Conventional wisdom is difficult to alter, but here goes: contrary to what has been widely written, Jesus Christ Superstar was not the first concept recording of a musical to spawn a wildly successful hit show. Sorry Andrew, sorry Tim.

It may well be that JCS was the first concept album to be the basis for a hit Broadway show, but the songs that formed the core of a hugely popular international success were first heard on vinyl in 1966 and landed on stage in New York in March 1967, for a run that would last for 1,597 performances, more than four years before the biblically-based musical. That show – and feel free to start singing the title tune now – was You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.

Composer Clark Gesner, who had previously written songs for television’s Captain Kangaroo children’s program, wrote the songs for YAGMCB with permission from Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz. According to Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis, Gesner’s first songs, the title track and “Suppertime,” kicked off conversations about a televised animated musical revue. Those plans were superseded by what became A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, the first animated Peanuts special, with memorable musical soundtrack by Vince Guaraldi, but not a musical under any conventional definition.

Consequently, Gesner’s songs first reached the ears of listeners, predominantly young listeners and their parents, in the autumn of 1966 when the 10-track, 25-minute concept recording of You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown was released on King Leo, the children’s division of MGM Records, a major label at the time Records (later issues were on Metro Records). It was billed as “an original MGM album musical” on the cover. The cast was Gesner as Linus, Barbara Minkus as Lucy, Bill Hinnant as Snoopy, and as Charlie Brown, actor-comedian-raconteur Orson Bean. Bean was had already appeared in eight Broadway shows, his most recent credit at the time being The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd.

Part of the reason the King Leo release has likely been lost to time was how quickly it was supplanted by the original cast recording – there was less than six months between the two – and as they were both released by MGM, no doubt marketing focused on the latter as soon as it was on record store shelves. Yet the 1966 concept recording is a fascinating document for fans of the musical, because it reveals how fully formed much of the score was before a stage incarnation was actually in the works. As a note for those who own the CD reissue cast recording on Decca Broadway dating to 2000 with tracks featuring Gesner and Minkus, those are from the demo entitled Peanuts in Song, which were the recordings Gesner sent to Schulz to secure his permission.

All ten of the songs on the King Leo album, including “Happiness,” “Snoopy” and “Little Known Facts” were in the show, some renamed, with the most prominent additions being “The Book Report” and “The Red Baron.” What’s most unexpected about the 1966 recording is its more varied orchestration: horns, strings and a most insistent clarinet are in evidence, no doubt replaced by the simpler piano and percussion mix of the show for financial reasons. Not unlike The Fantasticks, which kept TAGMCB from ever breaking records despite its notably long run, the show’s success was in part due to its small and economical scale.

To be fair to Rice and Lloyd Webber, their JCS concept album was for all practical purposes the complete score and libretto of their show. The YAGMCB album did not have an accompanying book and it was not through-sung, although some of the material which toggled between speech and singing were in place, as were some the introductory dialogue to the songs. The musical itself was largely written during the show’s four-week rehearsal, or, more accurately, assembled using the songs and Schulz’s strips to date, which at that point, with daily and Sunday counted, would have numbered roughly 5,875 through the end of 1966.

When Charlie Brown opened at Off-Broadway’s Theatre 80 St. Marks on March 7, 1967, only Hinnant remained from the concept recording, joined by his brother Skip as Schreoder, Bob Balaban as Linus, Karen Johnson as Patty, Reva Rose as Lucy and Gary Burghoff as Charlie Brown. The director was Joseph Hardy and the choreographer was Patricia Birch. The shift from Bean to Burghoff may have been simply a case of a successful Broadway and TV actor not wanting to commit to a small Off-Broadway show, but it also made sense because Burghoff was 15 years younger than the 37-year-old Bean; the role launched Burghoff into a  career defining role as Radar O’Reilly in the film and TV versions of M*A*S*H. Minkus could have easily played Lucy on stage, but it appears she was otherwise committed when the show opened, as one of the standbys for the role of Fanny Brice in the Broadway production of Funny Girl.

