1998 Sony/Columbia Broadway CD release of 1951 recording

After the original Broadway cast album became a viable commercial entity in the 1940s, Columbia Records executive Goddard Lieberson decided to assemble studio casts to record albums of songs from musicals that pre-dated the trend. Broadway star Mary Martin had been contracted to Columbia in the wake of the massive success of her show South Pacific (and its chart-topping Columbia cast album), and after she cut the solo album Mary Martin (1949), Lieberson had her head up studio-cast albums for George & Ira Gershwin's Girl Crazy from 1930, Dietz & Schwartz's The Band Wagon from 1931, Cole Porter's Anything Goes from 1934, and Rodgers & Hart's Babes in Arms from 1937. Lieberson was more concerned with getting good versions of a show's songs on disc than he was with respecting the characterisations on-stage. For Girl Crazy, he added two obscure but talented Broadway singers to join Martin: Eddie Chappell and Louise Carlyle. But he paid no attention to which characters had sung the songs originally ... But with a show like Girl Crazy, in which the songs had only a tangential relationship to plot and characters to begin with, this switching-around didn't matter much. What did matter was that Martin got to sing some prime Gershwin material and gave wonderful performances, while Carlyle and Chappell were fine. [This 1998 CD reissue added an alternate take of "But Not for Me" as a bonus track.]--William Ruhlmann, AMG

For complete review & track listing see: http://www.allmusic.com/album/girl-crazy-1951-studio-cast-bonus-track-mw0000269548

Used CD in Ex, near new condition. Stock photo