Recording Broadway

Recording Broadway: A life in Cast Albums is veteran producer Thomas Z. Shepard's first-person account of the making of fifty plus years' worth of show albums, featuring up-close-and-personal stories of his work with pretty much everyone who was anyone on Broadway, including Julie Andrews, Leonard Bernstein ("truly awesome but very complicated"), Sheldon Harnick ("as warm and decent as he was talented"), Barbara Cook ("one of my favorites"), Placido Domingo, Gregory Hines, John Kander, Fred Ebb, Danny Kaye, Angela Lansbury ("so gifted and so easy to be with and to work with"), Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters, Chita Rivera, Stephen Sondheim ("a genius, and very easily bruised"), Barbra Streisand ("as professional at 24 as any veteran I've ever worked with"), Andrew Lloyd Webber, and many more.

Alongside this unforgettable saga is the tale of Shepard's childhood as a very short piano prodigy on the middle-class streets of East Orange, New Jersey, and his emergence into the world as a recording producer of, first, classical music and then Broadway Original Cast recordings, Shepard has a unique voice, a striking combination of Broadway glitz, classical-music elegance and New Jersey street kid, and his book will be compelling even to someone not among the millions of Broadway lovers around the world for whom his recordings are a vital link to Broadway at its best.