The Forum OBCR is 44 minutes.The Tenderloin OBCR, from a year-and-half before Forum and also on Capitol, was 52 minutes. The No Strings OBCR on Capitol, from two months before Forum, was 49 minutes. Back in 1957, Columbia pushed the envelope with 58 minutes for the West Side Story OBCR, with tempi speeded up on a number of song, and a big last-minute cut in Tonight, which Sondheim had to work out at the recording session. Someone had miscalculated the timing, and Bernstein couldn’t be at the session, so it fell to Sondheim to choose how to cut it.
Anyway, nothing about the LP sides would have prevented the Forum cast recording from being longer.
I am pretty sure that the tempi we hear on the Forum OBCR are pretty much the theatre tempi. Goddard Lieberson at Columbia liked to speed up the tempi on cast recordings, but I don’t think the Capitol people necessarily had the same policy. |
