Jim Walton, Ann Morrison and Lonny Price in the original MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG
March 2022 at Musical Cyberspace is all about songs with people’s names in the title.
Steeped in the kind of dramatic irony that is provided by the distance of time, “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” is a song written by the characters that appear in Merrily We Roll Along about the USA at the dawn of the 1960s, with obvious references to the Kennedys, as well as other political figures of the time. This show, which flopped big time on Broadway, was created by George Furth and Stephen Sondheim. It famously tells the story of its protagonists in reverse chronology, a puzzle that has engaged directors who want to tackle the show ever since.
Sondheim, although creating a piece that fits in perfectly with the milieu of the show, sounds like he is offering a pastiche of some of his own early work. It’s clever, a novelty song that is – in the context of the show – perhaps cleverer than it is good, which makes it precisely the right kind of song for the moment in the show when it appears.
Taking a song that once again plays best on cast albums rather than in isolation, it’s difficult not to choose the original Broadway cast for the best rendition of the song. The original cast recording of Merrily We Roll Along is one of those definitively great recordings. How lucky we are to have it!
Keen to share your thoughts on “Bobby and Jackie and Jack”? Head on to the comment box at the end of this post.
Disney Theatricals may have hit the big time when Beauty and the Beast opened on Broadway in 1994, but the animated feature that started it all, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, was adapted for the stage a quarter-century before that auspicious calendar event. The initial 1969 production at The Muny in St Louis was revived there in 1972, with a 1979 engagement at Radio City Music Hall that was a key part of that venue’s diversification plans following its near closure. The show was subsequently televised and released on video, but the show soon slipped into memory and then into cultural insignificance. So how about we celebrate it again today?
The live production of Snow White is indeed a curiosity. Taking the 1937 film as a basis, the story is somewhat expanded in Joe Cook’s Book for the show. Following a prologue that gives us the full spiel about the wish that gives Snow White (Mary Jo Salerno) both her looks and name, we jump forward in time to her father’s second wedding day. The Queen (Anne Francine) is given a bit of a backstory, now coming from a faraway kingdom called Shi-tan, which appears to be a regrettable kind of magical mash-up of Middle and Far Eastern appropriations. Snow White’s father, the King (Thomas Ruisinger), still being alive, the Queen uses her lady-in-waiting, Luna (Yolande Bavan), to traffic Snow White to a remote village where hard labour would destroy her beauty, which the Magic Mirror (Charles Hall, who also voices the Hag) has reluctantly pointed out to his mistress. From there on out, the story plays out very much as the film does, although Prince Charming (Richard Bowne) is built up slightly to have him work with the Huntsman (Bruce Sherman) to expose the Queen’s treachery to the King.
A couple of new songs by Jay Blackton and Joe Cool are thrown into the mix with Frank Churchill and Larry Morey’s eight favourites from the film. The first of these is the forgettable “Welcome to the Kingdom,” which is then followed by the “Queen’s Presentation.” Later, the Prince warbles out a classic 1920s style charm song-cum-lament, “Will I Ever See Her Again?” The lyric of this song lists all of Snow White’s virtues, taking pains to rhyme ‘delicate charms’ with ‘slender arms.’ Far less entertaining is the perfunctory finale, signposted as “Here’s The Happy Ending.”
Frank Wagner’s staging of the show placed human actors alongside theme park-style costumes for the dwarfs and the Hag and a set of woodland characters that offers audiences full-on furry fantasy realness. A live horse is thrown into the mix for Prince Charming to ride – so there’s a clear attempt to use just about every trick in the book along with the expected set designs and special effects. The transformation of the Queen into the Hag is quite spectacular on video and must have been something to see performed live.
The overall result? Well, it’s not great but the children in the audience of the pro-shot that was released on video relished it. That said, there are some fantastically camp moments, more than enough to justify the show’s cult status in Disney’s theatrical history.
Snow White’s next stage appearance would be the notorious opening number of the 1989 Academy Awards ceremony, something that haunts all beings with taste to this very day. A second, much shorter stage adaptation of the film, Snow White: an Enchanting Musical, would be created for Disneyland just after the turn of the century. A typical theme park attraction, the newer production could never replace this grand, crazy, camptastic extravaganza of a show – which Disney seems to have disowned to some extent in its quest to dominate Broadway, the West End and the world.
Got a Snow White memory you’d like to share? Drop us a comment at the bottom of this post!
Giovanni Spano and Ben Forster in Jesus Christ Superstar
March 2022 at Musical Cyberspace is all about songs with people’s names in the title.
I first thought about including “Simon Zealotes” from Jesus Christ Superstar in this series of posts when I posted “Tommy, Can You Hear Me?” earlier this month. The two songs are certainly varied in tone and content, but there is something that connects them in the way that the chrous of the lyric is structured.
