ALEX LACAMOIRE
PAST WINS best musical show album (In the Heights, 2009), best musical theater album (Hamilton, 2016; Dear Evan Hansen, 2018), best compilation soundtrack for visual media (The Greatest Showman, 2019)
NOMINATED THIS YEAR best musical theater album (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)
I remember being conscious of the Grammys when I was working on Wicked. I played piano on the original cast album, and I remember the Grammy win and being proud, but it was a different thing when Heights was nominated and we eventually won. That show was scrappy in the best way, and here was some shine on it — like, “Oh, wow! People know about us!’
Cast albums in general are vital, particularly because that’s how a lot of people learn about musicals. When you do the math and you take a Broadway house that fits somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people per performance, there’s only a certain degree of reach you’re going to have. When you record a cast album, suddenly everyone across the world can learn about what you’ve been up to. Most people become familiar with the album before they see the show — case in point was Hamilton. [When] the album came out, the number of people that had seen the show was in the tens of thousands — and then we suddenly make the jump to millions of streams.
The fact that the Grammys acknowledge our medium, it gives more clout to what we do. It says what we do has a place. It makes us feel like we have a home in the community of artists and musicians. What I love about the Grammys is that it’s community-based: It’s voted on by peers, it’s nominated by peers, and that group keeps growing. And working to make the voting base more diverse brings more diversity to the kind of records nominated. Being Cuban-American, working on the things I’ve worked on, that helps put light on things that may not have gotten it before.
Those of us who work in musical theater, we always talk about how we’re a bunch of misfits, we’re laughed at.
But we’re strong, we’re resilient, and we’re passionate about what we do. To be welcomed in categories alongside people who are so well known, it gives us a little pep in our step.