Cast Album Discoveries: Shrek the Musical

I've been alternating the albums in my Top 150 Albums By Women project with cast albums, so I'll share my favorite five from these as I listen to them as well. 

I really only ever knew one or two songs from the Broadway musical adaptation of Shrek, so I figured I should listen to the rest of it. Let me say first off, this is not a good musical but it's a listenable cast recording because Brian D'Arcy James does all the vocal and emotional heavy lifting here, much like Ben Platt in Dear Evan Hansen. He sings each song so beautifully it's easier to overlook the cheesy lyrics and mostly-blah melodies. (Seriously, the creative team behind this show are so much better than this. What happened?!)

My five favorites, all of which I do enjoy at least partially:

5. This Is Our Story

My favorite thing about the Shrek story (and I do love the movie) is that it sets up a nontraditional female lead. Sure, she starts out pretty traditional, but by the end it makes the (super rare) point that a not-obviously-pretty woman can still find love and happiness. This song does a pretty good job of capturing the best part of that ending, even though some of the lyrics are pretty cheesy along the way.

4. Don't Let Me Go

While a LOT of these lyrics are pretty bad, the performance energy and upbeat music goes a long way to making it a fun one to listen to anyway.

3. Big Bright Beautiful World (Reprise)

This is a nice reprise because the original version began the show and set the tone of cynicism and having barriers against people, and this is just a lovely, vulnerable little tune of a character coming out of that mindset and professing his love, even though he's not sure it would work. Like I said, Brian D'arcy James really sells these moments!

2. Travel Song

So this one probably wouldn't land this high except I really, really enjoy the musical theatre technique where two characters each have an individual verse to sing and then they sing them both at the same time. Like, that's one of my favorite things and I love it way too much. (They do it in "I Think I Got You Beat" in this show as well, but that song also has like 45 seconds of burping and farting sounds, so... nah.) This one is just jaunty and enjoyable and fluffy.

1. Build a Wall

I am in no way surprised that this won. It was the only one of these top five that I already knew, and I liked it a bit already, but it has the fewest awkward lyrics of the whole show and it allows Brian D'Arcy James to act the heck out of it and make me genuinely care about his character. It's the only one of these that I'm likely to actually add into my regular listening rotation.

Anybody out there really love this show? Or really hate it? Share your thoughts and your own favorites in the comments!

Cast Album Discoveries: The Robber Bridegroom

I've been alternating the albums in my Top 150 Albums By Women project with cast albums, so I'll share my favorite five from these as I listen to them as well. This time I listened to the 2016 Off-Broadway cast of The Robber Bridegroom (starring Steven Pasquale, who I like a lot). My five favorites!

5. Once Upon the Natchez Trace. One of those fantastic opening numbers that really sets the scene for what's to come -- in this case, by introducing all the characters and establishing the tall tale nature of the plot. It's fun and entertaining and a great opener to the album.

4. Nothin' Up. An early favorite, partly because it's so rare to find songs for women written for the lower part of my voice and I was excited for it! I especially love the contrast between some of those high wailing notes and the lower, cynical lines. A good one.

3. Deeper in the Woods. I like how different this sounds from the rest of this cast recording. While most of the music is upbeat, this is a haunting coral piece that I just grew to love more and more.

2. Marriage is Riches. This is not one that I expected to last this long, but it's just so delightful and jaunty and silly. The back-and-forth of all the characters wanting different things is all captured hilariously in the tone of the music, and it just kept making me smile.

1. Steal With Style. This was another early favorite. It's so much fun to sing along to, and it does an excellent job of introducing us to our main character. Steven Pasquale sings the heck out of it, too.

Have any of you listened to this one? What did you think of it?

Cast Album Discoveries: Calvin Berger

I am finishing up quite a few of my first round of cast albums I've been listening to. This time I finished Calvin Berger, an entertaining and creative modern high school interpretation of Cyrano de Bergerac. If you know the story of Cyrano, you pretty much know this story, except this one ends much more happily and the characters are high school seniors.

If it's totally new to you, here's the premise: Calvin and Matt are both in love with the beautiful Rosanna. Calvin is incredibly intelligent but has a comically large nose and is insecure about his appearance. Matt is handsome but nervous, shy, and not the brightest crayon in the box. They decide to work together, with Matt wooing Rosanna publicly while Calvin writes his love notes, crafts his texts, and scripts out his conversations. The truth is ultimately discovered (without everyone dying like in the original version), and love triangles are resolved with the students figuring out how to deal with their flawed personalities.

Overall, I liked this album a lot. Music and lyrics are both by Barry Wyner, who hasn't done any other full-length musicals, though I hope he will because these perfectly capture teenage angst. Man, if I had heard this album as a high schooler, I would have been all over it. My top five songs from the show are as follows.

5. More Than Meets the Eye. Rosanna raves to Calvin about how amazing Matt is in this song and how he seems not that bright sometimes, only to send a text or say a random thought that is so much deeper than he appears to be. (Needless to say, this is a bit weird for Calvin to hear since he's the one responsible for all the great things Matt is saying.)

4. Don'tcha Think? A fun little tune at the beginning of the show where Calvin's best friend Bret helps him realize that he's in love with Rosanna. This song was actually the first song that I ever heard from this show, and it's insanely catchy.

