Music Recording Equipments

OK,
IM so happy that I have the Internet and I was able to find a bootleg CD of the entire OBC (its 2cds).

Listing to this CD made me a little upset. Its not the “Concert Cast” it is a Studio Cast. None of what is on the CD happened in the concert I think the concert was Soooo much better.

Im gonna start with the cast.

1.Audra Mcdonald – she was great in concert but on the cd I was like WHAT THE HELL she made the show Opera. No Soul at all she seemed like she wasn’t felling the music.

2. Heather Headley – Heather tried to make her voice sound like Loretta Devine but it wasn’t working. It is so annoying.

3.Lillias White – I’d Like to ask her WHAT HAPPENED? She will always be Jennifer Hollidays “Understudy” I loved her in concert “And IM telling you” was great but not on this cd.

All the men in the show are great.

I think people are giving this cd 5 stars because they have waited so long for the Whole show.

If you want to compare the two CDs you cant Because the OBC will always be better.

When I got this cd I turned the volume up all the way cause I thought I was gonna jam. WHERE Is the Orchestra?

Did I buy the wrong CD?
Sounds like they recorded this with Mono

This cd sounds like the RENT Karaoke.

Please Pray that this Summer DREAMGIRLS WITH Jennifer Holliday will be recorded.

Im going to make petition for that.

But this is just my opinion you spend 20 something dollars for it and be the judge.
Rating: 1 / 5

ok, i think everyone was cast well for this performance, there’s always the risk for holes in live performances that are not formally performed in a theater setting (vs a “concert” setting)and there are quite a few in this one.

lillias white was great as effie melody white, but had some serious trouble with “and i’m telling you, i’m not going” ugh, ran out of breath. i really thought she was going to have an asthma attack, i felt her pain ! as a sassy character, she was excellent in terms of acting, very much outspoken, but the singing, a mix of well oiled and rusty.

heather headley as lorrell was good, great acting and perfect timing, but went way off kilter in some of her notes, like a train who’s horn blows but then totally changes to a different sound. her “ain’t no party” was a little too excited, and it took away from the power of her voice.

audra mcdonald was good as deena, excellent actress, got a little winded in between but she was good as deena. the intense exchange of emotions of audra, lillias and heather leading up to the ousting of effie was fantastic.

for the men, cc’s role, sung by darius de haas was almost flawless, great job, curtis taylor jr, excellent by norm lewis,

but james thunder early? billy porter must have blown his voice completely out before the performance, there’s a difference between singing and screaming. when he screamed that hideous “i’m an original curtis !” i didn’t think cut off male entertainer, i thought drag queen, very flamboyant, not really good for that role and his voice was bad, i think he must have strained it and lost it for real, i felt bad for the guy but this is show business, if you sing bad, you sing bad, it’s the luck of the draw i guess. i’ve heard great things about his voice so i’m convinced he had lost it, and i’m not sure is his character was meant to be so flamboyant or not since i never saw the original show.

i liked the score and soundtrack, and there were many good moments in this concert, but it could have been alot better. and for all the money i hear that the people had to pay for this gala (and i hear it was quite a bit), they could have gotten a somewhat cleaner show.
Rating: 1 / 5

Henry Krieger vies only with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Frank Wildhorn as a Broadway composer who inspires the most admiration with the least talent. People cherish DREAMGIRLS because it brings soul and funk to Broadway, but any number of people who wrote for the Spinners or Gladys Knight could have done much better, writing truly memorable songs and really pointed lyrics. DREAMGIRLS seduces by default only. It camouflaged a hack score with brilliant staging, a spicy concept, and great performers.

Thus the idea that the score begged for a full reading has always been more a truism than a truth — and expanded to two CDs, we hear the thin, hokey pastiche that the score always was. Krieger followed DREAMGIRLS with THE TAP DANCE KID, a justifiably forgotten score with not a single memorable song, and his recent SIDE SHOW is esteemed because of its subject matter, not the incessantly paint-by-numbers music.

Thus what we have been properly waiting for in a full recording of DREAMGIRLS was a great RENDITION of it, because the material by itself doesn’t add up to much. And unless you are so taken by the sheer existence of our one soul/funk book musical that its quality is beside the point (in which case, okay) or you have heard the original album so often that it’s part of your blood (again, okay), then taken by itself, this double CD just ain’t no party.

As for the men, for example, any number of black male performers, making their bread and butter doing stock performances of AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’ , could score with such easy, obvious material. James Brown imitations, “Billy Dee” depressed-larynx “Baby, you’re all I need” routines — this isn’t hard stuff. DREAMGIRLS is about the women.

And here, one problem is, of all things, Audra, as many reviewers here note. She is overall a fabulous, celestial performer; I cherish her in RAGTIME and MARIE CHRISTINE like any other show fan and follow her every move. Thank God for her. But the simple truth is that she is too contained and racially assimilated a lady to convincingly portray — let’s face it — Diana Ross. She hits all of her marks — but this is no working class gal on the way up, period. There is a certain something that you have to be born to, no questions asked.

Heather Headley, always leaping off of any recording, is great, and Lilias White in my view thoroughly matches Jennifer Holliday. Spending 20 years listening to the original recording — and knowing about Holliday’s rocky times — one is tempted to consider her unbeatable, but really we are dealing with equal variants here. White’s preciousness is summed up by one moment — listen to her send a shiver up your spine with that one howl during her appointed response early in “Fake Your Way to the Top” — that’s just heaven speaking, period.

But then really, even with these great contributions, we find that even a great RENDITION of this thing can only go so far these days. The fact remains that 20+ years have gone by. Black women tearing up Broadway is no longer a novelty (none of these three women have exactly hurt for work these days), nor is modern pop any longer a brave gesture on the Great White Way (whereas DREAMGIRLS came along only about ten years after HAIR!). Thus today DREAMGIRLS can’t coast on boldness or freshness — we evaluate it as, simply, a piece.

And as such, it’s a movie-of-the-week set to, mostly, dishwater music, put across by people capable of addressing much richer material even of an accessible variety. One even misses, sometimes, the up-close studio quality of the original recording, since this at least gave the music an immediacy and fatness that the concert feeling of the recording here cannot provide — four-chord tunes set over 45-RPM beats suffer when recorded to sound like the orchestra did in the FOLLIES recording of 1985.

This recording will do. But I wish somebody would do a double CD of THE GOLDEN APPLE, or, perhaps more à propos, HOUSE OF FLOWERS or Duke Ellington’s QUEENIE PIE. Giving DREAMGIRLS the treatment is a gesture and good business; giving it to real works of art would speak to the ages.
Rating: 3 / 5