Cats is a sung-through musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It is based on the 1939 poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. The musical tells the story of a tribe of cats called the Jellicles and the night they make the "Jellicle choice" by deciding which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life. As of 2024, Cats remains the fifth-longest-running Broadway show and the seventh-longest-running West End show.
Patti Ann LuPone is an American actress and singer best known for her work in musical theater. After starting her professional career with The Acting Company in 1972 she soon gained acclaim for her leading performances on the Broadway and West End stage. She has won three Tony Awards, two Olivier Awards, and two Grammy Awards, and was a 2006 inductee to the American Theater Hall of Fame.
Song and Dance is a musical comprising two acts, one told entirely in "Song" and one entirely in "Dance", tied together by a unifying love story.
Betty Buckley is an American actress and singer. Buckley is the winner of a Tony Award, and was nominated for an additional Tony Award, two Daytime Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and an Olivier Award. In 2012, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
A cast recording is a recording of a stage musical that is intended to document the songs as they were performed in the show and experienced by the audience. An original cast recording or OCR, as the name implies, features the voices of the show's original cast. A cast recording featuring the first cast to perform a musical in a particular venue is known, for example, as an "original Broadway cast recording" (OBCR) or an "original London cast recording" (OLCR).
The discography of the English rock band the Who consists of 12 studio albums, 16 live albums, 27 compilation albums, four soundtrack albums, four extended plays, 58 singles and 23 video albums.
Sherie Rene Scott is an American actor, singer, writer and producer. She has been seen in multiple Broadway and off-Broadway plays and musicals, on numerous solo and original cast recordings, and in various film and television roles.
Little Shop of Horrors is a horror comedy rock musical with music by Alan Menken and lyrics and a book by Howard Ashman. The story follows a hapless florist shop worker who raises a plant that feeds on human blood and flesh. The musical is loosely based on the low-budget 1960 black comedy film The Little Shop of Horrors. The music, composed by Menken in the style of early 1960s rock and roll, doo-wop and early Motown, includes several well-known tunes, including the title song, "Skid Row (Downtown)", "Somewhere That's Green", and "Suddenly, Seymour".
Christian Dominique Borle is an American actor and singer. He is a two-time Tony Award winner for his roles as Black Stache in Peter and the Starcatcher and as William Shakespeare in Something Rotten! Borle also originated the roles of Prince Herbert, et al. in Spamalot, Emmett in Legally Blonde, and Joe in Some Like It Hot on Broadway. He starred as Marvin in the 2016 Broadway revival of Falsettos. He also starred as Tom Levitt on the NBC musical-drama television series Smash and Vox in the adult animated black comedy musical series Hazbin Hotel.
Rebecca Luker was an American actress, singer, and recording artist, noted for her "crystal clear operatic soprano" and for maintaining long runs in Broadway musicals over the course of her three-decade-long career. The New York Times compared her to actresses such as Barbara Cook and Julie Andrews.
Wicked is a cast recording containing the majority of the songs from the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Wicked, with music and lyrics by composer Stephen Schwartz and a book by writer Winnie Holzman. Released on December 16, 2003 by Decca Broadway both in physical and digital releases. The former contains a foreword and a short synopsis, provided by Gregory Maguire, who wrote the 1995 novel on which the musical is based, in addition to lyrics to those songs included.
Alex Lacamoire is a Cuban-American composer, arranger, conductor, musical director, music copyist, and orchestrator who has worked on many shows both on and off-Broadway. He is the recipient of multiple Tony and Grammy Awards for his work on shows such as In the Heights (2008), Hamilton (2016), and Dear Evan Hansen (2017). Lacamoire was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 2018.
Jessica Ruth Mueller is an American actress and singer. She started her acting career in Chicago and won two Joseph Jefferson Awards in 2008 and 2011 for her roles as Carrie Pipperidge in Carousel and Amalia Balash in She Loves Me. In 2011, she moved to New York City to star in a Broadway revival of musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. She won the 2014 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical for her performance as Carole King in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. She went on to receive two additional Best Actress in a Musical Tony Award nominations for her leading roles in Waitress (2016) and the Broadway revival of Carousel (2018).