Like “This Jesus Must Die” from the same show, this number offers more of the post-modern political reading that is one of the multiple perspectives of the Christ narrative as retold here by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber. The song offers a neat little cameo for the actor playing Simon and as he spurs the crowd into a frenzy of adoration for Jesus. The piece builds brilliantly out of “Hosanna” and makes for an effective contrast when “Poor Jerusalem” follows it.
Keen to share your thoughts on “Simon Zealotes”? Head on to the comment box at the end of this post.
March 2022 at Musical Cyberspace is all about songs with people’s names in the title.
Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant musical, Assassins is a natural place to look for name songs because it deals with figures from history. In this case, the name mentioned is Roosevelt and the song deals with an attempted assassination on the then president-elect of the United States by Giuseppe Zangara. Alternating between Sousa-inspired passages in which bystanders boast how they saved Roosevelt from being assassinated and a chilling tarantella in which Zangara reveals his desire to kill the capitalists even though this will cost him his life.
This is not particularly a catchy bop that transfers to settings outside of the show, so all of the options for listening to the songs are from particular productions. Top of the list for me is Eddie Korbich and the original Off-Broadway company’s take on the original cast album of that first production, with Jeffrey Kuhn-led number from the Broadway album a close second.
Keen to share your thoughts on “How I Saved Roosevelt”? Head on to the comment box at the end of this post.
March 2022 at Musical Cyberspace is all about songs with people’s names in the title.
People forget just how much music there is in Dreamgirls. That’s largely thanks to the film, which substituted some of the soul-influenced recitatives with dialogue, never quite managing to get the relationship between the spoken word and the singing right.
“The Firing of Jimmy” is one of those parts of brutal singing that was pared down significantly, although the lines that remain, sung by Anika Noni Rose as Lorrell are incredibly effective. It’s a great character piece for both Curtis (who is doing the firing) and Jimmy, showing us just how out of control both of them have spun and it’s allows the actress playing Lorrell to show the considerable growth in her character since the start of the show. It’s raw and invasive and, simply put, fantastic.
Keen to share your thoughts on “The Firing of Jimmy”? Head on to the comment box at the end of this post.
March 2022 at Musical Cyberspace is all about songs with people’s names in the title.
One of the most disturbing parts of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar, “Judas’ Death” documents Judas’ descent into a suicidal mania following an epiphany of what he has done in betraying Jesus. Featuring reprises of “Damned for All Time”, “Blood Money” and “I Don’t Know How to Tell Him”, the song builds into a frenzy of rock guitars and riffs until Judas hangs himself. After a brief moment of silence, the chorus intones his name profoundly and we are left to experience the outcome of the pact that has been sealed. Chilling stuff.
Like some of the other recent numbers featured in the March Monikers columns, this is a song that relies on the show itself for its power. I imagine that people’s favourite renditions largely fall in line with their favourite Judases. I’d probably go for the Carl Anderson and Jérôme Pradon’s versions respectively, knowing that the former is often lauded as the best ever in the role and that the latter has numerous detractors – but I’m not one of them.
Keen to share your thoughts on “Judas’ Death”? Who interprets the sequence best for you? Head on to the comment box at the end of this post.
March 2022 at Musical Cyberspace is all about songs with people’s names in the title.
Kiss Me, Kate features one of Cole Porter’s strongest scores. “Bianca”, sung by Bill Calhoun to woo Lois Lane exclusively into his arms, is often singled out as the weak link. Truth be told, it is something of a throwaway number. Perhaps, since the chorus of the song is intended to have been written for Lois by Bill himself, Porter decided that Bill wasn’t quite the composer-lyricist Porter himself was. Nonetheless, with a good actor in the role – from Harold Lang in the original cast through Michael Berresse and Tony Yazbek to Corbin Bleu – and imaginative staging, “Bianca” can still be great fun.
Keen to share your thoughts on “Bianca”? Head on to the comment box at the end of this post.
March 2022 at Musical Cyberspace is all about songs with people’s names in the title.
“Gigi,” a song about the titular character of the 1958 film of the same name, is a song I first heard when I picked up a piece of sheet music and played it on the piano as a child. By the time I saw the film and heard an orchestra accompany Louis Jourdan’s tentative delivery of Alan Jay Lerner’s lyrics and Frederick Loewe’s melody, I was already sold on the song. Perhaps the lyrics do get a bit overly poetic here and there, but Gaston is a Frenchman so perhaps it can be excused as an expression of character. Either way, I still love it.
As a song, “Gigi” has largely remained within the domain of the musical, on screen, on stage, in concert and in the recording studio, albeit with a couple of jazz covers on the side. Most recently, Corey Cott gave the song a more contemporary musical theatre sound in the flop Broadway revival of the stage adaptation of the film, which I’m not quite sure works for the material. It just doesn’t quite soar. Would someone like Jeremy Jordan or Aaron Tveit do better by the song in these times? Who can say?
