Cast recording

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" or an "original London cast recording".
Cast recordings are studio recordings rather than live recordings. The recorded song lyrics and orchestrations are nonetheless identical to those of the songs as performed in the theatre. Like any studio performance, the recording is an idealized rendering, without audible audience reaction.

History

The British were the first to create cast recordings, and they were also the first to create original London cast recordings of shows that had already opened on Broadway, but had not been recorded with their original Broadway cast. This led to the odd situation of having, for example, a 1928 recording of the London cast of Show Boat, but no recording with the actual 1927 Broadway cast, and a recording of the London cast of Sigmund Romberg's The Desert Song, but not of the 1926 Broadway cast - even though both of these shows are Broadway musicals, rather than British ones.
Prior to the development of original cast recordings, there had been recordings of songs from musicals, and collections of several such songs, and recordings of songs performed by cast members; but they were recordings of songs, that is, they were recorded as stand-alone show tunes rather than representations of a complete musical.
The first American original cast recording as we know it was an early experimental LP of program transcriptions of selections from The Band Wagon, a 1931 revue starring Fred and Adele Astaire. It was not widely released.
The following year, Jack Kapp produced an album of songs from Show Boat timed to the 1932 Ziegfeld revival. This album featured Helen Morgan and Paul Robeson doing their songs from the show but used studio cast singers for the leads.
As the 1930s progressed, Liberty Music Shop in New York City made mini albums of songs from the Ethel Merman musical comedies Red Hot and Blue and Stars in Your Eyes. These were more like personality recordings, since the arrangements were not the ones heard in the theatre.
The first complete so-called original cast album was Marc Blitzstein's 1938 album of songs from The Cradle Will Rock although these were recorded with just piano accompaniment and not the show's orchestra. In 1984, the original recordings from Very Warm for May were discovered and issued on an LP. However, these recordings were not made with the original orchestrations.
RCA Victor had made an album of the key songs from Porgy and Bess using the theatre orchestra but featuring Met opera singers Lawrence Tibbett and Helen Jepson singing the songs. Decca riposted with another album of the same highlights sung by the actual stars of the original production, although recorded five years after the premiere. When a revival was staged in 1942, Decca issued a second album of some of the secondary songs from the opera by the revival cast and later combined these two albums onto one LP and called it the "original cast recording". Decca also issued an album of songs from the all-soldier revue This Is the Army by Irving Berlin.
Finally in 1943, came Decca's recording of Oklahoma!. It not only featured the original cast, but the show's original chorus, all accompanied by the same orchestra heard in the show, playing the music in the original Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations and conducted by the show's original conductor, Jay Blackton. The show was the biggest hit Broadway had experienced up until that time and people who could not get tickets bought the album. It would eventually sell over 1 million copies as a set of 78-rpm records, and millions more on LP and Compact Discs.
Decca soon began recording every hit musical that came along including One Touch of Venus, Carmen Jones, Carousel, and Annie Get Your Gun. Soon, all the other record companies were bidding for the rights to record Broadway shows with their original casts.
Capitol recorded St. Louis Woman in 1946, and RCA Victor recorded Brigadoon in 1947. Although Decca abandoned the cast album field in the mid-1950s, Capitol and Victor actively bid for recording rights. Sometimes problems arose as when RCA Victor signed on to record the 1950 musical Call Me Madam even though the show's star, Ethel Merman was then under exclusive contract to Decca Records. This resulted in two albums of the score being released: Merman with a studio cast on her label, while the rest of the Broadway cast made an album for RCA Victor with Dinah Shore singing the Merman role.
The label that would dominate the field until the late 1970s, however, was Columbia. They began by issuing an album of the 1946 revival of Show Boat followed by the original Broadway cast of Finian's Rainbow in 1947. A year later the label introduced LP records and used the format for two best sellers: Kiss Me, Kate and South Pacific, both recorded and released in 1949.
Under the leadership of Columbia's Goddard Lieberson, the label's cast recordings came to define the genre. Columbia Masterworks produced the original cast recordings of such shows as The Pajama Game, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Gypsy, and Camelot. Lieberson also recorded important shows that had failed at the box office including Candide and Anyone Can Whistle. In 1956, he recorded Frank Loesser's musical The Most Happy Fella, which had so much music that it had to be released as a 3-LP set, an almost unheard of venture for an original cast album in the 1950s.
A 1970 documentary by D. A. Pennebaker, Original Cast Album: Company gives a straightforward view of the making of a cast recording. It shows how the recording studio looks, how performers are arranged, and how the director behaves. The cast feels the pressure of delivering a definitive performance, with a degree of perfection beyond that ever required on stage, under a time limit imposed by the high cost of studio time.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s it was not uncommon for cast albums to become best sellers. My Fair Lady, The Music Man, Funny Girl, and Hello, Dolly! all reached the #1 position on the Billboard magazine best-sellers chart. As popular music split away from the traditional Tin Pan Alley song stylings of Broadway and Hollywood, and rock music became the dominant pop culture form, show albums began selling less well, albeit with exceptions like the rock musical Hair, which as of January 2024 is the last cast album to chart at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Also, as radio and TV moved away from showcasing Broadway numbers the ability for a show to reach an audience beyond the traditional Broadway fans lessened.
Today few show albums even appear in the Billboard top 200, and the rare breakout hit like Wicked receives no radio airplay.
New boutique labels such as PS Classics and Ghostlight release many of the cast albums of recent Broadway hits. With the recent merger of Sony Music and BMG Music, many older editions of cast recordings are being deleted and newly remastered editions are being released.

