page_title: On the Town (cast album)
section_title: Reviews
hierarchical_section_title: On the Town (cast album) / Critical reception / Reviews
caption_attribution_description: Lena Horne's 80th birthday JUne 23, 1997 New York city © copyright John Mathew Smith 2001
context_page_description: On the Town is a 74-minute live album of Leonard Bernstein's musical, performed by Tyne Daly, Meriel Dickinson, David Garrison, Thomas Hampson, Cleo Laine, Evelyn Lear, Marie McLaughlin, Kurt Ollmann, Samuel Ramey, Frederica von Stade, London Voices and the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. It was released in 1993.
context_section_description: Edward Seckerson reviewed the album in Gramophone in October 1993. On the Town, he reminded his readers, was the first musical with a text by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and the first composed by Leonard Bernstein, yet was nevertheless "a peach of a show, a show which positively hums along on the heat of inspiration". A comedy about the romantic adventures of three World War Two sailors enjoying twenty-four hours of shore leave in the Big Apple, it explored the way in which transience brought people both sorrows and joys. The semi-staged production at which the album had been recorded over "two amazing nights" had been a thing as fleeting as the events that it narrated. There was no denying that the atmosphere of those two midsummer evenings could not be entirely caught on a CD, but Deutsche Grammophon's live recording had transmitted more of it than any studio album could have done.
  Frederica von Stade was a "super-cool, dusky-voiced Clare", crowning her "Carried away" with a high C that no-one had imagined her capable of. Tyne Daly was not quite so successful as Hildy. In the Barbican Hall, she had "knocked 'em in the aisles with her huggable personality", but listeners to the album would notice limitations of her vocal technique that would have been less obvious to people distracted from them by her acting. It was true that her singing had improved since she had starred in Gypsy on Broadway. She was "terrifically spunky" in "Come up to my place", but she struggled with the syncopation and breath control needed for "I can cook too". A more expert artist would have been able to convey its sexual innuendo more effectively. Vocal difficulties were also evident in the performances of Cleo Laine as the Nightclub Singer and Evelyn Lear as Madame Dilly. So powerful were Laine's instincts that they kept one "hanging on every breath [she] takes", but her tone was somewhat "threadbare". And the casting of Evelyn Lear was "slightly sadder (even embarrassing)".
  The album's male singers could all be praised without reservation. Thomas Hampson's "Lonely town" and "Lucky to be me" were "handsomely sung with careful avoidance of that peculiarly 'operatic' articulation". Kurt Ollmann - something of a Bernstein specialist - was "excellent", and David Garrison was "the business" in his duetting with von Stade. Musically, the three sailors blended well, and dramatically, "you could put them on any stage and never look back". Samuel Ramey sang "gloriously" in "I feel like I'm not out of bed yet", a dock-worker's hymn to the dawn, and was "very funny indeed" in his second role as von Stade's stupendously tedious boyfriend. And "you haven't lived till you've heard Adolph Green's Rajah Bimmy sounding a little as though some middle-eastern voodoo chant has been processed through a ring modulator."
  The "too, too English chorus" made delightfully "squeaky Charleston girls" in "So long baby", but were less believable in "Lucky to be me" or "Gabey's coming". The London Symphony Orchestra, by contrast, were entirely at home in Bernstein's territory, sounding less like a classical ensemble than a Broadway band in which "every last player [was] a character, an individual". Maurice Murphy's trumpet was "superb", John Harle played a "soaring, throaty sax" and "moody" clarinet music reminded one of paintings by Edward Hopper. In the musical's several ballet sequences, essential to its "sassy New York tinta", the orchestra was "stunning". Its performance of "Times Square" had "rhythms so hot and tight and idiomatic that you'd never credit this wasn't an American band".
  Deutsche Grammophon's engineering was one of the album's few weak points, probably because of the inherent difficulty of recording singers moving around on a stage. The disc had a balance that was more appropriate to an opera than to a piece if musical theatre. Voices were balanced too distantly to allow either the principals' words or their personalities to make as much of an impact as they could have done. Cleo Laine was the only soloist who sounded as close to a microphone as was idea
caption: Cleo Laine photographed by John Mathew Smith
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