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There has been quite a crop of 'em: ten thus far if you include the three scores that were recorded and released prior to the Broadway production: Billy Elliot, Irving Berlin's White Christmas and [title of show], which were previously reviewed in this column; two of them with casts, and orchestras, that did not participate in the Broadway edition.

The giant of the year, and the winner of ten Tony Awards including Best Musical, is BILLY ELLIOT [Decca Broadway B0006130]. This album was recorded in 2005 when the show first opened in London; as has become the norm with West End superhits, the powers that be are content to have us simply buy the original and disregard the fact that these are not the people we saw and loved on 45th Street. Tony Awards went to the three Billys (sharing one award) and featured actor Greg Jbara. These gentlemen now go down in the record books, but if you didn't happen to see them during their main Stem stints — which, if the show runs twenty years or so, will account for a bare fraction of the total performances — you will not have the chance to hear any of them.

Producer Kevin McCollum joined with various partners to transfer the unconventional musical Rent from an Off-Broadway non-profit venue to on; followed the same path for the similarly unconventional Avenue Q; and transformed the similarly unconventional In the Heights from an unsuccessful Off-Broadway production into yet another award-winning Broadway hit. He seems to like to take the unconventional path, as evidenced by another venture. IRVING BERLIN'S WHITE CHRISTMAS [Ghostlight 7915581225] was contrived to exploit the holiday season by mounting multiple seasonal productions in major cities across the land. They started at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco in November 2004, and the succeeding years have seen production in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Boston, Detroit and elsewhere. It wasn't until the fourth season that White Christmas braved New York, home of the Rockettes and other winter amusements. It's not yet clear if the show will become an annual tradition. The cast album features Brian d'Arcy James, an important element in three musicals of 2008-09 although he ultimately appeared on Broadway in only one.

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The first big musicals of the season — "big" in comparison to [title of show], anyway — were A Tale of Two Cities (which unsurprisingly went unrecorded) and Jason Robert Brown's 13 [Ghostlight 8-4413]. The creators of the latter seemed to be thinking of all those teenage girls who flocked to Wicked and, to a lesser extent, Legally Blonde. There's an audience for you; if you fill the cast of your Broadway musical with bonafide teenagers and build the plot around a Bar Mitzvah — an exotic occurrence across most of the country but a familiar event among Broadway-going New Yorkers — you've got it made, right? And that should bring in the teenage boy audience too, no? Along with all those grandparents. (Let it be added that a fair share of New York area 13-year-olds have five or six grandparents.) Well, it didn't and it wasn't and 13 was soon gone despite the efforts of Mr. Brown, who is a composer not to be overlooked.

The biggest show of the year, in a physical sense, was SHREK THE MUSICAL [Decca Broadway B0012627]. Not from the Disney house of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, but the same idea aimed at the same market. (Notice how I say the same market, and not the same audience?) Jeanine Tesori, the talented composer of Caroline, or Change, had the afore-mentioned Brian d'Arcy James in the title role, along with such accomplished entertainers as Sutton Foster, Christopher Sieber, John Tartaglia and Daniel Breaker. Most of them, alas, were all too covered in foam, latex and greenstuff.

The season's special events were headlined by LIZA'S AT THE PALACE [Hybrid HY20053], which came to the CD shelf on two discs. Liza fans loved it, naturally enough; those who weren't most probably didn't. Let it be said that Ms. Minnelli's salute to godmother Kay Thompson was an entertainment infinitely superior to her prior attempt, the haphazard 1999 affair entitled Minnelli on Minnelli. Continued...