Every year on New Year's Day, another crop of recordings enters the public domain in Europe, where copyright extends for only 50 years, and labels like the U.K.'s Prism Leisure lose no time in getting out their own unlicensed versions of successful albums. January 1, 2006, freed up the recordings of 1955, among them the original Broadway cast album of
Silk Stockings, the stage musical adaptation of the Greta Garbo movie Ninotchka with songs by
Cole Porter, which concerns a Soviet official who falls in love in Paris. Prism Leisure's version of the album repeats the material from the RCA Victor Records release (still claimed for copyright in the U.S.) in reasonable sound quality. In the past, the reissue label has added to the value of its gray market releases by including useful bonus tracks, but this time only one is featured,
Sammy Davis, Jr.'s cover of the show's best-known song, "All of You." ~ William Ruhlmann