Editorial Reviews

Starting in 1994, New York's City Center Theater began a series of concert performances of rarely heard Broadway musicals called Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert. The idea was to pick shows with good scores that had failed to reach their potential on-stage or did not get revived very often and perform the music in the original orchestrations, using current Broadway singers. Each show was done three times on a weekend in the winter, and each season consisted of three shows. Thus, with the tenth season in 2003, 30 musicals had been resurrected. By then, one of the performances, 1996's Chicago, had been transferred to a Broadway revival, where it was still playing; the series had been copied by theater companies all over the country; and DRG Records had released concert cast albums of seven of the shows, 1995's Call Me Madam, Pal Joey, and Out of This World, 1997's The Boys from Syracuse, 1999's Do Re Mi and Babes in Arms, and 2000's Tenderloin. This compilation is a best-of drawn from those seven albums. It represents music by some of Broadway's greatest songwriters: Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Jule Styne, Betty Comden & Adolph Green, and Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick. The performers are the cream of contemporary Broadway talent, including such marquee names as Tyne Daly, Peter Gallagher, Debbie Gravitte, Heather Headley, Nathan Lane, Rebecca Luker, Patti Lu Pone, Andrea Martin, Marin Mazzie, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Bebe Neuwirth. The compilation does not focus just on the hit songs that emerged from these lesser-known shows, but also finds good performance pieces that show off the talents of the stars, such as "All My Life" from Do Re Mi, turned into a tour de force by Lane. This is terrific material given outstanding treatments by talented performers. William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

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