NEW YORK, NY.- The best theatrical songwriting barely requires a theater. Which is a good thing when so many shows close so quickly.
Of the 16 musicals that opened on Broadway in 2023, only four are still running. Thats live theater, perpetually dying.
Yet not entirely. Like loved ones who leave behind scrapbooks or tchotchkes, many shows leave souvenirs of themselves in the form of cast albums. And sometimes, shorn of annoying context, theyre better than what was once seen onstage.
Below, my highly subjective ranking of the nine 2023 musicals that released cast albums. (One more Gutenberg! The Musical! is expected this spring.) And because no year is complete without a bunch of Stephen Sondheim marginalia, Ive added a few bonus tracks, including a snippet of a surprise, in his honor.
All the recordings are good, and some are sublime, as you can let your ears decide. But close your eyes if possible. Let the theater be inside you.
1. Sweeney Todd
The glorious score is largely unchanged. The orchestrations are only slightly tweaked. So whats the added value of this nth recording of the Sondheim masterwork? As you might expect from a cast headed by Josh Groban as the vengeful barber, the answer is the beautiful singing. Grobans slight stiffness and somewhat meek interpretation, which worked against the roles terror in the huge stage production, are utterly absent on the album, turning numbers like Sweeneys Epiphany into murderous arias as big as any in opera. Under Alex Lacamoires musical supervision, the performances not just Grobans but the ensembles go for the throat, over and over.
2. Parade
The original cast album of this 1998 musical is rightly a classic. Can a fairly faithful revival recording be one too? Yes, especially when the story of the 1915 Leo Frank lynching features principals giving similarly excellent but notably different performances. As Frank, Ben Platt is a vibrating wreck of inchoate anger in Jason Robert Browns tight-lipped songs. Its left to Micaela Diamond, as his wife, Lucille, to express what he cant, as she does with perfectly contained disdain in You Dont Know This Man, sung to a reporter looking for dirt. Carolee Carmellos stentorian version from 1998 is still definitive, but it turns out that more than one version can be.
3. Merrily We Roll Along
This difficult musical from 1981, with its reversed timeline, tangled love triangles and amazing but tricky Sondheim score, has proved especially confusing when recorded. But now that Maria Friedman, in her lucid Broadway production, has found a way to make it pay off onstage, the cast album does, too. You can hear that best in Not a Day Goes By, a song that disguises its complicated dramaturgy with pure beauty. First sung by a wife (Katie Rose Clarke) to the husband (Jonathan Groff) shes divorcing, it is reprised, years earlier, by the couple at their wedding. But who is that third voice? Shes the heartbroken woman (Lindsay Mendez) left out of the equation. Sometimes the drama isnt in how a song is sung but by whom.
4. New York, New York
Of course you can listen to a great rendition of the title tune from this magpie musical based on the 1977 movie. Or you can enjoy some of the other knockout numbers Lets Hear It for Me, But the World Goes Round that the songwriters, John Kander and Fred Ebb, called screamers. (All three are solidly sung by Anna Uzele.) But if you want to hear the songs that Kander likes best, youll go for those that whisper, including a new one, with lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, thats actually set in the Whispering Gallery at Grand Central Station. Sung in the show by Colton Ryan, its called Can You Hear Me? Better yet, thanks to the kind of bonus only a cast album allows, listen to the demo, with Miranda singing and Kander at the keyboard.
5. Harmony
With more than 30 studio albums, its no surprise that Barry Manilow has made another. But this one, written with lyricist Bruce Sussman for their musical about a six-man German singing group in the 1920s, is different. To start with, its not just a collection of songs but also a fully theatrical score, filtering elements of jazz, operetta, barbershop and cabaret through Manilows prodigious pop sensibility. The numbers especially the gorgeous And What Do You See?, sung by Sierra Boggess as a Jewish mans gentile fiancée are tightly tied to the story, their melodies and harmonies often seeming to twist and writhe to accommodate the characters hope and horror.
6. Camelot
The 1960 Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical about the magical land where the rain may never fall till after sundown has a great cast album already. And the forced and formal 2023 Lincoln Center Theater revival did not seem likely to produce a version that eclipsed it. But the recording is lovely, highlighting the pure sonic beauty of the 30-piece orchestra and the vocal prowess of its Guenevere (Phillipa Soo) and Lancelot (Jordan Donica). Especially in Donicas trio of showpieces Cest Moi near the beginning, I Loved You Once in Silence near the end and, in between, a ravishing If Ever I Would Leave You he demonstrates that a great voice can be a great actor.
7. How to Dance in Ohio
No one goes to musicals for their morals, and shows that are too assertively instructive can lack narrative interest. That was sometimes the case with this one, in which autistic performers played autistic characters working on their life skills at a Columbus mental health center. Though a wonderful breakthrough in many ways, the show too often hewed to familiar storytelling tropes yet the cast album, stripped of story, shines. The songs, by Jacob Yandura (music) and Rebekah Greer Melocik (lyrics), often take unconventional approaches, as is evident right from the opening number, Today Is. Its busy, anxious but upbeat accompaniment, reminiscent of piano exercises, underlines the busy, anxious but upbeat lives of the characters preparing for their days challenges and opportunities.
8. Shucked
A show needs a showstopper. Or at least an audience does. But because I didnt expect to find one in this musical built on a steady stream of middling corn puns, I was blown away when it suddenly appeared, unconventionally, in the middle of Act 1. Until then, the songs, by the country music team of Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, were genial and apt. But then Alex Newell, as Lulu, a whiskey distiller with a side hustle in sass, stepped forward with a feminist barnburner declaring that she, her business and her body were Independently Owned. The fog of geniality instantly dispersed in a hail of clever rhymes, real show music and a divas bountiful belt.
9. Back to the Future
When the star of your show is a car even if its a great one you may run into trouble with the songs. Thats how I felt about the Broadway version of the 1985 movie: It didnt need to be a musical at all. But if its score, by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, couldnt do much for the DeLorean DMC or even the human leads, Doc Brown and Marty McFly the cast album demonstrates surprising skill in characterizing the secondary characters. My Myopia, sung by Martys father as a teenager, gives us creepy insight into his later failures. And Gotta Start Somewhere, a big gospel rave, fills in the outlines of an otherwise barely-there character with ambition at the same time letting the irrepressible Jelani Remy, who sings it, realize his.
Plus: Never Enough Sondheim
Broadway has no exclusive on new Sondheim albums. From London comes a live two-disc recording of Old Friends, a concert celebration featuring greatest hits sung by Bernadette Peters, Judi Dench, Michael Ball and other familiars. Its a rich meal, and with 41 courses, a huge one, heavy on the honey.
Sondheim in the City, Melissa Erricos tribute to Sondheims urbanity, feels like a New York house tour of thrill and heartbreak. In songs like the jangly Another Hundred People, the exuberant What More Do I Need? and the dry, disappointed It Wasnt Meant to Happen, Errico, one of Sondheims deepest-hearted yet lightest-touch interpreters, evokes both the city and cabaret style at its best. (Shell be singing the program at 54 Below in May.) On the pristine recording you can almost hear the martini glasses clink and shatter.
And if you didnt get to see Sondheims final musical, Here We Are, off-Broadway at the Shed, or if you did and want to hold onto it, as I do, the cast album is scheduled to be released in May. The producers promise a full representation of the show and score, which means that the songs (of which I must admit theres not an awful lot) will be interspersed with playwright David Ives dialogue scenes, some of which are songlike in themselves. The samples Ive heard an instrumental underscoring and a snippet of The Bishops Song, performed by David Hyde Pierce are enough to leave me (like the shows characters) hungry for more.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.