SYCAMORE TREES Cast Recording Featuring Marc Kudisch, Judy Kuhn & More Out This Month

PS CLASSICS will release the original cast recording of Ricky Ian Gordon’s autobiographical musical Sycamore Trees at all digital and streaming sites on Friday, August 30. A special limited edition of 250 CDs will follow on Friday, September 20. Released on the heels of Gordon’s acclaimed memoirs, Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera, the album – featuring Broadway veterans Farah Alvin, Marc Kudisch, Judy Kuhn, Jessica Molaskey, Matthew Risch, Diane Sutherland, and Tony Yazbeck – offers Gordon’s musical and dramatic take on his tumultuous upbringing and early adulthood. The album is currently available for preorder at Amazon, and sound clips can be heard at the PS Classics website.
 
Sycamore Trees premiered in 2010 at Virginia’s Signature Theatre, winning multiple Helen Hayes awards, including the Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play or Musical, but no studio recording was made at the time. Fortunately, original sound designer Matt Rowe recorded excerpts from a performance for archival purposes; now, enormous advances in audio technology – and the willingness of members of the original cast to come briefly into the studio some 14 years later to fill in gaps that lay unrecorded – have allowed that “board mix” to be transformed into a genuine cast album: one that reflects both the spontaneity and suppleness of a live performance and the precision and expansiveness of a studio mix. Sycamore Trees is the fifth recording of Gordon’s work to be released by PS Classics, following the opera The Grapes of Wrath, the musicals My Life with Albertine and Dream True and the song cycle Only Heaven.
 
The orchestrations are by Tony Award–winner Bruce Coughlin; Fred Lassen conducts the eight-piece orchestra, with Andrew Resnick at the piano. The original production was directed by Tina Landau, and featured a book by Gordon and Nina Mankin. The new album was produced by Tommy Krasker and Bart Migal, with audio restoration by Migal, and was made possible by the support and generosity of the Ted & Mary Jo Shen Charitable Gift Fund, with additional funding provided by So-Chung Shinn.
 
Gordon comments: “Having this original cast recording being born into the world 14 years after its premiere is like getting the best birthday present of all time. It was so far away from anything I ever thought possible, this incredible cast, these amazing players. My gratitude for all that has been done to make this happen – to everyone who said yes, to everyone who supported it, to all who worked on it, and, of course, to my lifelong friend Tommy Krasker – is infinite, immeasurable.”
 
Tommy Krasker, co-founder of PS Classics, comments: “Philip [Chaffin, co-founder of PS Classics] and I were fortunate to see a performance of Sycamore Trees in 2010. We wanted to record it then, but it was such a crazy time for us: we were doing live albums with Kate Baldwin and the Callaway Sisters, and we had already committed to recording A Minister’s Wife and Death Takes a Holiday off-Broadway. We just couldn’t manage it. Over the years, Ricky and I lamented the fact that we’d been unable to produce an original cast album – especially with that amazing group of actors. But this year, when plans for Ricky’s autobiography started to materialize, he asked me to take another listen to the Sycamore Trees live recording and see if anything could be done. Needless to say, audio technology has advanced dramatically in the last 15 years – the last few years, especially. Fifteen years ago, if you had a “board mix” of a musical – a recording never intended for public consumption – all you could do with it was stamp “recorded live” on the packaging, and hope the listener excused the noises, the glitches, the cavernous theatre sound, the laughter that covered key lyrics. But now, new technology enabled us to remix and refine it: to take these glorious performances and orchestrations and give them a real studio sheen. I won’t pretend it sounds exactly as it would have if we had recorded in the studio – but for technology this new, I was amazed how close we were able to get. The audio restoration was spearheaded by my co-producer Bart Migal, and as he does on every recording we do together, he made magic. Sycamore Trees is such an important work, I’m glad we finally had the opportunity to release a proper recording of it.”

Sycamore Trees – Track Listing

1. Let There Be Light
2. Ours
3. The Last Time I Saw Him
4. Sycamore Trees
5. Pigeons
6. Poem
7. “Haunted, a poem”
8. “The dinner table”
9. My Mother Is a Singer
10. I Gotta Get Outta Here
11. Maybe a Work of Art
12. I Don’t Know What to Write
13. I Don’t Know What to Write/I’ll Get Clean
14. Two Men
15. Father’s Song
16. Self-Help
17. Watercolor
18. Healing
19. Far Away