I am interested in cataloguing live musical theater casts but there is no guidance currently in the style guidelines. I suppose it would look something like..
Wonderful Town Cast (Original Broadway production)
These would then be related to their associated theatrical runs as either a tour by relationship (for a touring cast) or, i guess, a residency? for a broadway cast.
Currently the guidelines about casts seem more geared towards releases where ensemble cast artists are discouraged.
However, I think it’s fairly natural to think of an artist as being a member of a Broadway cast in a specific role for a specific period of time.
I checked today to see how many of these “cast” artists currently exist in the database, this is what I was able to find.
Of course most of these artists point to the special purpose artist [theatre]
This is essentially a various artist entity that collects miscellaneous credits. I don’t think what I am trying to do at this point would require a re-write of the theater recording guidelines. I am interested primarily in cataloguing live productions, but because musical soundtracks are almost always associated with a live production, this is a good indicator of potential artists.
I think the first step would be coming up with a consistent way for formatting the artist entity name.. we can go ahead and borrow from the current theater disambiguation comment for consistency… and I think clearly distinguishing the musical title would be helpful…
The Cast of “Wonderful Town” (1953 original Broadway cast)
The Cast of “Wonderful Town” (2003 Broadway revival cast)