turn away from madness, burn the inner light
how I learned to stop worrying and love the concept album
Happy almost end of summer!
I got a haircut!!!
what’s living rent-free in my head this week
“The Messenger” from Elton John and Tim Rice’s AIDA
I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of cast albums lately, and the particular place that concept albums occupy in that space. (For reasons. Exciting reasons. Watch this space.) I fell in love with musicals at the age of 11, and entirely through cast albums — my gateway drugs being the original London cast recording of The Phantom of the Opera and a compilation album called The Premiere Collection that was a sampling of songs from most of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals. (For my real nerds: “the black one”, not the subsequent gold or red ones, though they were quickly added to the rotation. IYKYK.)
If you’re a musical theatre kid growing up outside of the New York metropolitan area, cast albums are your way in, period. Sure, you can see live theatre to some extent anywhere in the country, and we definitely did see some of the tours that came through Louisville and eventually got to NYC and saw shows there too. But those were special occasions.
In between, there were the cast albums, and they were magical because they required an element of sonic mental manifestation. They often came with booklets that contained the lyrics and synopses and a handful of production photos, and the act of taking those materials, listening to the show and imagining it unfold lit up my imagination like almost nothing else ever had at that age. The versions of the shows that I conjured through active listening still live in my head — and I partially credit the love I had for that experience with making me want to create musicals of my own.
In a pre-streaming world, cast albums also weren’t available everywhere in the same way that pop records were, so there was an element of treasure hunt in finding them, be it at the library or the record store. Some kids in the ‘90s collected Pokémon cards; my “gotta catch ‘em all” were all the different versions of Les Mis. (I just pulled up my iTunes and I still have dozens of versions of just that show: both the red and orange Japanese casts, the original Vienna cast, the original Prague cast, one in Danish, that weird Manchester cast EP that I inexplicably found at the Green Tree Mall Sam Goody in Clarksville, Indiana…)
The truly exciting thing, though, was when you could get your hands on something new. And so I remember vividly begging my mom to take me to a mall in Destin, Florida during Spring Break 1999 so I could get my hot little hands on the brand new concept album for the Broadway-bound Elton John and Tim Rice’s AIDA. They’d already released a single — a version of “Written in the Stars” sung by Elton and LeAnn Rimes — and it was getting a fair amount of play on the radio, so I was hyped for the rest of it.
I spent the rest of that trip sitting by the pool with my Discman devouring that record, which was unlike any of the musical theatre albums I’d ever encountered in that every track was performed by different artists rather than a set cast. And what a list of artists! Shania Twain, Lenny Kravitz, Sting, Tina Turner, James Taylor, the Spice Girls…! Because of this, each song was allowed to “pop” in a way that caught my attention. I loved the whole album, but the track that became a true obsession for me was “The Messenger”, as sung by Elton John and erstwhile ‘60s pop girlie Lulu:
This song was meant for the big tragic death scene of the lovers Aida and Radames, who’ve been sealed alive in their own tomb. As a very dramatic 15-year-old (is there any other kind?), the High Drama and Romance of the song was just thrilling, and the harmonies really did it for me too. I couldn’t wait to see this on stage.
So sure enough, when AIDA found its way to Broadway the next season, I made sure when my dad and I booked our trip to New York that summer that we had tickets. And oh, did we have tickets. In fact, we had second row orchestra tickets.
I ultimately enjoyed AIDA on Broadway very much, but my memories of it are largely colored by two things:
The distinct memory of being a hormonal sixteen-year-old girl mere feet from Adam Pascal when he took off his shirt while singing “Elaborate Lives”1 and very likely being the color of a raspberry the entire time as I realized that my dad was sitting next to me as I was, um, having an experience;
“The Messenger” was not in the show.
While I was devastated that what I considered to be the best song in the show was gone, when I saw the show staged, I fully understood why. These characters are sealed in a tomb — they aren’t going to have the time, much less the lung capacity, to wail the extremely Tim Ricean lyric “sullen and predictable, love is versatile”! It was my first lesson in writing theatre songs, really — the mantra I always repeat is what you read on the page is not what you hear, and what you hear is not what you see. And you have to take a song you’ve written for the theatre through all of those paces before you even know if it works. While “The Messenger” works gangbusters in the theatre of the mind, it looks real doofy on stage. (I texted my friend Adam Grosswirth who worked on the show to see if he had any insight on how/when it got cut, and he said that all he remembered was that it was gone by the show’s Chicago run pre-Broadway.)
Anyway, cast albums are great, and they’re still how the kids in the sticks find and fall in love with musicals. It’s a beautiful thing. And while the discovery process for today’s theatre kids is driven more by algorithms than by the happenstance of the record store bin, the joy is very much the same.
If you feel like discovering some new musicals or giving the algorithm food to spin out in the direction of some you’d like, here’s a Spotify playlist I made of 50 songs in musicals that I find to be thrilling moments on stage for wildly different reasons. Come on in, the water’s fine!
what I did this week
This week we recorded a particularly fun episode of Muppeturgy with very special guest star Peter Savieri, who was kind enough to join us all the way from Australia to discuss the Loretta Swit episode! Subscribe in the podcatcher of your choice and keep an eye out for our return in the fall to catch this and many other Muppety shenanigans.
I also renewed my passport after putting it off for years. Please give me a medal.
what’s next?
Weekly reminder: The Fitzgeralds of St. Paul is happening at Irish Classical Theatre Company in Buffalo, New York! November 8-24! Get those tickets at Irish Classical’s website!!!
in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog
There’s a 79-second pro-shot clip of this number on YouTube and revisiting it now, I fully understand why this overloaded my system as a teenager. This has got to be the horniest thing on the official Disney on Broadway YouTube channel by a factor of 47:
I think that "The Messenger" WAS in the show in the famously troubled Atlanta production, but was dropped when David Henry Hwang stepped in to rewrite the book.
(don't quote me on that)