Were there other concept albums that preceded YAGMCB? Perhaps. This post isn’t meant to be the final word on the subject. But it should lay to rest the idea that Lloyd Webber and Rice were somehow the first to bring a show to the stage in this way, and certainly not the first to have enormous success as a result. After all, per David Michaelis’s book, the original production yielded 13 touring companies in the US (though more likely some of those were sit-down productions) and 15 international companies. It has been a staple of the musical theatre repertoire ever since, notably revived on Broadway, with new musical contributions by Andrew Lippa, in 1999.

So step aside, Jesus Christ (Superstar). Just as he was anointed in the Schulz drawing that introduced the 1966 album, the musical theatre concept album crown belongs to Charlie Brown.

The complete 1966 recording can be heard here:

For those unfamiliar with my lifelong affection for the Peanuts comics, you can read about it in my post, A Man Named Charlie Brown, from 2013.

Daveed Diggs and the ensemble of Hamilton (photo by Joan Marcus)

I am not a betting man, but if you are reading this column, I would wager that you’ve already listened to the Hamilton original cast recording. Yet given this publication’s UK reader base, and the relatively small number of people who have actually seen Hamilton in comparison to the number of albums sold, I’m also willing to bet that a great number of you haven’t yet seen the show.

I raise this issue not to once again lionize or even analyze Hamilton, but rather to raise the fact that the success of the Hamilton recording, a virtually complete version of the show’s through-sung score, means that a great many people who ultimately see Hamilton will do so while being very familiar with the full text. It’s quite possible they’ll be able to sing along.

To those who say that this has often been true for cast recordings, I would counter that few shows have been recorded so fully. Yes, many people know a musical’s songs before seeing it, and I know of many people who specifically prefer to listen to a score before seeing a show (though I’ve never understood the need). However, for most musicals, songs aren’t all there is. There are, of course, exceptions, such as Les Miserables and Jesus Christ Superstar, but I wonder whether those recordings were as widely heard as Hamilton prior to the shows being seen.

As the second Hamilton company prepares to begin performances in Chicago later this month, and other engagements are announced, it’s fair to say that the story will hold few surprises. Sure, there’s a brief neck-breaking moment that has no auditory presence, but even the story’s final chapter is pretty much a given to those who secure the golden tickets. As for Burr shooting Hamilton, that’s in most US history textbooks, and we probably wouldn’t have a show without it.

This textual familiarity affords a rare opportunity for making an important distinction too often lost on many theatregoers, and certainly on the casual ones, namely the difference between a play (or musical) as text and in production. The foreknowledge not only of the story, but of the very words of the piece, means that what will be new (video clips notwithstanding) is the direction, the set, the lights, the costumes and so on. Even people familiar with pictures and videos of the original Broadway cast will be embracing its physicality for the first time, without the “distraction” of trying to keep up with what is being sung. Yes, some will register vocal variances from the recording, especially with almost all of the original cast gone. Still, the primary focus will be on the non-auditory elements, as what they may have previously imagined is made flesh before them.

Some might be tempted to say that this holds true for Shakespeare plays, given how widely read, taught and seen his ‘greatest hits’ already are. I would counter that, yes, for regular theatregoers there is the opportunity to ultimately compare how productions differ over time, long after we’ve learned when Hamlet will stab Polonius, but I doubt that many people have ever seen Hamlet for the first time only after having committed the majority of the script to memory.

Many modern musicals, when staged indelibly the first time out, tend to form a template by which all subsequent productions – I refer not to companies stemming from the original, but later regional, university and amdram productions – model themselves. It wasn’t until John Doyle’s Sweeney Todd that that show was freed from the visual spirit of Harold Prince’s original staging; Cats is in the process of having its 1980s design re-imprinted on US audiences even as we speak.

So while we are in the full flush of Hamilmania, and long before its theatre audience numbers manage to equal or surpass its cast recording listeners, the show can be a teaching tool, not simply to students but to the public at large. The brains of countless fans have partitioned an area just for the recording masterminded by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Alex Lacamoire, but their visual imagination is still free until they see the work of Thomas Kail and his team. In that space, and for that time, theatregoers have the chance to explore and ultimately understand what it means to realise a production.

And I, having been fortunate enough to have seen Hamilton three times so far, already look forward to how another set of creative artists will reinterpret the show many years from now. If I live that long.

This post originally appeared in The Stage newspaper.