Album Produced By...

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, There's Mel, There's Woody, and There's 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 incarnation-as 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