Album Produced By...

Book excerpt: Just as Frank Sinatra had an additional and invaluable career as the great preservationist and evangelist of the American popular song (with particular focus on the Lost and Found), so author-actor-singer-director Bruce Kimmel has additionally served the cause of Broadway and Hollywood beyond measure, producing some of the most memorable vocalists of our time in recordings that give new life to music that might otherwise be forgotten, while renewing and revitalizing the theatrical canon with his impeccable taste and unerring musicality. In his usual engaging and endearing style, he at last gives us a first-hand view of his process. For this terrific chronicle, and for his immeasurable contribution to musical theatre, we can only give our most inadequate thanks. Rupert Holmes, Tony and Edgar award-winning playwright and novelist Bruce Kimmel's rollicking memoir, Theres Mel, Theres Woody, and Theres You, left his fans begging for more. Thankfully, the theatre gods are kind and answered our prayers. Actor, director, composer, playwright, novelist, film-maker...and good at all of them, Kimmel has reinvented himself more times than Madonna and had more lives than a cat. In Album Produced by, he now shape-shifts into what may be his greatest theatrical incarnationas the foremost album producer of theatre music in the last twenty-five years. Through time and labels, his amazing career fluctuates with more highs and lows than the sliding dials on a soundboard and is sweetened with the usual Kimmel witlaced raconteurism.Whether working with the greats (Carol Channing, Lauren Bacall, Dorothy Louden, Ann-Margret, to name a few) or promoting and often discovering the next big musical stars of Broadway, our intrepid hero battles lessthan- visionary bosses, broken promises, harried orchestrators, enraged engineers, the occasional disgruntled diva, and the mysterious crooner, Guy Haines. But he manages to defeat all obstacles and egos in his way, emerging triumphant to dance in divine syncopation with the glorious music he creates. To know the stories behind all those wonderful albums is to listen to them with fresh ears and a new appreciation of the talent, tears, and genius that went into them. Charles Edward Pogue, screenwriter of Dragonheart, DOA, & The Fly