Some people can never get enough show tunes. BwayTunes.com, a new website all about the music from Broadway musicals and other shows, has just launched just for those very special people – and for those who need to buy gifts for them.
Co-founder Jim Russek and the staff have enough bona fides to satisfy any sleuth. Russek is an Executive Creative Director at the Broadway theater ad agency AKA NYC. Editor and content chief Andy Propst is a journalist (The Village Voice, Time Out/NY, Back Stage, The Sondheim Review, XM Satellite Radio's On Broadway channel, TheaterMania.com) currently working on a book about Cy Coleman.
Contributing blog posts with reflections on theater history and the like are playwright and lyricist Erik Haagensen, the former Back Stage theatre editor whose works have won an Obie and a Richard Rodgers Award, and record producer Bill Rosenfield, whose dozens of original cast recordings have collectively netted more than 30 Grammy nominations. This week Haagensen and Rosenfield discuss the 1958 Tony Awards, when The Music Man beat West Side Story for Best Musical.
A spot-check of a random handful of cast albums listed at BwayTunes.com showed some prices undercutting Amazon.com's. Probably more important, though, is the focus: on cast, concept and soundtrack albums going all the way back to 1940; recordings of artists who've written, starred in or inspired stage or movie musicals (such as Eubie Blake, Julie Andrews, Irving Berlin, Fred Astaire, Fats Waller); and sheet music. A search for "cabaret" for example will get you right to the Cabaret cast albums, along with a few other recordings with that word in the title. You can search by show, song, performer, composer, lyricist or year.
The catalog doesn't appear to be 100% populated yet – I found a dead link, and did one search that came up empty but shouldn't have – but when it's all there it promises to be a cornucopia of show music the likes of which it'll be hard if not impossible to find anywhere else.
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