CDs: A Star Is Born

Earlier this year, PS Classics Inc. embarked on an unusual venture, the commercial release of demo recordings sung and played by Stephen Sondheim and taken from the composer-lyricist's private collection. The first volume of the label's Sondheim Sings series covered material from ...Forum to A Little Night Music. While there were a few rarities and a number of early versions of well-known songs, much of the material on Volume I was familiar.

On the newly-released Volume II, there are five familiar numbers. "I Remember That" and "A Moment with You" were heard in Saturday Night. Marry Me a Little included "Pour le Sport" and "The Girls of Sumer." And Putting It Together featured the 1960 song "Do I Hear a Waltz?," not to be confused with the title song of the 1965 Broadway musical of the same title.

But for the most part, Volume II consists of unknown material, from the early years of Sondheim's career, from 1946 to 1960. Five of the tracks are taken from acetates recorded on home equipment in the '40s. The others are from demo recordings made on tape beginning in the '50s.

The earliest items here are three piano-only fragments of tunes from By George 1946, the sixteen-year-old Sondheim's musical written in honor of the George School, a private high school. Sondheim's Williams College show Phiney's Rainbow 1948 is represented by "How Do I Know?," an instrumental of a pretty waltz, heard here in the first public broadcast of a Sondheim song. Then there are two songs for the hero of an unproduced musical called Climb High 1952.

The eight-minute "A Star Is Born" 1954 is a list-song Hollywood spoof, written and recorded in honor of the birth of a friend's daughter. The litany of show-biz names includes two future Sondheim stars, Ethel Merman and Alexis Smith. "New York Song" 1953 is an attractive piece for a potential musical version of the film The Clock that was never written. "You're Only as Old as You Look" 1955 is a thirty-ninth birthday tribute for a friend who was, at the time, the husband of Mary Rodgers.

There are three fine songs from The Last Resorts 1956, an unfinished project to be produced by Hal Prince and with a book by Jean Kerr. From the same year is "The Girls of Summer," written to promote N. Richard Nash The Rainmaker, Wildcat's play of the same title, for which Sondheim created incidental music. And there are two items from 1960, the title song "Do I Hear a Waltz?" from a TV musical written with Arthur Laurents that was never produced, and the lengthy and intriguing "Ten Years Old," written for but cut from a Fabulous Fifties TV special.

Helpful glossaries are provided in the booklet for the dozens of names and topical references with which "A Star Is Born" and "Ten Years Old" are crammed. As on the first Sondheim Sings CD, Sondheim is an enthusiastic, infectious performer of his work, and on this volume of early recordings, he's in somewhat better voice. With all of its unknown and distinctly superior material, Sondheim Sings: Volume II is an enticing disc.

BROADWAY UNPLUGGED Bayview

I'm not one to spend a lot of time decrying the incursion of amplification on Broadway. Generally speaking, most shows have more serious problems to worry about. Then too, over four decades, I've inevitably become accustomed to the miking of Broadway musicals and their performers.

Still, one does occasionally wonder what certain singers and songs would sound like without amplification, and here's the concert that answers that question, the first annual Broadway Unplugged. Like the Broadway by the Year series, this is a Town Hall event, created, written, and hosted by Scott Siegel. Bayview has preserved quite a few of the Year series, and a recent CD release now offers the initial Unplugged concert, in a live recording made on September 27, 2004.

Featuring songs from the '20s through the '90s, the concert offers a much larger cast than the Broadway by the Year series, as each artist at Unplugged performed only one, solo song. The accompaniment is a five-piece orchestra conducted by Ross Patterson.

The level of performing is high, with no notably weak links. I particularly enjoyed Nancy Anderson, in her operatic mode for "Romance" from The Desert Song; Cady Huffman, reminding us what a good singer she is with "Anything Goes"; Barbara Walsh, repeating one of her Falsetto numbers, "Holding to the Ground"; and Alice Ripley belting out "Serenity" from Triumph of Love, rather daringly appropriating a song that would seem to belong to Betty Buckley.

Stephanie Block The Boy from Oz, Wicked opens the proceedings with a formidable "Don't Rain on My Parade." Then there's Norm Lewis, splendid as always in "Make Them Hear You" from Ragtime; Euan Morton in a well-built "Why God Why?" from Miss Saigon; Darius DeHaas in a surprisingly effective "I Am Changing" from Dreamgirls; Christine Andreas, lovely in "My Ship"; and a lady who never needs amplification, Alix Korey, in an admirably dramatic "Everything's Coming Up Roses."

Because of its goal, this concert was perhaps more of an event to experience live, in a sizable theatre, than to listen to on CD. After all, the overhead mikes used to record a concert for disc see to it that everyone can be heard, so there's less suspense on a CD about how various performers will come across without their customary amplification.

But most of the performances are strong, and one gets enough of a sense of how these singers sound live and unmiked to make the recording interesting listening.