| re: Lonny Price answered this question at BroadwayCon! | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 10:13 pm EDT 08/18/24 | |
| In reply to: Lonny Price answered this question at BroadwayCon! - Showtunegal 08:44 pm EDT 08/18/24 | |
|
|
|
| That may be what Lonny Price said, but a couple of things are not accurate. First, it was RCA, not Sony. In any case, Sony was still Columbia in 1981. A few years later, it would be known as CBS and then later Sony. It would be quite some time before RCA/BMG and Sony two merged. The story as told in Sondheim & Co. is that Tommy Valando, Sondheim's music publisher, and Thomas Z. Shepard, at that time a vice president at RCA, went to Bob Summer, at that time the president of RCA, to urge him to make the cast recording, and Summer gave it the green light. I have read somewhere about Prince going to RCA and telling them they would never get another Prince show, not another Sondheim show. I don't know how Prince could tell RCA that they would never get another Sondheim show. Sondheim would have had to tell them that, although I suppose Prince could have conveyed the message. But I think in 1981 RCA would have been more concerned about not getting any future Prince shows than about not getting any future Sondheim shows. I suppose it may be right that the reasoning behind the prominent Sondheim photo was to promote the show as a Sondheim show, but in 1981 would that many people have recognized Sondheim? And wouldn't most everyone who recognized Sondheim have already been inclined to buy it with or without his photo on the cover? So if that was the reasoning, it seems to me kind of questionable reasoning. In any case, not long after of the release of the recording, there was an article in Newsday stating that 40,000 copies had been sold in less than a month, comparable to the numbers for the cast recordings of 42nd Street and Sophisticated Ladies. Also that RCA expected it to be a big album in New York, but they were surprised by the orders for more copies in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas. It was proving to be decidedly a bigger seller than they had expected or hoped. |
|
| reply | |
|
|
|
| Previous: | re: Lonny Price answered this question at BroadwayCon! - WaymanWong 04:16 am EDT 08/20/24 |
| Next: | re: Lonny Price answered this question at BroadwayCon! - WaymanWong 04:02 am EDT 08/20/24 |
| Thread: |
|
Time to render: 0.024364 seconds.