Rodgers & Hammerstein wrote the music for this film starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. The scene in which Andrews crests a hill with her arms spread singing the title track is one of the greatest in American film. Hearing that song forever fills the listener with that image, and remains as fresh and even chilling as it was initially. Unfortunately much of this has been co-opted by ...
The movie version of Kander and Ebb's Chicago was long in the making but its well worth the wait. Director Rob Marshall's main change was to turn the classic musical numbers into fantasy sequences, but of course this isn't obvious on CD. Most importantly, the arrangements are bursting with life while being true to the show's spirit, and the casting is simply inspired. Catherine Zeta ...
This recording captures the 1985 London cast that transformed an obscure French musical based on Victor Hugo's gargantuan novel of pre-Revolutionary France into a worldwide phenomenon throughout the late-1980s and '90s and became one of the best examples of the era's trend of blockbuster musical spectacles. Yes, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg's score tends to recycle its themes, but ...