Forums / Rules Meeting / [ ] Broadway casts etc.

[ ] Broadway casts etc.

Bloopy · 16 replies

[ ] Broadway casts etc.
Bloopy
6 years ago
Dec 10, 2017 - 7:54am
I've started looking at Broadway/musical soundtracks, treating them like any other soundtrack or multi-band compilation where the crediting allows. They make some quite ridiculous links via the more obscure performers with no solo tracks.

However, the trouble starts when you get something like 'Disgustingly Rich' on Side 2 Track 1 here, credited simply to "Entire Company":
[www.discogs.com]

Does that now give us a band called Entire Company? Sometimes this dilemma is handled on Discogs by prefixing the band name with the title in double quotes, eg.
[www.discogs.com]
"The Pajama Game" Entire Company

So maybe we could do the same and have a band called:

"Ben Bagley's Rodgers And Hart Revisited Vol. II" Entire Company


In this particular case I guess I can circumvent it by going with the final track which is credited to "Bobby Short, Blossom Dearie, Entire Company". It falls under rule 6c because Bobby and Blossom are members of the "Entire Company".
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Mark
6 years ago
Dec 11, 2017 - 2:36am
Perfect timing. Just today I was looking at a record with crediting examples along both of these lines. I wondered if there is a good way to credit them.

Could someone argue that Entire Company or The Cast (which I was seeing on my record today) are merely descriptive terms and that no bands are being credited in those instances?
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Bloopy
6 years ago
Dec 11, 2017 - 6:46am
It's crediting a group, but informally I suppose. It's similar to rock bands writing "The Band Is:". Or a band where not all members play on all tracks crediting a specific track to "The Whole Band". To find the actual name of the band, you have to look elsewhere, eg. front cover.

A musical's front cover might not be helpful though. The Pajama Game cover isn't, so it's hard to come up with anything better than "The Pajama Game" Entire Company.

I imagine some musicals don't even have crediting at the individual track level. But either way they might have something useful on the front cover such as:

Name Of Musical · Original Cast Recording

Then you could read the band name as being "Name Of Musical · Original Cast".
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Mark
6 years ago
Dec 12, 2017 - 3:13pm
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Bloopy
6 years ago
Dec 13, 2017 - 4:28am
I thought it was ok, but that was before the Duane Eddy entry got updated:
[www.bandtoband.com]

Are you going to show us this record you were looking at which credits "The Cast"?
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Mark
6 years ago
Dec 13, 2017 - 3:13pm
I've been trying for years to get John Denver into the database. [www.bandtoband.com] shows the song-specific band credits for [www.bandtoband.com]

I've never been quite convinced about our entry.

I can't believe I already asked you about that release. I'm getting old.
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Mark
6 years ago
Jan 5, 2018 - 5:18am
I think overall that your idea is a good one and that it's better to address this head-on than to try the circumvention trick. What's the least clunky and most intuitive way to do it?

It seems to me that we should use whatever group language (like "Entire Company" or "The Cast") is actually used on the release.

Regarding the main part of the band name, I think you're on a good path for musicals (although I'm not totally convinced that we need the quotation marks), but how would you handle my example? "The Cast" language doesn't explicitly refer to The Muppets. But it seems ugly to interpret it as referring to the title.
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Bloopy
6 years ago
Jan 10, 2018 - 10:19pm
This Discogs entry agrees with track by track credits for John Denver & The Muppets. Although, it's debatable as to whether it got the last track correct, or if the names The Great Gonzo, Miss Piggy & Animal were simply labelling the picture:
[www.discogs.com]
Since one track is credited simply to "The Cast" instead of "John and The Cast", it seems Denver isn't a member of "The Cast". Doesn't sound like he's on this:
[www.youtube.com]

John and The Cast is non-connective because there are tracks credited to "John". His other collaborators have prior solo, including Robin on this:
[www.discogs.com]
and Scooter on the 2nd track here:
[www.discogs.com]

You might be able to argue that "John, Scooter and The Cast" is a collab with a new rule 6c band called "Scooter and The Cast". But that's as messy as what I was trying to pick at here:
[www.bandtoband.com]

As for having a band called "The Cast", I think it falls under what I was saying before about trying to look elsewhere to find the actual name of the band. In this case "The Cast" by itself is just an informal name for a band name found on the front cover: The Muppets.
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Mark
6 years ago
Jan 14, 2018 - 12:02am
In one of your examples there are credits for both "Entire Company" and "Bobby Short, Blossom Dearie, Entire Company" even though Bobby and Blossom are members of the "Entire Company" elsewhere.