3. We're The Man. This was the first song in the show that I really loved. Calvin and Matt have two of the best songs in the show. Matt is such a likable character who manages to be the target of many of the cast album's jokes without becoming a pathetic character because he's such a cheerful character, and the two boys have great repartee going back and forth in this song.

2. Never Know. I really enjoy unusual counterpart, and that works here wonderfully, as Calvin tries to help Matt memorize a romantic rap to share with Rosanna. The song is about a third Matt practicing, a third Calvin coaching, and a third Calvin singing to himself about how weird it is that this is all working out somehow.

1. How Can I Compete With That. Of all the (many) unrequited love songs in the show, this is the one that hits home the hardest. The whole group sings individually about their insecurities, and it's a quiet little angst-fest that has some funny but honest lyrics expressing their frustration with themselves.

Cast Album Discoveries: The Toxic Avenger

In my first grouping of 10 cast recordings to listen to as part of this project, this was the only one that I just didn't like at all. With music and lyrics by Joe DiPietro and David Bryan, The Toxic Avenger has a really dismal cast recording, with forgettable music and obvious, lowest-common-denominator lyrics. They're clearly trying to do something like the self-aware (and very funny) Evil Dead musical, but it all falls flat here, with incredibly predictable tunes that hinge entirely on having a third-grade sense of humor. (I've just looked up the writers of this musical and it turns out they also collaborated to write Memphis, which I don't know well but which has... won Tonys and stuff for being great. So apparently they do have some talent, it's just not on display here.)

The show is based on the 1984 movie, which I have never seen, and tells the story of a nerdy scientist trying to clean up the toxic waste from his state. He ultimately gets dumped into a vat of said toxic waste and develop superpowers. He falls in love, unseats a government conspiracy, and everything worked out.

As I said, though, this cast album is bad. I was looking forward to it because I often love campy sci fi stories, but these songs were so awful I was able to speed listen through this because after just one or two listens to a song, I could practically sing it back to you because they were so unoriginal there weren't any surprises.

Because of how unlikable this cast album is, I couldn't come up with a top five, but there is one song in the show that isn't as terrible as the rest. The one piece of "that's all right" in a pile of crap is the song "You Tore My Heart Out," whose lyrics are still pretty sloppy but not distractingly bad, and the melody is actually quite pretty. As a whole, however, the cast album is a mess and not worth listening to. At all. And I'm glad I never have to listen to it again.

Cast Album Discoveries: 110 in the Shade

I've been doing a thing where I choose 10 different cast recordings for shows I don't know, add the first song from each to a playlist, and listen to that playlist until I'm ready to swap out some of the songs for the next one in the show. It lets me evaluate each song on its own without everything kind of blending together without dialogue to separate it out.

I just finished getting all the way through my first show for this project (though a second is coming up soon, as I only have two songs left). It was the 1963 musical 110 in the Shade. Most of the musicals I added to this list are very new, but this was a slightly older one I wanted to include. I'll post the Wikipedia plot synopsis here:

Based on Nash's 1954 play The Rainmaker, it focuses on Lizzie Curry, a spinster living on a ranch in the American southwest, and her relationships with local sheriff File, a cautious divorcé who fears being hurt again, and charismatic con man Bill Starbuck, posing as a rainmaker who promises the locals he can bring relief to the drought-stricken area.

The music is by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, best known for The Fantasticks, a musical I like very much. I didn't actually know this was by them until just now, so that was a fun little surprise.

I listened to the original Broadway cast starring Inga Swenson, Robert Horton, and Stephen Douglass. There is a 2007 revival starring Audra McDonald, but that version is not on Spotify, so I listened to the original. Here were my top five favorite songs from the album.

5. A Man and a Woman. There were a lot of songs in this show I was kind of indifferent to, and this is down closer to that spectrum, but I liked it enough that it made it into my top 5. It's a very pretty, sad song about lost love and possible future hope, and is definitely worth a listen for anyone who likes more traditional Broadway ballads.

4. Love, Don't Turn Away. If I'd listened to this show while I was first compiling my Unrequited Love Showtunes CDs, I would've had a great time with it. Of the two songs the show has in this vein, this is the more lighthearted one, a cheerful ditty about all the love she has to share. It's sweet and fun.

3. You're Not Foolin' Me. This song reminds me a lot of The Music Man. It could absolutely have been a song sung between Marian and Harold Hill, and I like it a lot. Both characters call each other out on the lies they're trying to live, and it becomes a great spirited duet between two strong characters.

2. Old Maid. Oh, man. While "Love, Don't Turn Away" is a sweet and fun song about hoping for love, this song is devastating in its hopelessness. The more operatic feel of classic Broadway musicals really suits this song, as it lends an air of theatrical tragedy to it rather than modern teenage angst. The verse about visiting extended family as "poor Aunt Lizzie" is truly heartbreaking.

1. Rain Song. This was the first song in the show that really gripped me, and it stayed one of my favorite. It's the song where Starbuck convinces the town that he can bring them rain within 24 hours if they pay him $100. For another comparison to The Music Man, this is this show's "76 Trombones," starting off with a cool, slinky jazz section and building to a religious revival feel as the whole town starts singing about the expected rain.

Any of you out there familiar with this show? If so, what are your favorite songs?