John McGlinn

John McGlinn is an American conductor and musical theatre archivist. He has been one of the principal proponents of making "authentic" studio cast recordings of Broadway musicals written before 1943 (i.e. using the particular shows' original orchestrations and vocal arrangements). His first album was a recording of Gershwin overtures and dance music in their original orchestrations, released by EMI in 1987. He has made stereo recordings of the complete scores for "Show Boat" (for whom the original orchestrations were once thought lost), "Anything Goes ", "Brigadoon", "Annie Get Your Gun", "Kiss Me, Kate", and an obscure Jerome Kern musical, "Sitting Pretty" (no relation to any film made with that title). The three-disc, three-and-a-half hour "Show Boat" album, and the one disc "Brigadoon" album, have been especially acclaimed.

McGlinn's albums are nearly always even longer than the scores of the shows in question. He always includes musical underscoring from the show, as well as some dialogue, in addition to material deleted either in out-of-town tryouts or over several generations of stagings. His appendix to the "Show Boat" album includes original versions of scenes revised before the Broadway opening, as well as songs written especially for the 1928 London production, the 1936 film version, and the 1946 Broadway revival of the show. The most notable addition to the album is the inclusion of the complete version of the dramatic and tragic African-American lament "Mis'ry's Comin' Round", which Florenz Ziegfeld, who staged the original "Show Boat", ordered dropped from the score (presumably because it made the show too long, but actually because it made him uncomfortable). Rather than place it in the album's appendix section, McGlinn restored it to its rightful place, right at the beginning of the famous miscegenation sequence, which is also included on the album.

McGlinn began to make recordings of musicals from Broadway musicals shortly after the discovery of authentic manuscripts and original orchestrations of Broadway shows in a Secaucus, New Jersey Warner Bros. warehouse was made public in 1987. Once these materials were catalogued in the Library of Congress, it became possible to make recordings with them.

However, since about 1992 or so, McGlinn has not released any more complete recordings of scores from Broadway musicals, only compilation albums of songs from stage productions and films, most of them played and sung in their original arrangements.

He is said to have begun a project in which he was set to record the complete shows of Victor Herbert and Jerome Kern, respectively, but so far, none of these albums have appeared, except for "Show Boat" and "Sitting Pretty". Kern's "Have a Heart", and Herbert's "Babes in Toyland", were reported to be in the process of recording but remain unreleased as of now. [ [http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/5347 Babes in Neverland: Peter Filichia's Diary on TheaterMania.com] ]

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