Benjamin Schiff Platt is an American actor and singer. The son of film and theater producer Marc Platt, he began his acting career in musical theater as a child and appeared in productions of The Sound of Music (2006) and The Book of Mormon (2012–2015), rising to prominence for originating the title role in the Broadway coming-of-age musical Dear Evan Hansen (2015–2017). His performance in the latter earned him multiple accolades, including the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical, the youngest solo recipient of the award at the time, in addition to a Daytime Emmy, and Grammy Award. Platt reprised the role of Evan Hansen in the 2021 film adaptation of the musical, produced by his father. He then played Leo Frank in the 2022 New York City Center Gala production of Parade, which transferred to Broadway in 2023 and earned him nominations for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical and the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album.
Kinky Boots is a Broadway original cast album for the homonym musical Kinky Boots. It was released on May 28, 2013, less than two months after the show opened on Broadway. It was produced by Cyndi Lauper, who wrote the songs, Stephen Oremus, the orchestrator and conductor, and William Wittman. On release it premiered at number one on the Billboard Cast Albums Chart and number fifty-one on the Billboard 200 chart, making it the highest charting Broadway cast recording since The Book of Mormon's album was released two years earlier. Vocalists on the album include Stark Sands, Billy Porter and Annaleigh Ashford,.
Celina Consuela Gabriella Carvajal, known professionally as Lena Hall, is an American actress and singer. She originated the role of Nicola in the Broadway musical Kinky Boots and won the Tony Award for her performance as Yitzhak in the 2014 revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which also earned her a Grammy nomination for the musical's official album. She made history by becoming the first person to play both Hedwig and Yitzhak in the same production during the national tour of the musical in 2016. Her other Broadway credits include Cats, 42nd Street, Dracula, the Musical and Tarzan, the Musical. Hall has also starred in Off-Broadway productions such as Radiant Baby, Bedbugs!!!, Rooms: A Rock Romance, The Toxic Avenger, Prometheus Bound, Chix6, Little Shop of Horrors, and the 2017 original play How to Transcend a Happy Marriage.
Hadestown is a sung-through musical with music, lyrics, and book by Anaïs Mitchell. It tells a version of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Eurydice, a young girl looking for something to eat, goes to work in a hellish industrial version of the Greek underworld to escape poverty and the cold, and her poor singer-songwriter lover Orpheus comes to rescue her.
Dear Evan Hansen: Original Broadway Cast Recording is the cast album to the 2015 musical Dear Evan Hansen, with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and a book by Steven Levenson. The recording stars Ben Platt, Rachel Bay Jones, Laura Dreyfuss, Jennifer Laura Thompson, Michael Park, Mike Faist, Will Roland and Kristolyn Lloyd. The album was produced by Alex Lacamoire, Pasek and Paul, and featuring musicians include Rob Jost, Adele Stein, Justin Smith, Ben Cohn, Jamie Eblen, Dillon Kondor, Justin Goldner, Christopher Jahnke and Todd Low. The album was released by Atlantic Records on January 27, 2017, and featured at #8 on the Billboard 200, making the highest debut for a cast album after Camelot (1961). It also topped the Internet Albums chart. It further received the Best Musical Theater Album award at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards.
The musical Hadestown, written by American singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and based on her 2010 studio album of the same name, has had two official cast recordings. In addition, various songs from Hadestown were re-recorded by Mitchell for her 2014 studio album Xoa, including the musical's opening number "Anyway the Wind Blows" which had not appeared on the original concept album. The song "Why We Build the Wall" has been covered by a variety of artists, including English singer-songwriter Billy Bragg for his 2017 EP Bridges Not Walls, Ben Fisher, Ben Dunham, Lilli Lewis, and Robert Neustadt.
