The Theater: Actors in the Living Room

Tickets to such Broadway hit musicals as South Pacific, Guys and Dolls and Call Me Madam are still harder to get than rush-hour seats in the Manhattan subways. But, for roughly the price of a ticket, a theater fan anywhere can hear the shows tunes just as they sound from the stage without stirring from the living-room sofa.

In ten years, original-cast recordings of Broadway scores have boomed into big business by appealing to 1) those who cannot see the shows, and 2) theatergoers who want something more than a playbill to remember them by. Columbia Records has sold 980,000 copies of South Pacific (at from $4.85 to $8.87 an album) for about $6,500,000. The Broadway show itself has grossed less than $5,000,000. Decca’s 1943 Oklahoma!, still going strong, heads the bestseller list at over 1,000,000 copies, and its new Guys and Dolls is selling faster than Oklahoma! did in its heyday.

Decca’s late president, Jack Kapp, fathered the original-cast musical recording with George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and his company has set the pace ever since (Carousel, Call Me Mister, Annie Get Your Gun). But the competition is furious. Producers’ royalties have shot up to 10% per record, and producers switch unpredictably to different labels as they bring out new shows. RCA Victor cinched the rights to Call Me Madam by financing the musicomedy for $225,000, but had to do without Star Ethel Merman, whose recording contract committed her to do the songs for Decca.

With too few new musical hits to feed a hungry demand, the leading companies have gone off in new directions. Columbia has fattened its current catalogue (Kiss Me Kate, Out of This World, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) by recording older shows in their original spirit, mostly with new performers: 1931’s The Bandwagon, 1934’s Anything Goes (both with Mary Martin). Awaiting release: 1940’s Pal Joey with the original’s Vivienne Segal, and 1934’s Conversation Piece with Author Noel Coward and Lily Pons. Decca is turning out record albums of straight plays with only minor cuts: T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and, soon to be issued, The Lady’s Not for Burning, which Poet-Playwright Christopher Fry conveniently wrote even more for the ear than the eye.