DOES MERRILY HAVE AN OUTSIDERS’ CHANCE? By Peter Filichia
Will the winner be THE OUTSIDERS or MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG?
We’re talking about the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album.
All right, there are four other nominees. But in the Charity-Begins-at-Home Department, we here at Masterworks Broadway – which recorded both THE OUTSIDERS and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG – are rooting for one or the other.
THE OUTSIDERS would seem to have the inside track; slightly more often than not, the musical that wins the Tony also captures the cast album Grammy. Since the award was first bestowed in 1959, 33 of the 65 Best Musical victors wound up winning both prizes.
So, will the Tony-winning THE OUTSIDERS soon make it 34 out of 66?
Well, you never know. MAME bested MAN OF LA MANCHA, which had won the Tony and would run two years longer. In 1993, the previous year’s revival of GUYS AND DOLLS had the votes right here to deny the Tony-winning CRAZY FOR YOU.
That brings up another point. Since 1986, when the Leonard Bernstein-conducted WEST SIDE STORY won, ten more studio or revival cast albums have copped the Grammy.
So, this year, will the Tony-winning revival of MERRILY be the 11th?
In a manner of speaking, THE OUTSIDERS and MERRILY have a bit in common. The former takes place exclusively in the 1960s, while MERRILY occasionally does, offering us five scenes that occur in that decade.
However, even when the two musicals’ time periods intersect, the scores never sound alike. They can’t.
THE OUTSIDERS is set where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain – Oklahoma! – so it has a country and rock feel. MERRILY’s scenes in the ‘60s are all New York, all the time, during Broadway’s Golden Age. As one of its lyrics goes, “It’s FUNNY GIRL, FIDDLER and DOLLY combined.”
So, while THE OUTSIDERS’ Jonathan Clay, Zach Chance and Justine Levine have their kids sing about “Friday at the Drive-In” in Tulsa, Stephen Sondheim has his young songwriters in a Manhattan penthouse displaying their song about a couple that had a “Good Thing Going.” While MERRILY’s Franklin Shepard likes “Growing Up,” some Outsiders fear that, young as they are, “Death’s at My Door.”
That these two musicals opened in the same Tony season was not necessarily a guarantee that they’d be competing for the Grammy in the same year. The Tonys have traditionally used March, April and even May for cutoff dates, while the Grammys have basically stuck to August. So, there have been many times when the Grammys have nominated musicals in one year while the Tonys honored them in two. The Best Musical Tony went to APPLAUSE in 1970 and then to COMPANY in 1971, but both vied for the 1971 Grammy in what was then called “Best Score From an Original Cast Show Album.”
Guess which musical won? Let’s put it this way: Stephen Sondheim was not at all sorry but considerably grateful for the results.
He may not have been as happy the following year, when GODSPELL’s cast album beat FOLLIES’. That will seem heretical to many, but one must wonder if the Grammy voters thought that the FOLLIES album was deficient because it was abridged and butchered to a single record.
(Probably not, but you never know…)
The irony is that long before FOLLIES was produced, it held presentations for record executives, and the representative from RCA Victor wanted his company to do it as a two-record set. His bosses thought that would be too expensive, so they passed.
And look what happened. The wrong wasn’t rectified until 1985, when FOLLIES IN CONCERT gave us so much of what we’d been missing.
And who was the enthusiastic RCA rep who wanted it in the first place? Stephen Schwartz, who was scouting for the company even before he wrote the score for GODSPELL. Had he got his wish and recorded a complete FOLLIES, would he have lost his GODSPELL Grammy?
Fun fact: Sondheim saw every one of his Broadway musicals receive at least one Grammy nomination. What, even ANYONE CAN WHISTLE, you say? Well, not the 1964 original cast album, no, but a nomination came by way of the 1995 concert.
Minority report: I prefer this later recording for, overall, the singing is better.
In any history of any awards, there are some surprises. Grammy cast album nominees of yore include JENNIE, REX, THE GRAND TOUR and the original 1981 MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG. None broke box-office records, but their recordings impressed enough to snag nominations.
By the way, we at Masterworks Broadway would be just as happy if THE OUTSIDERS and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG tied. Thus far, there has been only one dead heat in the category. In 1960 – in the one year that the category was called “Best Broadway Show Album” – a win went to GYPSY and … care to guess what else?
You’re pardoned if REDHEAD didn’t come immediately to mind. But that, indeed, was the one that pulled even with GYPSY.
Now, I like REDHEAD quite a bit. (I wrote the liner notes for the cast album’s CD reissue.) And I know that many have affection for a show that won six out of the seven Tony Awards for which it was nominated, including Best Musical (which, inexplicably, is something GYPSY can’t boast).
For that matter, Lonny Price, Charley Kringas on the first Grammy-nominated MERRILY, told me that he heard the REDHEAD Overture blaring out an open window while he was driving on a street… in Nebraska.
Nevertheless, I daresay that composer Albert Hague and lyricist Dorothy Fields would be among the first to admit that their score for REDHEAD – nicely sung by Tony winners Gwen Verdon, Richard Kiley and Leonard Stone – doesn’t match up with what Jule Styne and Sondheim delivered for GYPSY.
That year, when the category was called “Best Broadway Show Album,” non-musicals could compete. That opened the door for AGES OF MAN, a celebration of Shakespeare delivered by the illustrious John Gielgud.
How illustrious? He’s even mentioned in a MERRILY song. And for this show, he received an honorary Tony “for contribution to theatre for his extraordinary insight into the writings of Shakespeare.”
That Gielgud would also get a Grammy nomination would seem as unlikely as his directing a musical. But, as we were taught or reminded in A CLASS ACT (whose cast album should have received a Grammy nomination), Gielgud was the original director of the 1973 revival of IRENE (whose cast album should have also received a nod).
Well, you still have time to place your bets on which musical will win the 2024 Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album, for we won’t know who won until February 2, 2025. Perhaps if that had been the date on which the Grammys had announced the 2018 Best Musical Theater Album, GROUNDHOG DAY might have won.
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His new day-by-day wall calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY – 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
