Great Broadway musicals must feature great songs, but not all the great songs are found in great musicals. That’s why I collect cast albums: There are obvious gems and hidden ones. To explore that range at the end of a generally fine and unusually eclectic Broadway season, I picked a song from every show that received a Tony Award nomination in any category. (The exception: “Pirates! The Penzance Musical,” which will record its New Orleans-inflected Gilbert and Sullivan score after the awards are doled out on CBS this Sunday.) Some of the songs are delicate, others brassy. Some jerk tears, others laughs. Some forward the show and others stop it cold. In any case, even if you never see them onstage, they all repay a deep listen.
‘Up to the Stars’ from ‘Dead Outlaw’
For most of its 100 minutes, “Dead Outlaw,” a death-dark comedy about a man who became a mummy, accompanies its posthumous picaresque with songs (by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna) in a genre you might call rockabilly grunge. But near the end, the palette radically changes, when a formerly secondary character emerges as the show’s perfect avatar. He is Thomas Noguchi, the real-life Los Angeles “coroner to the stars” from 1967 to 1982. In a hilarious yet philosophical number called “Up to the Stars,” filled with sparkling, macabre lyrics, he details his most famous cases and corpses in the finger-snapping Rat Pack style of Dean Martin. As Noguchi, Thom Sesma sells what may be the best number ever about buying the farm.
‘With One Look’ from ‘Sunset Boulevard’
Whatever you think of the storytelling in this adaptation of the great Billy Wilder movie, “Sunset Boulevard” includes some of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s most sophisticated music. Much of it is sung, of course, by the show’s leading character, Norma Desmond, a deluded, washed-up diva. In “With One Look,” we hear the drama of her contradictions: the fear (nervous strings), the nostalgia (think Puccini), the schmaltz, the fury and the glamour. Pulling them all together, the former Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger (heard here on the London cast live recording) beams each new feeling as if with a laser, commanding the audience to follow her into crazyland, complete with big bellowing high C at the end.
‘Where I Wanna Be’ from ‘Boop! The Musical’
Where would a Jazz Age “It Girl” find a home in contemporary New York City? That’s the unlikely question animating “Boop! The Musical,” based on the flapper cartoon of early talkies. The answer, naturally enough, is in a jazz club, and as delivered by the sensational Jasmine Amy Rogers in “Where I Wanna Be,” you may not believe the story, but you totally buy the feeling. The song’s driving, joyful music (by David Foster) and neatly cascading lyrics (by Susan Birkenhead) make the case that Betty really does belong here — if not on Broadway, then on your playlist.
‘They Just Keep Moving the Line’ from ‘Smash’
Understudies don’t usually get the best number. But in “Smash,” the comic backstager based on the television melodrama about a Marilyn Monroe musical, surprise is part of the agenda. Sung in the TV series by Ivy Lynn, who plays Marilyn, “They Just Keep Moving the Line” has now been given to Karen Cartwright, her loyal (and royally abused) standby. And what a gift it is: a song that with its infernally catchy melody, rousing build and dare-me triple rhymes bears comparison to the best of Kander and Ebb. As Karen, Caroline Bowman — a former standby for Elphaba and Norma Desmond — grounds it in the lived experience of frustrated hope, bringing the great number an additional aura of authenticity.
‘Lord Lay Your Hand on My Shoulder’ / ‘Ain’t No Man’ from ‘Swept Away’
Scores that consist primarily of songs from pre-existing sources are not eligible for Tony nominations. But if there were a category for repurposing such material, “Swept Away,” the musical about a 19th-century shipwreck and its survivors, would be (with “Smash”) a top contender. One of the show’s high points is in fact a mash-up of old and new, starting with the purpose-built “Lord Lay Your Hand on My Shoulder,” sung by the pious Big Brother (Stark Sands) as a Sunday hymn. It is immediately followed by, and then wonderfully blended with, the rollicking “Ain’t No Man,” from the Avett Brothers album “True Sadness,” sung by the cynical first mate (John Gallagher Jr.). Together, and with the ensemble of doomed seamen joining in, they perfectly establish the battle of philosophies that will be tested when the storm comes.
‘Never Fly Away’ from ‘Maybe Happy Ending’
To describe love as it rises and falls without banality, the great musicals must rely on metaphors: dancing, blossoms, ice cream, clowns. But what if the characters are robots? In “Maybe Happy Ending,” by Will Aronson and Hue Park, the apt and beautiful image is fireflies. After all, Claire (Helen J Shen) and Oliver (Darren Criss) are retired “helperbots” on different timelines toward obsolescence. When they take a road trip to an island off the coast of South Korea, they encounter a forest of the bioluminescent insects, which, unlike them, produce light “without ever being plugged in.” Over a swirling foundation of pizzicato strings, they sing of the creatures’ glowing tummies and apparent need to “get somewhere before the dawn.” The word “love” does not appear even once in the song, nor does it need to. It’s in every breath.
