I’m a CD person. I don’t store music on any electronic devices or subscribe to any music services. I like my music on the little plastic discs, and I have quite a pile. Because I directed so many musicals when I was teaching, a big chunk of my collection is of Broadway and Off-Broadway shows. My most recent Broadway CD is “Dear Evan Hansen,” the 2017 Tony Award winning show, which I got for Christmas. I got “Next to Normal” recently, too, because it is the next production at Syracuse Stage. Last spring, we saw “Waitress” on Broadway, a fabulous little musical, and we have been playing the disc ever since.
I also like to buy the discs of lesser known shows, odd shows, virtually unheard of shows. I have several collections called “Unsung Musicals,” that include songs that were cut from famous shows or songs that were part of shows that flopped. Some of my favorite, little known show CDs are “Floyd Collins,” a musical about a guy who dies trapped in a mine, the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer Musical called “Once More, With Feeling,’ ” “Assassins,” Stephen Sondheim’s musical about all the famous American assassins and attempted assassins from John Wilkes Booth to Squeaky Fromm, “Phantom,” about, but not to be confused with, “Phantom of the Opera, “From Here to Eternity,” recorded only in England, which I hunted down on Amazon, and the truly awful rock opera, “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.” I could go on, but won’t.
A couple of months ago, I purchased through Amazon, two of the gems of my collection: The Premiere Cast Recording of Stephen King’s “Carrie,” and the World Premiere Cast Recording of “Heathers, the Musical.” Back in the 80’s the “Carrie” musical opened for the first time on Broadway and closed a few days later. It was so bad that a book about musicals that flopped was written called “Not Since Carrie.” The reason for the title was that over the years so many reviews about bad musicals began with the line “Not since “Carrie’ has there been such a horrible. . .etc.” Because it was so bad and so many people talked about it over the years, that a reimagined revival was all but definite. It took decades, but it’s happened and based on the new CD. . . I imagine it is pretty bad, too. I was so disappointed because I love Stephen King’s things, especially the early stuff. And “Carrie” was his first. “Heathers,” the movie, came out in 1988 and starred Christian Slater and Winona Ryder. It was a hilarious, dark, dark comedy about the dangers of popularity in high school. It was great. And, hooray, the musical soundtrack is fun, too. You can even go online and find lengthy scenes from the World Premiere. Don’t anticipate glitzy Broadway glamour, though. The costumes are nice, but the scenery is at the level of a respectable high school production of something with platforms. (In doing my research for this post, I discovered that there is a “high school” version of “Heathers, The Musical” in Italian. I can’t figure that out!)
But still, I treasure these two musicals, because they are such “pop cultural”. . . treasures, and even though, they aren’t going to win any Tony’s, they are much better than “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.” (The missing comma in the Andrew Jackson title isn’t my mistake. It’s the way the title is written. Maybe the authors thought they didn’t have commas back when Andrew Jackson was prez.)
Greg Ellstrom
