The New Yorker:
.....at deeper level,[Andrew] Lloyd Webber’s memoir exposes a central fault line in the history of popular music. In the late fifties, not only was the “My Fair Lady” cast album the biggest seller of its time but spinoff jazz albums with musicians playing “My Fair Lady” material were huge sellers, too. Sinatra’s great albums of the mid-fifties were heavy with theatre songs. By 1964, all that had altered for good; a successful original-cast album went from the place where hits always happened to a place where they rarely did. When the Beatles and the rest arrived, the line between pop music and theatre music became almost absolute; the circumstance in which a Broadway musical was the natural home of a hittune began to break up more rapidly than anyone had thought possible, even though the previous connection had been so long-lasting that the Beatles felt obliged to play, as their second song before the American public, “Till There Was You,” from Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man.” An ironic sign of obeisance to a dying order.
Comment: True. I bought the OBC My Fair Lady and a Sinatra album together in Boston in the late 1950s.
