An Evening With Jerry Herman, Lee Roy Reams and Karen Morrow

This is one of those odd genre-bending CDs that falls between the cracks at most music stores — it's show music, to be sure, but it's also live and features a fair amount of light jazz improvisation, and a lot of reminiscing by Herman himself at the piano. Karen Morrow is most impressive in all of her big-voiced glory, though it is Lee Roy Reams who, for some reason, gets a good deal of the spotlight. As with most unretouched live recordings of this sort — even one done, as this was, in a studio setting — there's a certain lack of "presence" to some of the quieter moments, but it's also a superb showcase within an autobiographical context for the music out of Milk and Honey, Hello Dolly, Mame, and La Cage Aux Folles.