Description

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Recording Broadway: A life in Cast Albums is veteran producer Thomas Z. Shepard's first-person account of the making of fifty plus years' worth of show albums, featuring up-close-and-personal stories of his work with pretty much everyone who was anyone on Broadway, including Julie Andrews, Leonard Bernstein ("truly awesome but very complicated"), Sheldon Harnick ("as warm and decent as he was talented"), Barbara Cook ("one of my favorites"), Placido Domingo, Gregory Hines, John Kander, Fred Ebb, Danny Kaye, Angela Lansbury ("so gifted and so easy to be with and to work with"), Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters, Chita Rivera, Stephen Sondheim ("a genius, and very easily bruised"), Barbra Streisand ("as professional at 24 as any veteran I've ever worked with"), Andrew Lloyd Webber, and many more.

Alongside this unforgettable saga is the tale of Shepard's childhood as a very short piano prodigy on the middle-class streets of East Orange, New Jersey, and his emergence into the world as a recording producer of, first, classical music and then Broadway Original Cast recordings, Shepard has a unique voice, a striking combination of Broadway glitz, classical-music elegance and New Jersey street kid, and his book will be compelling even to someone not among the millions of Broadway lovers around the world for whom his recordings are a vital link to Broadway at its best.

About the Author

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Thomas Z. Shepard is the 12-time Grammy-winning producer of the cast albums for such shows as Ain't Misbehavin', Annie, La Cage aux Folles, Chicago, Company, Crazy for You, Dames at Sea, Follies in Concert, 42nd Street, Jelly's Last Jam, The King and I, Kiss of the Spider-Woman, A Little Night Music, Marry Me a Little, Me and My Girl, Merrily We Roll Along, No No Nanette, Pacific Overtures, Porgy and Bess, The Secret Garden, 1776, Song and Dance, Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd, Victor/Victoria, Zorba and many, many more. In a 60-year career that has included stints as the lead Broadway producer at Columbia Records, RCA and MCA, he's left a hallmark on Broadway that will never be erased, and worked with everyone who was anyone on the Great White Way.Gayden Wren is the former entertainment editor forThe New York Times Syndicate and artistic director of the New Punctuation Army, Inc. He is also a playwright whose produced works include A Gilbert & Sullivan Christmas Carol (1994) and Very Truly Yours, Gilbert & Sullivan (1997).