Broadway: The Great Original Cast Recordings

Sony celebrated the millennium with its mammoth 26-CD collection, Soundtrack for a Century, but fortunately starving actors and other theater lovers can satisfy themselves with the 2-CD installment, Broadway: The Great Original Cast Recordings. Beginning with what most consider the dawn of the modern musical, Show Boat, the set goes on to sample songs from Kiss Me, Kate (the first cast recording issued on LP) and many other of the greatest shows ever written for the stage (My Fair Lady and West Side Story have the most selections--three each). The set is limited to recordings from the Columbia Records vault, but it was a treasure trove under the primary direction of producer Goddard Lieberson. The 1940s and '50s are marked by major shows by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, and Leonard Bernstein, to name only a few, while the 1960s and '70s see new takes on the traditional forms, with Cabaret and works by the young Stephen Sondheim (even Anyone Can Whistle). Things begin to thin out in the last two decades of the century, as Columbia missed out on the mature Sondheim, the Andrew Lloyd Webber & Co. blockbusters, and the surge in revivals; the '80s are represented by Nine and the '90s by Cy Coleman's Will Rogers Follies and The Life. Of course, it's impossible to capture a whole century of Broadway music in only 153 minutes, but few fans could quibble with more than a handful of these smart selections. Practically worth the price of the package itself is the beautiful 64-page booklet, which includes an essay by Frank Rich, notes on every show, plus some brief sidebars, album covers and theater posters, and photos from both the stage and recording studios. --David Horiuchi

Snoopy!!! The New Musical Entertainment (1975 San Francisco Cast)

Hal Hackady, Pamela Myers, Don Potter, James Gleason, Larry Grossmann, Randi Kallan

Sunset Boulevard (1994 Los Angeles Cast)

Alan Campbell, Christopher Hampton, George Hearn, Don Black, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Glenn Close, Judy Kuhn