Just what the title says, a 15 & a half hour studio session (plus pick-up vocal a few days on) as Stephen Sondheim’s career defining musical is recorded for vinyl shortly after opening to raves on B’way. Condensed to an hour for primetime NBC tv by docu-filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, it’d never make it to network broadcast today. One of Sondheim’s most revived/least reviled shows (currently on B’way with a gender switch: leading man Bobby flipped to leading woman Bobbie), the problematic book (a series of facile sketches meant to convince Bobby that marital plunge is worth the horror show of couples he sees in his best friends) happily avoided in this behind-the-scenes look at Sondheim’s phenomenal score & lyrics. Blood, sweat, tears & make-up-free skin pores from the amazing talent in front of the mikes and back in the booth. Plus, you don’t have to be a B’way nerd to get into it. But those who are will be shocked at all those singers puffing away; at how much better soon-to-depart leading man Dean Jones (yes, of the Disney films) sounds on Pennebaker’s sound mix than he does on the finished album*; at the phenomenal voice from little-known Pamela Myers singing ‘Another Hundred People’ (very Linda Ronstadt); spotting pre-MURPHY BROWN Charles Kimbrough; or just reveling in a lost B’way era. If only Pennebaker would give us a longer cut, one that needn’t fit into a one-hour time slot.
DOUBLE-BILL: It’s an AUDIO Double-Bill. Stream the original cast album to hear the two-thirds that goes missing here. Including Elaine Stritch blasting out the longest, loudest, flattest note in B’way album history at the end of the opening number. How’d that get by amazingly patient, amazingly calm album producer Thomas Z. Shepard?
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Jones left the show soon after the opening (personal issues; he and his wife headed for divorce) with Larry Kert, B’way’s original WEST SIDE STORY Tony, taking over before being followed in turn by yet another WSS alum, George Chakiris, the film’s Bernardo.
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