Soundtracks

Following my trip to see Guys and Dolls on Friday, I decided I needed a new copy of the soundtrack. There weren’t any on sale at the theatre, as this production hasn’t been recorded.

Now, let me rewind that one for a moment. I said a ‘new’ copy, for I do have a soundtrack album, from the National Theatre production, (which was, gulp, 25 years ago), but it’s on vinyl not cd, so I did a bit of browsing at the weekend and found the same album on Amazon for £4.97 (probably cheaper than the LP was when I bought it!) and it arrived this morning.

Now I’ve just read here that the cast album for the new musical The Drowsy Chaperone is being produced on vinyl, but with a cd copy included, but the article then goes on to say that cast albums are an endangered species, as the returns on them are so low. It’s not like film, where you have a global audience, and less and less of them are being recorded. If you think about it, it tends now to be only ‘first run’ musicals that get recorded. Those that cross over from New York rarely are, though at one time it would be pretty standard to find an original London cast album. It seems a great shame that there are less of these, as they are a part of theatre history. You can never truly capture a theatre production either on film or on record, as the experience isn't fixed, and changes from performance to performance, but these recordings capture one element of a show, and should, I think, be celebrated in all their sometimes bizarre glory*.

If I think about my (vinyl) record collection, there’s an awful lot of musical theatre soundtracks in there, some, like Guys and Dolls, from productions that I never even saw, but also many from shows that I did, Me and My Girl, Chess, Joseph, Evita, Les Mis. They probably say as much about me as my ‘pop’ collection, as my theatre going was shaped by musicals from the age of 10 onwards.

*For an example of this you should try listening to the album from the RSC's Wizard of Oz - I'm not sure who ever told the woman playing Glinda she could sing, but they were wrong. Yet I'd forgotten this until I heard it again the other week