Cast recording

A cast recording is a recording of a stage musical that is intended to document the songs as they were performed in the show and experienced by the audience. An original cast recording or OCR, as the name implies, features the voices of the show's original cast. A cast recording featuring the first cast to perform a musical in a particular venue is known, for example, as an "original Broadway cast recording" (OBCR) or an "original London cast recording" (OLCR).

Cast recordings are (usually) studio recordings rather than live recordings. The recorded song lyrics and orchestrations are nonetheless identical (or very similar) to those of the songs as performed in the theatre. Like any studio performance, the recording is an idealized rendering, more glossily perfect than any live performance could be, and without audible audience reaction. Nevertheless, the listener who has attended the live show expects it to be an accurate souvenir of the experience.

History

The British were the first to create cast recordings, and they were also the first to create original London cast recordings of shows that had already opened on Broadway, but had not been recorded with their original Broadway cast. This led to the odd situation of having, for example, a 1928 recording of the London cast of ''Show Boat'', but no recording with the actual 1927 Broadway cast, and a recording of the London cast of Sigmund Romberg's ''The Desert Song'', but not of the 1926 Broadway cast - even though both of these shows are Broadway musicals, rather than British ones.

Prior to the development of original cast recordings, there had been recordings of songs from musicals, and collections of several such songs, and recordings of songs performed by cast members; but they were recordings of ''songs'', that is, they were recorded as stand-alone show tunes rather than representations of a (more or less) complete musical.

The first American original cast recording as we know it was an early experimental LP of program transcriptions of selections from ''The Band Wagon'', a 1931 revue starring Fred and Adele Astaire. It was not widely released.

The following year, Jack Kapp produced an album of songs from ''Show Boat'' timed to the 1932 Ziegfeld revival. This album featured Helen Morgan and Paul Robeson doing their songs from the show but used studio cast singers for the leads.

As the 1930s progressed, Liberty Music Shop in New York City made mini albums of songs from the Ethel Merman musical comedies ''Red Hot and Blue'' and '' Stars in Your Eyes''. These were more like personality recordings, since the arrangements were not the ones heard in the theatre.

The first complete so-called original cast album was Marc Blitzstein's 1938 album of songs from ''The Cradle Will Rock'' although these were recorded with just piano accompaniment and not the show's orchestra. In 1984, the original recordings from '' Very Warm for May'' (1939) were discovered and issued on an LP. However, these recordings were not made with the original orchestrations.

RCA Victor had made an album of the key songs from ''Porgy and Bess'' using the theatre orchestra but featuring Met opera singers Lawrence Tibbett and Helen Jepson singing the songs. Decca riposted with another album of the same highlights sung by the actual stars of the original production, although recorded five years after the premiere. When a revival was staged in 1942, Decca issued a second album of some of the secondary songs from the opera by the revival cast and later combined these two albums onto one LP and called it the "original cast recording". Decca also issued an album of songs from the all-soldier revue ''This Is the Army'' by Irving Berlin.

Finally in 1943, came Decca's recording of ''Oklahoma!''. It not only featured the original cast, but the show's original chorus, all accompanied by the same orchestra heard in the show, playing the music in the original Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations and conducted by the show's original conductor, Jay Blackton. The show was the biggest hit Broadway had experienced up until that time and people who could not get tickets bought the album. It would eventually sell over 1 million copies as a set of 78-rpm records, and millions more on LP and Compact Discs.

Decca soon began recording every hit musical that came along including ''One Touch of Venus'', '' Carmen Jones'', ''Carousel'', and '' Annie Get Your Gun''. Soon, all the other record companies were bidding for the rights to record Broadway shows with their original casts.

Capitol recorded ''St. Louis Woman'' in 1946, and RCA Victor recorded ''Brigadoon'' in 1947. Although Decca abandoned the cast album field in the mid-1950s, Capitol and Victor actively bid for recording rights. Sometimes problems arose as when RCA Victor signed on to record the 1950 musical ''Call Me Madam'' even though the show's star, Ethel Merman was then under exclusive contract to Decca Records. This resulted in two albums of the score being released: Merman with a studio cast on her label, while the rest of the Broadway cast made an album for RCA Victor with Dinah Shore singing the Merman role.

The label that would dominate the field until the late 1970s, however, was Columbia. They began by issuing an album of the 1946 revival of ''Show Boat'' followed by the original Broadway cast of '' Finian's Rainbow'' in 194