Best Musical: Tony vs Grammy - Part 2

Other Factors

In the seventeen years when the Best Musical Grammy went to recordings of shows which won neither the Best Musical nor the Best Actress Tony, there seem to be four other factors that could logically have acted upon the minds of Grammy voters. They are: the noticeable success of record sales or radio play (including cover versions of a show's songs), the presence in the show's credits of recording industry veterans, the fact that the show appealed to African-American audiences during the 1970s, and the presence of a new type of recording technique or situation utilized in making the recording.

Record Sales and Radio Play

Though the Recording Academy always encourages Grammy voters to vote for quality recordings, without giving credence to what it calls "mass sales," there must surely be a correlation of some kind between top vote-getting recordings and the familiarity, popularity or commercial success of the music on those recordings. In the mid 1960s, the popularity with club singers of songs from She Loves Me ("Tonight at Eight") and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (the title song) could explain the Grammy winning success of their original Broadway cast albums. And in 1964, Barbra Streisand's Grammy-winning cover version on Columbia Records of her first act song from Funny Girl, "People," surely helped that show's original cast album on Capital Records to Grammy success in the best show album category.

Extremely popular cover versions of songs from Hair ("Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In," for example) and Promises, Promises ("I'll Never Fall In Love Again") may have helped lift those Broadway cast albums to Grammy wins in the late 1960s. And in 1971 the popularity of the single "Day By Day" as sung by the cast of Godspell (led by Robin Lamont) must have paved the way for that show's cast recording to achieve Grammy success, making it the only truly off-Broadway original cast recording to ever win the Best Musical Grammy.

Fascinatingly, in that same year the original studio cast "concept" album of that other religious-themed show, Jesus Christ Superstar, was nominated for the big-time Album of the Year Grammy (losing to Carole King's "Tapestry"), though it was not nominated in the show album category. (Maybe the concept of a "concept" show album was confusing for Academy members.) And the following year, the show's Broadway cast album was also nominated for Record of the Year (losing to the multi-artist "The Concert for Bangladesh"), but again the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice tuner was not nominated for the show album award. Crazy!

In 1984, Barbra Streisand's influence via "The Broadway Album" and the song "Putting It Together" may have helped Sunday In the Park With George win "Best Cast Show Album" (as the award was called that year)-though being a Pulitzer Prize-winning show by a legendary composer/lyricist named Sondheim couldn't have hurt, either. But only a heady mixture of record sales, PBS broadcasts and incessant touring to the hinterlands west of the Hudson can explain the 1996 win in this category of the original Riverdance recording (not the Broadway cast album, but the earlier one). Left empty-handed by Grammy? A little show called, um, Rent. The Grammy Award seems like the only award that Jonathan Larson's blockbuster Pulitzer/Tony pop/rock musical didn't win. Well, gentle reader, remember that Riverdance was very, very popular.

It should be noted here that hit songs from certain shows which won both the Grammy and Tony for Best Musical have had a life of their own right off the bat, and may have been a contributing factor in the cast album's Grammy success. How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, The Wiz, Annie, Evita and Cats can be listed in that regard. (I don't have to list each show's breakout hit song, do I?) And recordings of two shows where the leading lady won the Best Actress Tony has also been helped by songs having recording industry success. They are Mame (Eydie Gorme won the Grammy for Best Vocal Performance, Female, for her popular cover of "If He Walked Into My Life") and Dreamgirls (Jennifer Holliday's radio-ready cast album performance of "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" won her the Grammy for Best R & B Performance, Female).

Recording Industry Veterans

Three Broadway cast albums seemed to have triumphed at the Grammy Awards ceremony due to the contributions made to them by highly respected recording industry veterans. Certainly the 1981 show album winner, Lena Horne: The Lady And Her Music, is an example of this (the album, a live recording of the acclaimed one-woman show, also won Miss Horne the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female). The win in 1993 of the Broadway cast recording of Tommy, the rock opera by The Who, surely needs no further explanation here. And two years later Smokey Joe's Cafe, a double-length cast recording of the best songs by the veteran rock and roll songwriting duo of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, won the Best Musical Grammy, giving that show a pat on the back for having the courage to open in the same Tony-eligible period as the last blockbuster to date with an Andrew Lloyd Webber score, a little bull-in-the-china-shop called Sunset Boulevard.

As with the popularity of a show's songs with the radio and record shop public, the presence of recording industry veterans in the credits of a show album may have helped that recording win the Grammy, even if the show in question triumphed at the Tonys for Best Musical or Best Actress. Ain't Misbehavin' is of course a compendium of the songs of Thomas "Fats" Waller, and Jersey Boys is the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, using the songs the boys sang on their bumpy road to the top of the charts. Spring Awakening's composer Duncan Sheik comes from the recording world. Even Stephen Sondheim could be called a recording industry veteran by the time of 1994's Passion win, the seventh show he composed which won in the Best Musical Grammy category. (He also won the big songwriter's award [Song of the Year] for "Send In the Clowns" in 1975, two years after A Little Night Music won him his second show Grammy.) And two shows with songs by composer Elton John (and a veteran lyricist named Tim Rice) won the Best Musical Grammy two years apart at the end of the millennium, The Lion King and Aida, one of which one the Best Musical Tony and the other one the Best Actress award.