Technical limitations

A 10-inch 78-rpm disc could hold about minutes of music per side. A 12-inch 78-rpm could last minutes. Early albums had to severely abridge selections to fit the format. With LP cast recordings, usually released as single discs, it was not rare for compromises to be made to fit the recording within the forty-to-fifty-minute time limit. For example, reprises, or minor songs might not be included.
By the 1980s, the rise of the compact disc with its 74-minute recording capacity resulted in improvements in cast recordings, which were now usually capable of including all songs, the full overture and entr'acte, and, when appropriate, lead-in dialogue to the songs.
In recent years, some cast recordings have been recorded live, in recording studios incorporated into the theater concerned. Otherwise, live recordings tend to trade sound quality for freshness and immediacy.

Alternate versions

It is often the case that many cast recordings may be made for the same show. In addition to the recording of the cast of the original production, later high-profile productions may also produce cast recordings: for example, a recording by the cast of the first London production of a show that originated on Broadway, or of the first Broadway cast of a show that originated off-Broadway, or of the cast of a revival produced many decades later than the original production.
For some musicals created before cast recordings became the norm, studio cast recordings are all that exist to document the original productions' orchestrations. Such studio cast recordings have been made of many early musical comedies by the Gershwins, Vincent Youmans, and Rodgers and Hart.

Terms

Original cast: the premiere or original cast of the production. This can include revivals as well as first productions. Less misleading in this last case is "Revival Cast".
Studio cast: assembled by a record company. In the early days, the studio cast singers were often lesser known performers with good singing voices, usually joined by one fairly well known star. Mary Martin made a number of studio cast recordings for Columbia in the early 1950s including Babes in Arms, Girl Crazy, and Anything Goes. More recent studio albums have tended to be note-complete recreations of the original orchestrations, often with well-known singers taking the leads: such as EMI's recordings of Brigadoon and Show Boat.
The performers who appear in Broadway shows sing the score live each night. When a Broadway cast album is made, it is recorded in a studio and produced with the home listener in mind. While it is strictly correct to call a movie soundtrack a "cast recording" since it does record the performances of the film cast, it is even more misleading, not to mention incorrect, to call any recording a "soundtrack" that has no connection with a motion picture or recorded television production.
Soundtrack albums fill a very similar function for films with music. Soundtrack and cast albums sometimes have much in common, especially when the film concerned is a motion picture version of an original stage musical, and it often makes sense for record shops to put the two genres in the same section. But the cast album of a stage musical is very specifically not a soundtrack.