Album Produced By...

Just as Frank Sinatra had an additional and invaluablecareer as the great preservationist and evangelist of theAmerican popular song (with particular focus on theLost and Found), so author-actor-singer-director BruceKimmel has additionally served the cause of Broadwayand Hollywood beyond measure, producing someof the most memorable vocalists of our time in recordingsthat give new life to music that might otherwisebe forgotten, while renewing and revitalizing the theatricalcanon with his impeccable taste and unerringmusicality. In his usual engaging and endearing style, heat last gives us a first-hand view of his process. For thisterrific chronicle, and for his immeasurable contribution tomusical theatre, we can only give our most inadequate thanks. Rupert Holmes, Tony and Edgar award-winning playwright and novelistBruce Kimmel's rollicking memoir, Theres Mel, Theres Woody, and Theres You,left his fans begging for more. Thankfully, the theatre gods are kind and answeredour prayers. Actor, director, composer, playwright, novelist, film-maker...and goodat all of them, Kimmel has reinvented himself more times than Madonna and hadmore lives than a cat. In Album Produced by, he now shape-shifts into what maybe his greatest theatrical incarnationas the foremost album producer of theatremusic in the last twenty-five years. Through time and labels, his amazing career fluctuates with more highs and lowsthan the sliding dials on a soundboard and is sweetened with the usual Kimmel witlacedraconteurism.Whether working with the greats (Carol Channing, Lauren Bacall,Dorothy Louden, Ann-Margret, to name a few) or promoting and oftendiscovering the next big musical stars of Broadway, our intrepid hero battles lessthan-visionary bosses, broken promises, harried orchestrators, enraged engineers, theoccasional disgruntled diva, and the mysterious crooner, Guy Haines. But he managesto defeat all obstacles and egos in his way, emerging triumphant to dance in divinesyncopation with the glorious music he creates. To know the stories behind allthose wonderful albums is to listen to them with fresh ears and a new appreciationof the talent, tears, and genius that went into them. Charles Edward Pogue, screenwriter of Dragonheart, DOA, & The Fly