By Mervyn Rothstein
28 Jun 2011

	Tommy Krasker and Philip Chaffin

Let's talk a little about you and your background — how PS Classics happened, how you came to be doing what you do.

TK: I think my story is like that character from Wonderful Town who comes to New York and wants to be a writer and then sings, "And since then I haven't written a word." I came to New York wanting to be a stage director, and have never done it! I worked on one Broadway show, the original Nine, as a rehearsal pianist — and I didn't have the stomach for it. There was this hostile undercurrent, and a lot of backstabbing, and finger-pointing — maybe it happens on most Broadway shows, maybe this one was unusual — but I was 22 or 23, and it freaked me out. I thought, "OK, I can't work in live theatre." I started working as an archivist — it was easier to work with dead people — and then I got really lucky: I was working for Mrs. Ira Gershwin and she started a recording project in the late 1980s and made me the record producer. We were going to record the old Gershwin musicals that predated the advent of the original cast recording. I had never been in a studio before — talk about learning on the job! But I discovered I was good at it, and it allowed me to work with actors in a way I had been trained to, still in a pressurized way — since studio dates are intense and grueling — but not in the ways that were very hard for me to stomach working on a Broadway show.

The Gershwin project closed down in the mid-'90s, but by then, I'd established myself as a record producer, and worked freelance for Nonesuch Records, and BMG Classics, and Philips Classics, doing cast albums and discs for solo artists like Dawn Upshaw and Audra McDonald and Mandy Patinkin. And sometime in the late '90s, I saw those opportunities start to evaporate: a lot of labels were eliminating or downsizing their Broadway divisions, and the folks who'd been hiring me weren't there anymore. Philip and I at the time were actually working on a solo disc for him, and we decided to self-release it in 2000, and suddenly, folks starting calling and writing us and saying, "We see you have a label. I want to do a CD."

And it was quite by chance, but suddenly we had a label, PS Classics, named for our two dogs, Please and Sumner. (They've both since passed away.) We were really filling a void, and that was never so apparent as in our third year in business, when, because of my relationship with Maury Yeston, whom I'd known for 25 years, we were encouraged to bid on the cast album for the revival of Nine, with Antonio Banderas — and we got it! We never thought we'd be doing cast albums on our label, but within the next few years, we were doing Fiddler and Assassins and Grey Gardens, and we had Grammy nominations and it's all been very surprising and gratifying and terrifying. We love the work we do — we don't take on any projects that we don't feel passionate about — but oh my God, what we've had to learn about the business side of running a label. We knew nothing. And these days, of course, the music business is changing so fast that the minute you master something, it's already obsolete!

	The Sweet Bye and Bye sheet music cover

So what's next?

TK: We have six albums coming out between June and August — a cast album of the Gershwins' Strike Up the Band, which lay unfinished when the Gershwin project ended; Sweet Bye and Bye; Jason Robert Brown's symphony for orchestra and actors, The Trumpet of the Swan; the Off-Broadway cast recording of A Minister's Wife; and solo discs from Kate Baldwin and Liz & Ann Hampton Callaway. They're all albums we love — I couldn't be more proud of what we're doing this year. You struggle every year not to — oh, I don't know, "sell out" is too strong a phrase — but not to take on albums for the wrong reasons. We vowed when we started this label that we'd never take on any album where we couldn't hold it up, at the end of the day, and say, "We love this. We feel it's as good as anything in our catalog." And I definitely feel that way about our 2011 releases.

As to what's next, I have no idea. Maybe a good rest! We don't plan far ahead. Folks are always surprised by the lopsidedness of our catalog: some years we do a lot of cast recordings, some years we do mostly solo albums. We do what interests us. Last year we did four Broadway shows; this year, that wasn't where our attention took us. As to what our next vintage recording will be: oh Lord, let's see how Sweet Bye and Bye does, and we'll talk! There are a lot of old musicals I'd still love to see recorded: one old Gershwin show, for sure, and an Arthur Schwartz musical. And Sweet Bye and Bye made me think about some other shows as well.

The challenge with Sweet Bye and Bye was to avoid restoring the show to the way it was "left," because by the time it ended its pre-Broadway tryout, the score was definitely at its worst. I had to go back and get inside Duke and Nash's heads, and figure out, when did they think the score was at its best — in other words, if they could have made this cast recording, what would they have wanted preserved? And it started me thinking about some other Broadway scores that have actually been recorded, but not as the authors originally wrote them. They too underwent huge overhauls from start to finish, and not, to my mind, for the better. It might be fun, if I could get the proper permissions, to take on one of those scores. Who knows?

(Merv Rothstein writes Playbill magazine's popular A Life in the Theatre column, which also appears on Playbill.com.)

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For more about PS Classics, visit PSClassics.com.