Black Musicals of the 1970s

The Grammy wins of The Lion King and Aida were in a small way a reminder of a strong Grammy trend of the 1970s, as these shows take place in Africa and had mostly African or African-American casts. For whatever reason-as a sign of the times, an indication of NARAS membership or because the recordings were for the most part highly listenable, whether or not one had seen the musical on stage-seven of the eleven recordings that won Grammy's Musical category from 1972 to 1982, inclusive, were from shows which have been characterized as "black musicals," or shows with predominantly African-American casts, subject matter and audience appeal. The shows were popular with other audience members as well, but certainly made a conscious effort to appeal to theatergoers of color. This is the third factor that seems to come into play at the Grammy Awards, beyond pure success at the Tony ceremony.

Four of these eleven musicals were discussed earlier as being Tony winners for the best show and/or actress of the year:  Raisin, The Wiz, Ain't Misbehavin' and Dreamgirls. A fifth, Lena Horne: The Lady And Her Music was, well, Lena Horne (she won a special Tony Award that year, by the way, years before the Special Theatrical Event category was conceived). Two other shows which won as Best Musical recording don't seem to make sense as Grammy winners, apart from the trend away from the all-white musical titles of Grammy's past and towards African-American shows at that time. (Indeed, the only recordings to win the Grammy during this time that weren't African-American in some large part were the remarkably popular post-Watergate tuner Annie and recordings of shows by Stephen Sondheim [2] and Andrew Lloyd Webber [1].)

Though, to be fair, these two shows are probably better on record than on stage, thereby rendering their Grammy success at least to be sentiment correctly placed. Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope from 1972 and Bubbling Brown Sugar from 1976 will thrill your loudspeakers. (Did I mention before now that I own all of the Best Musical Grammy-winning recordings?) And note that the former disc defeated a little title called Grease, among others that were nominated. The latter, produced by Brill Building veterans Hugo and Luigi, defeated recordings produced by the two recognized giants in the field of show album production, Columbia's Goddard Lieberson and RCA's Thomas Z. Shepard.

Recording Techniques Take Center Stage

A funny thing happened in 1985-Grammy's horizons expanded. Prior to that year, every single winner of the Best Musical album Grammy was the original cast recording (or what was seemed to be the full original cast, anyway) of a new Broadway musical. (The exception proving the rule, the aforementioned Godspell, was an off-Broadway show in nature and location, though in fact it did transfer to the Main Stem late in its run.) But around the time of the digital revolution, and the time that London theatrical imports began to dominate New York's biggest stages, Grammy voters found reasons to look elsewhere (though not to London cast albums!) for recordings to crown as the annual show music champion.

Eight of the next nineteen winners were not recordings of new Broadway musicals. Four were recordings of Broadway revivals, as was mentioned above. (Three of these shows had not won the Grammy in their original recorded versions.) The other four winners are examples of different kinds of recordings altogether, recordings that together make up the fourth and last of the non-Tony factors we are discussing. Two were studio cast recordings-souped-up versions of the kind of star-laden discs that had been made even before actual theater casts recorded show scores. (This kind of recording had never before achieved Grammy success.) One Grammy winner (Riverdance) was what can now be considered the cast album of a very lengthy pre-Broadway tryout, with the kind of success that had occasionally produced recordings in the past. And one winner was arguably the best concert cast recording ever made of a Broadway score, as well as certainly one of the first of that type of recording.

I am referring of course to the legendary Follies concert cast album universally known as Follies in Concert. This RCA recording returned to the public ear the essentially intact full score of the Sondheim/Prince/Bennett collaboration of 1971, which had notoriously been recorded in a truncated version and in fuzzy sound by Capitol Records (Grammy-nominated, it lost to Godspell). By 1986, the year that the concert album appeared, the listening public wasn't even sure what the full score of Follies was, though songs from it were certainly highly regarded. All that changed, and Grammy took note.

One year earlier, Leonard Bernstein's ballyhooed studio cast recording of West Side Story took Grammy honors. (The score had been honored with a Grammy award once before-in 1961 for the film's soundtrack recording.) Even though the 1985 Grammy winner is somewhat dismissed these days (the joke being that stars Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras were not only way too old to play Maria and Tony, but they each sang with the other character's accent), the sumptuousness of the recording's full-orchestra sound and the more or less complete nature of the record's contents, conducted by the composer as a "definitive" statement of his tempos, style, etc., proved irresistible to members of the Recording Academy.

The other studio cast album to win the Best Musical recording award was the 1990 winner, the so-called "symphonic version" of Les Miserables. This logistically massive undertaking, recorded around the world by cast members who sometimes never even met but who had all performed in the Cameron Mackintosh mega-blockbuster somewhere, was a note-complete technological feat, as well as a second chance for Grammy voters to honor a score which had won the same award (honoring its Broadway cast recording) only three years earlier.

In summary, though only two studio cast albums and only one concert cast recording have won the Best Musical Show Album Grammy to date, these recordings continue to be made and nominated, and one could win again.

So, then, in Parts One and Two we have discussed the shows whose recordings have won the Best Musical Grammy award over the last fifty years. But what about those Tony-winning Best Musicals that did not win the recording prize as well? We'll examine some of the more shocking Grammy omissions in Part Three.