‘That Was Then, This Is Now’ from ‘Death Becomes Her’
The song that establishes the main character, especially in a comedy, has a lot of work to do. If there are two main characters, it’s even trickier, requiring balance and contrast as well as the usual checklist of virtues. The two songs near the start of “Death Becomes Her” (by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey) hit the bull’s-eye, first with “For the Gaze,” introducing the diva Madeline Ashton, and then with “That Was Then, This Is Now,” introducing her mortal frenemy, Helen Sharp. Madeline’s number is a laugh-out-loud portrait of showbiz narcissism disguised as pizazz, but Helen’s, sung by Jennifer Simard, is even more unusual: an up-tempo ode to schadenfreude. “Now I get to shove my happy love life in her face,” she sings to her fiancé. “She’ll choke when she sees how loved I am by you.”
‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’ from ‘Gypsy’
You could make a case for almost any song in “Gypsy,” with its blazing music by Jule Styne and prismatic lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. “Rose’s Turn,” the show’s 11 o’clock nervous breakdown, is justly analyzed like a Verdi aria. “You Gotta Get a Gimmick” is a master class in raunch and rhyme. Even the overture is a classic. But listening repeatedly to the cast album of the current revival, starring Audra McDonald, I was once again wowed by what the authors packed into “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” a song that, out of context, sounds like an upbeat “we can do it” number. In context, though, it’s devastating, revealing (at the Act I curtain) how a mother shifts her monumental ambition from one daughter to another, selling it as optimism. McDonald lets you hear how quickly and fully uplift becomes horror.
‘Dear Bill’ from ‘Operation Mincemeat’
There have seldom been unlikelier plots than that of “Operation Mincemeat,” a musical about the real British scheme to win World War II by planting deceptive papers on a corpse. Amid the show’s hectic farce, “Dear Bill,” heard here on the London cast recording, is a welcome respite. Having been assigned to accessorize the corpse with personal effects, the matronly Hester Leggatt (Jak Malone) writes a fake love letter from the dead man’s supposed girl back home. But what she writes isn’t so fake: In its prosaic yet incantatory stiff-upper-lip minutia about piano practice and talking to the roses — set to a haunting, halting waltz — the song makes us understand that she is writing from her own sad experience. “Why did we meet in the middle of a war?” she sings. “What a silly thing for anyone to do.” Be that as it may, it’s the most moving moment in the silliest musical on Broadway.
‘Dos Gardenias’ from ‘Buena Vista Social Club’
In “Dear Bill” a lover talks to flowers; in “Dos Gardenias,” a 1945 song by Isolina Carrillo, the flowers talk back. But beyond telling the beloved how much the singer feels, these gardenias are a kind of threat: If they die it will be because “tu amor me ha traicionado” (“your love has betrayed me”). The double-edged lyric, set to a beautiful bolero tune, makes “Dos Gardenias” a highlight of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club,” where it fittingly serves double duty. It is both a diegetic love song being recorded in a Havana studio by the singer Omara Portuondo (Natalie Venetia Belcon) and a portal to Omara’s much younger self (Isa Antonetti). Singing in gorgeous harmony, they suggest that it’s possible to betray even one’s own past.
‘Lucky’ from ‘Floyd Collins’
The (true) story of a man trapped in a cave in Kentucky in 1925, “Floyd Collins” is also about what happens aboveground, as a media circus comes to town selling falsehoods and infeasible dreams. Among the dreamers: Floyd’s sister, Nellie, recently home from a spell in a mental hospital. Where others see only disaster in Floyd’s predicament, this uncanny character, played by Lizzy McAlpine in the current Broadway revival, sees opportunity; in the song “Lucky,” by Adam Guettel, she tries to persuade her stepmother (Jessica Molaskey) to see opportunity too. But just as Floyd lies deep beneath the soil, something cold lies deep beneath this jaunty music, with its twangs, slaps, gulps and guitar harmonics. Only the unlucky need to dream of luck.
‘If I Were a Bird’ from ‘Real Women Have Curves’
Beneath the uplift of “Real Women Have Curves,” a musical about body acceptance and American aspiration, is a darker substrate: the threat of deportation. Among the undocumented workers in a small sewing factory in Los Angeles, the 19-year-old Itzel (Aline Mayagoitia) has the most to fear, having recently arrived from Guatemala. In the delightful “If I Were a Bird” (by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez) she sings to her new friend Ana (Tatianna Córdoba) about rising above “what seems so unfair.” (Immigration enforcers, Ronald Reagan and boys “who just wanna — you know” are high on the list.) The combination of serious and playful (the song does not neglect the scatological implications of airborne birds) turns a catchy tune into a perfect theatrical statement.
‘Beyond the Sea’ from ‘Just in Time’
In the jukebox biomusical “Just in Time,” Jonathan Groff plays Bobby Darin, whose hits are jimmied into place to tell his story. But the show, and the cast album, come into best focus when the songs tell the story of popular music itself. Among them, “Beyond the Sea,” part of the introductory sequence, stands out. What began in 1946 as a French ode to the ocean (“La Mer”) became, in 1959, a Darin hit about romantic longing; then, perhaps 30 years later, it became Groff’s own. (He first heard it, he says in the show, while “twirling in our mother’s heels in Pennsylvania Amish country.”) His singing and the terrific arrangement — with a padding bass gradually joined by drums, piano, trombone, reeds and the whole band — somehow encompasses that story, recapitulating the way music can move through time to find us, in diabolically catchy 12-bar increments.
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions.
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