In my example there are credits for "The Cast" and "John, Scooter, and The Cast" even though Scooter is included in "The Cast" elsewhere. (And I doubt that John Denver intended to be known simply as "John" for a brief moment of his career, only on a few songs on one record.)

In two of our examples, the song-specific credits don't appear on the center labels. The song-specific credits in all three of our examples are all over the place.

It seems to me that we could handle your musicals cleanly by going with the overall group and ignoring the very specific credits about who is singing, and we could use a name along the lines of what you proposed above. It would be somewhat like what we discussed in [www.bandtoband.com]
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Bloopy
6 years ago
Jan 14, 2018 - 7:49am
I think a band called "Bobby Short, Blossom Dearie, Entire Company" (using text that appears on the release) is a hell of a lot cleaner than a band called Ben "Bagley's Rodgers And Hart Revisited Vol. II" Entire Company which doesn't exactly appear on the release in that configuration. So I'd leave that one as is.

Though I'm not opposed to leaving The Muppets collab as entered either. But if we connected John Denver some other way then it'd be interesting to document that he has solo tracks on the thing. Arguably he could keep John Denver as primary name since that's how we treat multi-band compilations, but it'd seem like cheating to connect the collabs.
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Mark
6 years ago
Jan 15, 2018 - 2:34am
I agree that "Bobby Short, Blossom Dearie, Entire Company" is cleaner than that other thing, but if you're willing to recognize Entire Company as a legitimate component of that band, then why not allow it to stand on its own when it also appears alone on the release? Is it just because we might then end up with 999 bands called Entire Company?
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Bloopy
6 years ago
Jan 15, 2018 - 5:55am
Yeah, though "not allow" is a bit strong. I was just looking for a way to make it look nicer when it does stand alone.

The name "Bobby Short, Blossom Dearie, Entire Company" is comparable to [So And So] & Friends bands (except with [So And So] being one of the Friends). It'll never happen, but if all the groups of friends had a habit of then going away and releasing tracks as Friends, we might look for a better way to distinguish all the bands called Friends too.
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pkasting
6 years ago
Feb 20, 2018 - 7:24am
As someone with some experience acting in musicals -- crediting to "Bobby Short, Blossom Dearie, Entire Company" is a way of saying "the whole cast sang on this song, but Bobby and Blossom sang leads/solos". It simply calls out roles, in a different-but-equivalent way that many liner notes will call out the specific musical roles played on individual songs. So this doesn't create a new group.

But to the original question: "entire company" is a descriptive phrase and not a name. It would be invalid to credit a release to it. Generally musicals aren't establishing the cast as a "band" and I'm uncomfortable listing them on this site at all if they don't have a specific name. But I imagine I'm the only one who feels like that since several years back everyone else seems to have jumped on the train of listing any old kind of "set of people who created sonic output" as a band here. So I would establish a consistent naming scheme for all musicals and cast recordings without an explicit name for the cast; and my suggestion would be "<Name of Musical> Cast". So e.g. "The Sound Of Music Cast". If there is evidence on the recording that this is a specific cast that disambiguates from others (e.g. "Broadway Cast", "Original Cast", "25th Anniversary Cast") then list those instead of just "...Cast".

The album is then viewed as cohesively released by the whole cast, even if some tracks lack some cast members and others call out specific members. So e.g. the Les Miserables cast recordings would not have tons of different lineups even though the majority of the songs are solos by one cast member or another.

I think these rules reflect reality better than trying to slavishly stick to wordings used on the album, which will be all over the place.
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MAXWELL
4 years ago
Aug 22, 2019 - 7:56am
I envision a few musicals don't have crediting at the individual track level.
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