Add Kinky Boots to the Roster of Tony-Winners
So the percentage just went from 56.92% to 57.58%.
I’m talking about the number of Tony-winning Best Musicals that can be found on recordings and downloads on Masterworks Broadway.
With Kinky Boots winning Best Musical (over the slightly favored Matilda), thirty-eight of the sixty-six victors can be found on this website.
“Sixty-six?” you ask. “But Sunday night’s broadcast said it was the sixty-seventh Tony Awards.”
Yes, but there have been “only” sixty-six Tony-winning musicals. For the first two seasons of the prize – 1946-1947 and 1947-1948 – there was no award for Best Musical. (There’s an irony for you; these days, most people are more interested in this award than in any other.) That would make sixty-five, but in 1959-1960, there was the one and only Best Musical tie between The Sound of Music and Fiorello!
Truth to tell, Masterworks Broadway inherited many of these recordings. During the Golden Era of Original Cast Albums – which one could say lasted from the late forties to the late sixties – two companies were duking it out for cast album rights: Columbia and RCA Victor.
Fervent collectors always breathed a sigh of relief when they saw that full-page ad for a new musical in the Sunday New York Times and spied the words “Original Cast Album by Columbia Records.” Not only did producer Goddard Lieberson deliver the recordings that aurally pleased most listeners, but he also released them on the classical arm of the company: “Masterworks,” the label said, not opting for the popular division’s red label, but the classical green label which eventually became a gray label.
While RCA Victor had released the first album with a gatefold cover (Silk Stockings) in 1955 and Capitol followed suit in 1957 (The Music Man) , Lieberson got into the “swing” of things with the London cast album of My Fair Lady in 1958. He then upped the ante in 1960 with Camelot: a gatefold with color pictures and an extra half-page inside. He then went whole hog to a gatefold with color pictures inside for that most anticipated show of 1962, Irving Berlin’s Mr. President.
That brings us to RCA Victor, which desperately wanted the rights to Mr. President, too. When Columbia outbid, it just went ahead and made its own studio cast album. It cast then-easy listening star Perry Como as the chief executive with Sandy Stewart and Kaye Ballard sharing duties as his First Lady. (Guess this president was a Mormon; frankly, the show might have been more interesting had he been.)
Columbia knew how RCA Victor felt two years later when it lost out on Fiddler on the Roof. The preeminent cast album company was embarrassed not to have this blockbuster in its ranks; as a result, it later recorded Herschel Bernardi, the third Broadway Tevye, to do an album on his own. What’s more, this recording included a cut song – and a delightful one: “When Messiah Comes.”
These two examples best illustrate the fierce competition between the two companies. But if two different AFLs – the American Federation of Labor and the American Football League – could join forces with their bitter enemies – respectively The Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO) and the National Football League (NFL) – so too could Columbia and RCA Victor. Yes, it happened through a merger, but we now have, as Harold Rome wrote in Pins and Needles, “one big union for two.”
Still, if we return to those thrilling days of yesteryear when the cast album wars were waging, we see that RCA Victor landed fifteen titles that would win the Best Musical Tony: Damn Yankees, Redhead, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Sweeney Todd, 42nd Street, La Cage aux Folles, Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, Titanic, Fosse, Contact, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Thoroughly Modern Millie.
Fittingly enough, the more highly regarded Columbia had more: eighteen, in fact: South Pacific, Kiss Me, Kate, Kismet, The Pajama Game, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, Bye Bye Birdie, Cabaret, Hallelujah, Baby!, 1776, Company, A Little Night Music, Raisin, A Chorus Line, Annie, Nine, City of Angels and The Will Rogers Follies.
Thanks to the merger, two Tony-winners were released under Sony (The Producers and Hairspray), one simply under Victor (Avenue Q) and two on Masterworks Broadway: last year’s Once and this year’s Kinky Boots.
As a result, we can essentially say that two companies landed thirty-eight – which is even more impressive when one looks at the twenty-eight others; they were recorded by thirteen different companies. The most any other company has is Decca with six.
And while Masterworks Broadway might not have been on the ground floor with those twenty-eight other Tony-winners, it did make subsequent recordings via revival cast albums (Evita, Guys and Dolls, The King and I and Man of La Mancha), a TV soundtrack (Wonderful Town), a London cast album (Crazy for You) and even a foreign cast album (El Fantasma de la Opera, the Spanish language recording of you-know-what).
If you’d care to add in these seven, the figure balloons to forty-five out of sixty-six for a 68.18%, up from last year’s 67.69%. But if you consider that cheating, you still have to admit that Masterworks Broadway is the primary residence of the recordings of the Best Musical Tony-winners.
Peter Filichia also writes a column each Friday at www.kritzerland.com.and www.mtishows.com. His books on musicals are available at Amazon.com.
