And do you like them? They don’t have to have ever appeared on Broadway or any other major venue.
I’ll lead with two:
Fair & Tender Ladies- a bluegrass musical based on the same namedLee Smith novel that premiered at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and has since travelled through other regional theaters. The CD is recorded by the lyricist/composer and therefore has men singing female roles and vice versa, but it’s overall excellent. It tells the story of Ivy Rowe, an Appalachian girl who ages from 13 to 73 in the course of the play, and manages to tug the heartstrings without romanticizing mountain life or the early 20th century. Hopefully this musical will one day receive the recognition it deserves.
King David by Tim Rice & Alan Menken- a concert based on their operetta, it tells the life of the biblical king (the original focus of Jesus Christ Superstar, incidentally) from the crowning of Saul til the death of Absalom. Very hit and miss piece that I wouldn’t recommend without qualification, but there are definitely some A+ moments (including Warm Spring Night when he first spies Bathsheba bathing and the chilling and exciting Exile pieces (in which the actor singing the role of [the ghost of] the Prophet Samuel sustains a note for I believe longer than any singer on any album I have (the audience bursts into applause mid-song).
What are some of your more obscure musical holdings?
Tim Rice & Stephen Oliver’s Blondel. Both English & Austrian versions. Oh to bring this to Broadway.
ABBACADBRA in English, French, Dutch & Portugal. The FIRST musical based on ABBA songs.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Likes of US (first show with Tim Rice), Cricket (obscure show with Tim Rice, having only one performance for the Queen) and Jeeves.
The original London cast recording of Blood Brothers with Barbara Dickson. I first saw clips of it on some show about new Broadway and London productions way back in the early 80s, and fell in love with Barbara’s voice. Later saw it on Broadway with Carole King (who was sick, and to compensate they bumped the reverb in her mic way up).
The original cast recording of King of Hearts. We did possibly the first production since it flopped on Broadway at the summer camp where I was working in the late 80s, and I thought it was a sweet little show.
A cassette of the London Moby Dick that a friend gave me.
Well, no, not the first, since I did the show in dinner theatre in the mid 1980s!
I was going to mention this one, and imagine my surprise in a thread about obscure musicals that’s only three posts long, someone mentions my most obscure first!
It IS a sweet show. I still have a videotape of our production, and I fondly recall the Madam singing, “Fetch me the dress with the rose on the shoulder - the one they adored in Tangiers…” I loved that show.
Since KoH has been taken, I’ll mention Stephen Schwartz’s 1978 “Working,” based on the Studs Terkel interviews. Awesome show, not well known, and I have it on vinyl, not CD. If I hit the lottery, I will produce four shows to run in a community/dinner theatre environment over a year - three months per show. The shows will be Sunday in the Park with George, Working, King of Hearts, and Company.
“Goodtime Charley” is the fourth fantasy show. And in fact, maybe it should count as an obscure musical I have the soundtrack for. Anne Reinking, Joel Grey, in a musical about Joan of Arc and the French Dauphin.
I’ve wondered if Sunday in the Park with George will ever get a revival. Since it has to remain permanently lodged in the mid 1980s (in order for the Marie character to conceivably still be alive) I’ve wondered if it would seem too dated.
AFTER THE FAIR, BIRDS OF PARADISE, A MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE, THE GOODBYE GIRL, STEEL PIER, and my favorite, RANDY NEWMAN’S FAUST, which was done at the Goodman and La Jolla and could have done well off-Broadway. Oh well.
Avenue X is an all a capella musical, an exciting premise that has a sadly dull story. I can’t remember it off-hand (and it’s too late for me to look at the synopsis in the liner notes), but it has something to do with overcoming racism with the power of music. :rolleyes:
First Lady Suite is a decent musical/song cycle by Michael John LaChiusa, who also did the Broadway adaptation of The Wild Party and Hello Again (both of which could also qualify as being relatively obscure musicals, but I think they have a pretty strong cult following). It basically shows a day in the lives of various influential first ladies… It’s probably the least accessible of all his scores; if you don’t really like Sondheim, you’ll probably hate LaChiusa.
Nightingale is an adaptation of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy story by Charles Strouse. Don’t expect it to be full of the light, catchy tunes we all know and love from “Annie” or “Bye Bye Birdie”… With the occasional exception, I don’t find it particularly interesting, although I know some people who love it.
I have William Finn’s In Trousers (on CD, not vinyl, unfortunately). It’s the predecessor to March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland, but not nearly as well-known or frequently performed as those shows. It’s not a very good recording, technically speaking, but the music is wonderful.
Not an obscure show, but I used to have (until a friend borrowed it, then lent it to someone else who never gave it back) the Korean cast recording of Evita. It was pretty bad. The lead singers were okay, but the chorus and the orchestra were awful. The entire contents of each disc were contained on a single track, so you had to fast forward to whichever song you wanted to hear. And the entire thing must have been recorded in one take because you can hear glaring mistakes made by the orchestra that you’d think they’d have tried to correct.
Carmen Jones, an update and remake of Carmen. I have the DVD of the movie and the CD of the London production. As much as I like (some) real opera, this version is much better.
Mine are mostly from Eric Woolfson (formerly of the Alan Parsons Project):
Freudiana, about the life of Sigmund Freud. I have both the “white” (English) studio version and the “Black” (German, and much rarer) cast recording.
Gaudi, about the life of Antonio Gaudi, the architect who built the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. This one is based on the APP album of the same name. I have the Alsdorf (more common, but still rare) and Aachen (rarer) versions.
Gambler, set in Las Vegas and based off the APP album “Turn of a Friendly Card.” This one is very hard to find–I had to order it from the German theatre shop where the musical was being staged.
Poe, about the life of Edgar Allan Poe and based loosely on the APP album “Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Edgar Allan Poe.”
Oh, and I also have A Shoggoth on the Roof and am waiting impatiently for them to finish The Dunwich Horror Show.
Oh–I missed the part about do I like them. Yes, I like all of mine a lot. Woolfson does some great arrangements of old songs and writes some equally great new ones.
David Byrne’sThe Forest. The record is very odd, but listenable…occasionally. Ninevah is fun.
I heard his ‘The Knee Plays’ at a friends house and had a discussion about who had the stranger record…I think he won. There was an act about how he became his elderly neighbours bag of groceries.