That said, the show has never worked on stage and the earlier interpretations by Geoffrey Burridge and Daniel Massey don’t being things home either. Part of the challenge is the song, which basically asks performers to Henry Higgins the charm out of the verse, but then deliver a rich vocal on the more romantic chorus. It is perhaps Graham Bickley who finds the best balance between the two elements of the song on the JAY studio recording of the show. In the end, maybe one just has to return to the OG for Louis Jourdan’s intimate delivery of the song, which works beautifully in context.
Keen to share your thoughts on “Gigi”? Head on to the comment box at the end of this post.
Today we celebrate the birthday of one of the most well known leading ladies of the legit musical theatre era, Elaine Paige. Born Elaine Jill Bickerstaff, she changed her name at the start of her career at her acting teacher’s recommendation. Looking for inspiration, she then quite literally took a “page” from the phonebook and just added the “i”! Let’s take a look at this iconic West End lady’s shining career moments.
5. “With One Look” from Sunset Boulevard
Picking up the lead role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard with a two-and-a-half week rehearsal, Paige filled in for Betty Buckley who fell ill during the 1995 revival. Her brief appearance as this famous film diva on stage brought her great acclaim and gave us a very memorable rendition of the song “With One Look.” Even though Paige is a small lady (1.5m) she packed more than enough punch for this enigmatic and strong female lead, earning her the full-time role in the following year. Ms Paige is a true example of big explosives coming in small packages.
4. “Anything Goes” from Anything Goes
Paige saw the 1987 Broadway Production of Anything Goes starring Patti LuPone and knew she needed to bring the show to London. Co-producing it with Tim Rice, Paige secured her part in the role of Reno Sweeney and played opposite Howard McGillin. Looking at Paige’s performance of the titular song, one can easily understand why this show brought her a third Olivier Award nomination. With a glint in her eye, crisp and clear intentions and fire in her belly, Paige owns the stage and shows why she is one of the West End’s most beloved leading ladies.
3. “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” from Evita
Earning the spot in the titular role of the first production of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita, Elaine Paige, who was then still quite unknown, shot herself into the limelight. Receiving critical acclaim for her performance and her first Olivier Award, Paige was set on her journey of West End stardom. Her performance of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” will always remain her beautiful and impactful introduction to the West End.
2. “I Know Him So Well” from Chess
In 1984, Tim Rice and Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson created the concept album of the hit musical, Chess. Paige originated the role of Florence Vassy in this 80s rock musical singing opposite Barbara Dickson. The two of them recorded and released the duet “I Know Him So Well” which continued to hold the number one position in the British singles charts for four weeks! This not only speaks to the genius of the score of Chess but also the mastery in which Paige and Dickson sang this beautiful song.
1. “Memory” from Cats
Finally, we come to the pièce de résistance, “Memory” from Cats. Arguably the most memorable performance of Paige (pun most definitely intended) and one which touched the hearts of millions of people and makes you understand why she is known as “The First Lady of British Musical Theatre.” Paige, of course, originated the role of Grizabella in Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats and has since remained the standard to which this role is upheld. Watching the 1998 recording of this song, you can’t help but embrace the tears that this beautiful ballad brings to your eyes and Paige’s truthful performance just seals the deal.
Elaine Paige had several other outstanding performances like Anna in The King and I, Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd, Carlotta in Follies and many more. She truly is the queen of the West End and has earned the title rightfully so.
Are you a fan of Elaine Paige and want to be heard? Share your most memorable moments from Ms Paige’s career in the comments section below.
Bob Bingham as Caiaphas in the film of Jesus Christ Superstar
March 2022 at Musical Cyberspace is all about songs with people’s names in the title.
“This Jesus Must Die”, from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar, is a creepy little song sung by creepy little men with voices on extreme opposites of the male vocal range. The choice works perfectly to dramatise the moment in which Jesus’ fate is sealed. What also makes sense in a powerful way are the political reasons why Jesus was to be killed. The Bible is very clear on the spiritual reasons, so the shift in perspective away from the traditional narrative offers new layers of understanding to the Christ story. It’s perhaps not the type of song one “enjoys,” but it works like gangbusters in the context of the show.
Given that it has such a specific plot function, “This Jesus Must Die” isn’t one that has a range of recordings outside of the various productions of the show. Thus, the playlist below offers a range of extracts from cast albums and productions of Jesus Christ Superstar.
Keen to share your thoughts on “This Jesus Must Die?” within the context of modern musical theatre classic? Head on to the comment box at the end of this post.
Musical Cyberspace 