Broadway's Record Year

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLES: A STACK OF ORIGINAL CAST ALBUMS

COMPOSERS: SOME PROMISING FELLOWS NAMED GERSHWIN, LOESSER, MORTON

THE BOTTOM LINE: Can't get to those smash "new" musicals? No sweat -- they sound even better on record.

THE STAGESTRUCK KID, CRAZY for musicals, says, "When I was little, I used to watch all the big shows. The music! And the lights!" And her chipper beau effuses, "Just imagine this theater -- giving it a whole new life!" The sentiments belong to Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in some Edenic MGM % musical. But the words come from Crazy for You, the 1992 Tony winner for Best Musical.

The lights and the music are back on Broadway. A rash of hit musicals has given the Fabulous Invalid a whole new life. And in passing, the so-called renaissance of the American musical has spurred a genuine rebirth of that endangered species, the original cast album.

All the Broadway biggies are here: Crazy for You, Guys and Dolls, Jelly's Last Jam, The Most Happy Fella, Five Guys Named Moe, The Will Rogers Follies, The Secret Garden, Once on This Island, Grand Hotel and, in an earlier gestation, Falsettos. The ardent browser will find off-Broadway hits (Song of Singapore) and fizzles (Stephen Sondheim's Assassins) and even the season's notorious flops on Broadway (Nick & Nora) and off (Eating Raoul). If Moose Murders had been a musical, someone would now be recording it.

Why now? For the same reason country music has found an urban constituency: baby boomers are fleeing the assault of rap and hard rock. "When we were kids, our parents tried to force show music down our throats, and we didn't like it," says RCA Victor's man-about-Broadway, Bill Rosenfield. "Now we discover that we like these tunes. We want music that is comfortable."

Back in the more comfortable '50s, show music was popular music. In 1957 the original-cast recording of My Fair Lady was America's top-selling album. In 1958 The Music Man was No. 1; in 1960, The Sound of Music; in 1961, Camelot. Even in 1964, the year the Beatles cued kids to buy their pop in long form as well as in singles, Hello, Dolly! was the No. 3 seller. Hair topped all 1969 LPs; the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice Jesus Christ Superstar (technically not an original cast album, since the piece was recorded before it was staged) was No. 1 in 1971. And that was it. No show, including the later Lloyd Webber perennials, has since come near the top of the U.S. pops.

The reasons for this eclipse are simple and depressing. The sweet democracy of Top 40 radio devolved into a dictatorship of rock; songs like Tomorrow (from Annie) and Memory (from Cats) became standards without having been hits. And Broadway producers, turning a tin ear to the lessons of Hair and Superstar, did little to lure younger songwriters -- Randy Newman, Carole King, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Jim Steinman -- who might have brought the American musical into the age of rock. Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered, given the stodgily conservative tastes of Broadway's geezer audience. The Rocky Horror Show lasted less than a month in 1975. And Chess was a 1988 Broadway flop, though Rice and the composers from the pop group ABBA wrote a spectacularly varied and vigorous score that included One Night in Bangkok, the last show tune to make the Top 10.

Today's most popular shows take no such chances. Perhaps there is something right about a season in which Frank Loesser, dead since 1969, has as many shows on Broadway as Lloyd Webber. But there is also something very wrong. Not one recent main-stem show has been set in today's America or taken inspiration from the best of today's pop music. Broadway is now the museum of the American musical. Guys and Dolls, for all its snazz and lilt, is a faithful revival of Loesser's 1950 hit. Crazy for You is a jolly update of Gershwin's 1930 Girl Crazy. Jelly's Last Jam is a spiked showcase for the rags and blues of Jelly Roll Morton, who flourished in Gershwin's day. Tourists go to these "new" shows with the same nostalgic avidity they bring to a "new" Matisse exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Which doesn't mean they aren't worth attending, in person or on record. A Broadway album is, after all, a portable archive of good music. And original- cast producers are ingenious curators. "On the Crazy for You album you're hearing a bed of strings that is three to four times as large as in the show," says Thomas Z. Shepard, an independent producer with more than 60 original cast albums to his credit. Shepard's tour de force is the 7 1/2-min. I Got Rhythm, a furious fugue of corrugated tin, metal plates, pickaxes and flying feet. The song took Shepard a whole day to record -- as long as many entire Broadway albums. Three times he overdubbed the taps of seven dancers, he says, "so it would sound like 21 taps. It gave me a crispness and balance I never could have gotten if I'd told the whole cast, 'Just do what you do on stage.'

The best albums preserve not just a show's score but the meaning and joy of the theatrical moment. Sitting at home, you can't see the deliriously gaudy haberdashery that bedecks the Guys and Dolls touts, or the wonderfully witty scene changes in Crazy for You, or the ghosts of parents past that float through The Secret Garden. You may miss the sulfurous sensuality Tonya Pinkins radiates in Jelly's Last Jam, but you'll get the achy-breaky pain in her reading of Play the Music for Me. On the Secret Garden album, Daisy Eagan, the show's child star, is forever 11, frozen in innocence. Faith Prince's comic chirps and sniffles come across magnificently on Guys and Dolls, as does the schlemiel's charisma of Nathan Lane in his Sue Me duet with Prince.

So suit up and listen to albums that turn the Broadway museum into a gallery of living masters. Every night, for a fifth of the price of a theater ticket, you can hear the music. And feel the light.