The 67th annual Grammy Awards are scheduled to take place on Feb. 2, 2025. And while that may seem far away, the road to the Grammys has already begun. The awards body’s submission period is currently open for recordings released between Sept. 16, 2023 and Aug. 30 2024. Now through Aug. 30, the Recording Academy is accepting entries for 94 awards across 11 fields of music.
Though the Tony Awards ceremony is certainly Broadway’s biggest night, the Grammy Awards offer another opportunity to recognize theatrical artistry — primarily of cast albums. The category Best Original Cast Album (Broadway or TV) was presented at the very first Grammy Awards in 1959. (The prize went to Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man.”) The category has changed names over the decades — Best Broadway Show Album, Best Show Album (Original Cast) and Best Musical Cast Show Album among them. But since the 47th Grammys in 2005, the category has been known as Best Musical Theater Album.
But that’s not the only category that welcomes entries from musical theater. In June 2024, the Recording Academy revised the criteria for the Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album category. Starting this year, it will recognize “excellence in albums consisting of a type and style of song and/or performance that cannot properly be intermingled with present forms of pop music,” hence “traditional.” Albums of new performances of tunes from such sources as the Great American Songbook or, say, an album of songs from various musicals, are now eligible. Think of past records like “The Jonathan Larson Project” or Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal’s “Acoustically Speaking - Live at Feinstein’s 54 Below.”
“The intention was to be more inclusive of those albums that kind of ride the line,” said Shelly Maree, genre manager for musical theater at the Recording Academy. “Ultimately, if they don’t fit in the category of Musical Theater Album, they might have a home [in Traditional Pop] that’s just as healthy and visible.”
“We’re seeing a huge resurgence of [these kinds of] albums,” Maree continued. “A lot of people think of ‘trad pop,’ they think of Tin Pan Alley, that old Frank Sinatra sound, but it’s so much more than that.”
But how do rule changes like this happen? How are albums deemed eligible and categorized? Who votes to crown the Best Musical Theater Album and what are they looking for?
As the genre manager, Maree is the staff liaison between the musical theater community and the official body of the Grammys. Here, she breaks it all down.
