Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Recording Broadway: A Life In Cast Albums is Shepard's first-person account of the making of 60 years' worth of show albums, featuring up-close-and-personal accounts of his work with Julie Andrews, Leonard Bernstein ("impulsively generous, reflexively cruel"), Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick, Barbara Cook ("my favorite star"), Placido Domingo, Gregory Hines, John Kander & Fred Ebb, Jerry Herman, Danny Kaye, Angela Lansbury ("the nicest person it's ever been my pleasure to work with"), Robert Lindsay (the joke he refused to put on the Me and My Girl cast album), David Merrick (a Shepard/Merrick showdown in the studio for 42nd Street), Carroll O'Connor, Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters, Otto Preminger (Shepard composed the music for Preminger's film Such Good Friends), Hal Prince, Anthony Quinn, Debbie Reynolds, Chita Rivera, Richard Rodgers ("looked like a banker, with an endless supply of music on tap"), Stephen Sondheim ("not an evil man, but very, very easily bruised"). Barbra Streisand ("as professional at 24 as any veteran I've ever worked with"), Elaine Stritch (the story behind the story chronicled in Original Cast Album: Company, the classic D.A. Pennebaker documentary about the making of that album), Andrew Lloyd Webber (Shepard warned that Evita would never succeed) and many, many more.
Synopsis
Recording Broadway: A Life In Cast Albums is veteran producer Thomas Z. Shepard's first-person account of the making of 60 years' worth of show albums, featuring up-close-and-personal accounts of his work with pretty much everyone who was anyone on Broadway, including Julie Andrews, Leonard Bernstein ("impulsively generous, reflexively cruel"), Barbara Cook ("my favorite star"), Placido Domingo, Gregory Hines, John Kander & Fred Ebb, Danny Kaye, Angela Lansbury ("the nicest person it's ever been my pleasure to work with"), Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters, Chita Rivera, Stephen Sondheim ("not an evil man, but very, very easily bruised"), Barbra Streisand ("as professional at 24 as any veteran I've ever worked with"), Andrew Lloyd Webber (whom Shepard warned that Evita would never succeed) and many, many more.
Alongside this unforgettable saga is the tale of Shepard's childhood as an undersized piano prodigy on the working-class streets of East Orange, New Jersey, and his unlikely emergence into the world of first classical music and then Broadway recordings. Shepard has a unique voice, a striking combination of Broadway glitz, classical-music elegance and New Jersey street kid, and his book will be compelling even to someone not among the millions of Broadway lovers around the world for whom his recordings are a vital link to Broadway at its best.