Recently, The Times’s co-chief theater critics put together a musical cast recording starter kit for those of us stuck at home — 10 cast albums they’d take with them to a desert island. We asked some of their fellow critics to pick one cast album each and extol its pleasures.

Few fixtures of a New York City summer are as enchanting as Shakespeare in the Park. So when the news arrived last week that its season, too, was canceled because of the pandemic — taking with it “Richard II,” and Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery’s delicious musical adaptation of “As You Like It” — there was only one sensible, self-salving thing to do: Put on some Taub music and revel in the not-so-distant past.

At Shakespeare in the Park two summers ago, Taub’s adaptation of “Twelfth Night” (conceived with Kwame Kwei-Armah, and part of the Public Works program) was a dose of civic joy — inventive and playful, infectious in the pre-Covid sense of the word. With Nikki M. James as the shipwrecked Viola, Ato Blankson-Wood as Orsino, the count she loves, and Taub herself as the benevolent fool Feste, the cast album is full-on gorgeous.

Taub is one of the most exciting composer-lyricists in the American theater, and I often listen to her solo albums on repeat. (Those include seriously delightful demos of both “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It,” extremely worth checking out on Bandcamp.) But the “Twelfth Night” cast album, with its warm, enveloping sound and friendly, whip-smart lyrics, is the most comforting choice right now. It is guaranteed to catapult you gently back to a time when we sat together in the gathering dark as actors and musicians told us a story.