documents the original Hal Prince staging in its touring version, and preserves Lansbury and Hearn in peak form. The other, taped twenty years later, preserves the LuPone-Hearn concert version in its San Francisco incarnation.
So Nonesuch's new Broadway cast album can actually be considered the fifth English-language Sweeney Todd recording, as well as LuPone's third recording of Mrs. Lovett. Although the two CDs of the new Nonesuch set would easily have allowed room to record the entire performance, that has not been done. The recording runs about ninety minutes, and is in fact the shortest of the three English-language CD versions. There's a two-disc, 1995 Barcelona cast recording, sung in Catalan.
As the piece contains so much music and often shifts back and forth between music and spoken word, no recording of Sweeney Todd can be without dialogue. The new Broadway cast recording includes a substantial amount, especially where it's integral to the musical numbers.
In addition to eliminating many of the applause "buttons" at the end of songs, the current Sweeney revival features cuts in both book and score. But considering that the new Nonesuch recording is a two-CD set, it's surprising that it omits portions of the music actually featured in the production. Some of Pirelli's music has been cut. Absent on the recording are the wigmaker duet for Anthony and Todd; the letter scene; and "Parlor Songs." Most surprisingly, the climactic "City on Fire" sequence is absent on disc.
It's probably inevitable that director John Doyle's most celebrated innovation --having the ten actors of the company double as the orchestra-- is less effective on disc than in the theatre. Because we can't, of course, see the actors playing their instruments on an audio-only recording, it's possible to forget that it's the performers who are the musicians, even though the recording adheres strictly to that policy and does not add any additional players. While the intricacy of the instrumentation is, in the theatre, a marvel, it's bound to be less impressive on disc.
Which is not to say that Sarah Travis' new orchestrations aren't admirable, especially when one considers the requirements of the staging. They're satisfying even to one familiar with the original, grandiose Jonathan Tunick orchestrations. Indeed, Travis' work serves to demonstrate how well Sondheim's score can come across even in a reduced instrumentation.
In the title role, Michael Cerveris offers a grim, intense, single-minded but ultimately touching portrayal. Vocally, he lacks the sensuousness of Cariou and Hearn. But the role's range gives Cerveris no problems, and his is an interesting alternate take on the part. Compared to her first two recordings of Mrs. Lovett, LuPone is somewht vocally restrained here, with less grand-scale belting to be heard. But if some portions were more vocally exciting on her previous recorded Lovetts, the singing remains impressive. LuPone's more subtle approach here works well, and, in her first Broadway musical appearance in almost two decades, she makes a grandly cunning Lovett.
All of the other cast members come across well on disc, with particularly fine work from Mark Jacoby as the Judge and Manoel Felciano as Tobias. The accompanying booklet includes three essays. Jeremy Sams considers categorizing Sweeney Todd as revenge tragedy, melodrama, psychological thriller, and operatic masterpiece on a par with Wozzeck, Porgy and Bess, and Peter Grimes. In his essay, director Doyle emphasizes the need for the audience at this production to use its imagination. And Travis explains the complex jigsaw puzzle of orchestrating for this particular staging, as well as the problem of having to re-orchestrate between the Watermill/London version and the Broadway production.
This production of Sweeney Todd is more fascinating to watch than to listen to. But even with those troubling cuts, this is a worthy recording. It doesn't replace the other four Sweeney recordings, all featuring the original orchestrations, and it can't quite convey what makes this production so gripping in the theatre. But on its own terms, the new album works.
ANNIE GET YOUR GUN Bayview
In 1998, LuPone played Annie Oakley in the Irving Berlin classic Annie Get Your Gun in a one-night-only concert version at Lincoln Center Theater. LuPone never got to record the full role, but there is no shortage of Annie Get Your Gun recordings. Ethel Merman, the original 1946 Annie, recorded the score three times. There are cast albums with Mary Martin, Bernadette Peters, and Suzi Quatro. And there are studio versions starring Doris Day, Kim Criswell, and Judy Kaye.
Bayview's new, fifty-minute Annie Get Your Gun CD is an international affair, featuring the only existing recordings of the first London 1947, Paris 1950, and Australian 1947 productions. The London production had an even longer run than the smash Broadway version, playing 1,304 performances at the vast Coliseum. Starring in the title role throughout those three years in the West End was Dolores Gray, the American singer-actress who had the biggest personal success of her stage career in the London Annie. Gray was still at the beginning of a theatrical career that had already included Seven Lively Arts, Are You With It?, and the road-closer Sweet Bye and Bye.
Gray's leading man in the London Annie Get Your Gun was the high-quality baritone Bill Johnson, who had already played opposite Merman in Broadway's Cole Porter show Something for the Boys. Johnson would return to London to star in Kiss Me Kate, then take the lead in Broadway's Pipe Dream, prior to his untimely death in 1957.
The London cast recordings of Annie Get Your Gun were four 78 sides, featuring twelve songs heavily trimmed to fit into medleys, the whole recording running about eighteen minutes. These London Annie recordings have already been on LP and CD several times, most recently as part of Sepia's Irving Berlin in London CD.
Gray had not yet come into her full vocal bloom in 1947. There is a marked difference in excitement between Gray's recorded performances in Annie and those to be heard on the original cast album of Two on the Aisle 1951, the Broadway revue Gray starred in upon her return to the U.S. Still, Gray sounds very good here, as you would expect of one of Broadway's best-ever vocalists. And Johnson is superb.
From the Paris production, which was entitled Annie du Far-West, we get the only four numbers recorded, all solo performances by leading lady Lily Fayol. She does "Doin' What Comes Natur'lly," "You Can't Get a Man with a Gun," "Moonshine Lullaby," and "I Got the Sun in the Morning," all, of course, sung in French. Fayol, while very Gallic, is nonetheless a delightful, vivacious Annie.
No commercial recordings were made of the highly successful Australian production, starring American-born Evie Hayes opposite Webb Tilton. The six tracks that close Bayview's CD are actually live recordings, made during a performance at Her Majesty's Theatre in Melbourne in 1948 and discovered after Hayes' death in 1988. Unfortunately, we don't get to hear Hayes in "Doin' What Comes Natur'lly," "You Can't Get a Man with a Gun," or "Moonshine Lullaby." But Annie's other big numbers are here.
And Hayes is yet another fine, big-voiced Annie, notable for her smooth tone and winning personality. The audience is obviously eating her up, and it's nice to be introduced to this popular Australian entertainer. Tilton sounds good, too.
