Fortunately, for the recording session, the women were unimpeded by harnesses. McCleskey and her fellow Divas, Ashley Spencer and Jacqueline B. Arnold, were free of their glam costumes (McCleskey told us “pink and purple and white eyeshadow and big lashes, big hair, beautiful dresses, tight corsets, long trains” are the norm). Their voices, however, were in fine form, however, as we got a chance to step into the recording booth and hear the ladies lay down a few tracks.

First, Spencer shone during the recording of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Then the girls took on the show’s finale, CeCe Peniston’s Finally, a song that has a special place in McCleskey’s heart. “I grew up on that song,” she told us. “I grew up on pretty much all the music in the show. I remember hearing that song when I was about eight years old. I was playing a basketball game, and they played it at halftime, and I was like, ‘What is this?’ That’s when I knew I was going to be a singer.”

Of course, the challenge of a recording session as intricate as this one – with a cast of about 25 – is to coordinate the vocals accordingly, particularly when the songs in question are such recognizable disco classics. For the recording of Finally, the ladies, each in fine voice, were having issues staying on pitch as a group. Each was singing at the top of her game, but the monitoring system, which allows the ladies to hear each other as they lay down the tracks (each sings in a separate booth), were somehow off. After some tweaking, the previous pitch problems were a thing of the past.

Next up were Shake Your Groove Thing, another showcase for the Divas, and It’s Raining Men, which allows velvety-voiced Jacqueline B. Arnold to take center stage. Up in the booth, co-producer Frank Filipetti was manning the board, showing off his signature disco moves, passing around spicy toothpicks to anyone interested. The show’s orchestrator, musical supervisor, and arranger (not to mention the album’s co-producer) Stephen “Spud” Murphy” manned the computer, keeping track of the musical score and checking pitch and tempo.