It’s only taken seventy years for On the Town to get a truly complete recording by a cast who had lived in the roles through an actual run of a production. But, like its long-suffering character of Pitkin, it and the public is used to having to “understand.” After all, its first recordings of original cast members putting down vocals for posterity meant only a handful of the numbers in the dark ages of the 78 rpm shellac records before the dark ages of the long-playing vinyl of the 1950s and beyond. It wasn’t until 1960 that key members of the original cast were reunited in a recording studio to create a “full-length” recording. Of course, it wasn’t really complete, given the limitations of space on discs of that day and the fact that this show has so much music, including lengthy ballet sequences for the story which itself was inspired by a ballet called Fancy Free. Over the years, there have been other recordings: three from London, a noble and quite thorough 1995 studio cast from That’s Entertainment Records (TER). The film soundtrack is anything but complete, the powers-that-were having decided that some of the songs were not what they wanted and ordering replacements. And the New York revivals in the decades of the 1970s and 1990s, despite impressive casts, did not result in cast albums. In the show, the characters sing, “Oh, well, we’ll catch up ‘Some Other Time.'” Some other time, at last, hooray, has come. We have a dynamic and dazzling two-disc set with the big and incidental songs and lots and lots of spectacular dance music that is delightful dynamite. Read more…