One positive result of the corporate mergers in the record business is that it gets easier to make comprehensive compilations, and the marriage of the show music vaults of Columbia and RCA Victor Records that resulted from the Sony BMG joint venture brings together two major repositories that used to be major rivals unlikely to cross-license anything. That makes possible, for example, an album like this one, that manages to include both "Tonight" from the Original Broadway Cast album of
West Side Story, released by Columbia, and "Do You Love Me" from the Original Broadway Cast album of Fiddler on the Roof, released by RCA Victor. Unfortunately (from a compiler's point of view), Sony BMG still hasn't merged with Universal, so the old Decca archives remain separate and the compilers have had to settle for recordings from Broadway revival casts for songs from Annie Get Your Gun, Oklahoma!, and Carousel. It may be, however, that they would have chosen those tracks anyway, since there seems to have been a decision to go for more recent, and therefore aurally superior, versions of the songs. Unquestionably, some of Broadway's most popular love duets are included, but another criterion seems to have been to make sure they weren't all old songs. So, in a collection otherwise devoted entirely to recordings from the '50s and '60s, at the end there are two from the late '90s. "All the Wasted Time" from
Parade is somewhat more angst-filled than its predecessors, but still fits in more or less. "Sailing" from
A New Brain is another story, since it really is more a song about the love of sailing than about love of another human being. It might have been better to stick to old-fashioned love. ~ William Ruhlmann