Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne and Arthur Laurents’s Gypsy is my all-time favourite musical. It is also my current favourite. It’s a fantastic musical, brilliantly conceived and executed. It features one of the most complex female characters in musical theatre and it is always great when another actress steps up to bat and puts her own stamp on the role.
The second-to-last major revival featured Bernadette Peters. Many disliked her in the role. Many disliked the production in which she appeared. For me, she’s not the best Rose, but she’s a long way off from the worst one. I really enjoy listening to her cast recording of the show. Here she is, boys: Bernadette doing “Rose’s Turn”, along with an overview of the production in which she appeared.
The Book of Mormon (with book, music and lyrics credited equally to book, lyrics, and music by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone) has one of the funniest scores I have heard in a while and, when I saw it, a great deal of the show had me in tears I was laughing so hard. Yes, the book loses a momentum it never regains towards the end of the first act, with the characterful dialogue that knits the first third or so of the show together so tightly sometimes giving way to the most basic of links and song setups. Yes, the show struggles to juggle the narratives of its dual protagonists structurally. But the score is a hoot and it makes me laugh – a lot.
Post a song from a musical which everyone should see performed live.
I should be posting a song from A Chorus Line today. But there are other things on my mind and I am going to go with another show brought to life on stage by the incomparable Michael Bennett: Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen’s Dreamgirls. Why is this show foremost on my mind? Because I was planning to see the show in June when it played in its current incarnation, the recent tour started at the Apollo Theatre, at the Artscape Theatre Complex in June and yesterday a press release to the following effect was published on Artslink:
Showtime Management, producers of the international hit musical, Dreamgirls, today advised the cancellation of the show’s Cape Town season. It was scheduled to open on 8 June 2011 at Artscape.
‘It is with much regret that we are cancelling the Cape Town run,” says Hazel Feldman, the show’s producer. “We are sorry to disappoint patrons who have already purchased tickets and ask them to contact Computicket to obtain their refunds.”
Despite being hailed unanimously by leading local critics and celebrities as “the finest” musical ever staged in South Africa, poor public support resulted in this very hard decision. Currently on stage at The Teatro at Montecasino, Dreamgirls ends its Johannesburg season on 8 May 2011.
So the show hasn’t sold well in Johannesburg, and based on that fact as well as, one presumes, the knowledge of whatever pre-sales have managed to take place in Cape Town, the producers have made this ‘hard’ decision. But what did the producers expect when Cape Town is an already tough sell, a fact that is known to anyone and everyone, one that should have influenced their initial decision to produce the show there rather than at this late stage? What did they expect from advance sales in Cape Town when there has been significant Cape Town targeted marketing in the midst of the media hype they have tried to stir up for the run in Johannesburg? I’m totally disgruntled. Why should I, as a consumer, trust their brand again in the future, especially when they implicate me as a member of the public in the reasoning behind their decision? The flaw lies in their producing and their inability to live up to their commitments for misunderstanding, not knowing or even blatantly ignoring the market to which they have to sell their product! That is the cause behind this effect, along with extravagant ticket prices, not mere public apathy – a hard sell though they might be.
The video I’ve chosen to commemorate this travesty of an event is a clip from the Tony Awards from the original 1982 production of the show: the sequence that ends the first act (“It’s All Over” / “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” / “Love Love Me Baby”). Enjoy it.
Post a song from a musical you wish was (never) made into a movie.
The brackets make this one wide open. Perhaps I’ll pick something from somewhere in the middle, namely ‘a musical that I wish was never made into (the movie it was), but which I wish was made into a (better) movie.’ Got it? And the choice is Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s A Little Night Music. Harold Prince, who did a brilliant job of the show on stage, floundered when he translated the show to film. There are many reports of how much he disliked the process of making the film, and it shows. A genius of the theatre, film is not a medium that works for Prince.
I was going to post “A Weekend in the Country”, which is probably the most effectively shot part of the film, but I couldn’t find a clip on YouTube, so I went for the most well known song: “Send in the Clowns”.
I am going to choose Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s Edges for today’s show. How come? Because this show came out of nowhere and became really popular through nothing but hard work and word of mouth. The best thing about it? It’s really good too. In the generation of musical theatre composers that is currently coming to the fore, Pasek and Paul are among the best. Here’s to a great future for them!
I found this one tough to choose, simply because I don’t generally think about musicals in this way. Eventually, I decided to choose the Disney-produced Phil Collins-David Henry Hwang musical, Tarzan, a show which I thought had a great deal going for it but which also had so much that didn’t come together in the end that I thought it would be fair enough to call it a guilty pleasure.
The song I’ve chosen is the love song “For the First Time”, one of the new songs for the stage show that I instantly liked. Belting it out with Tarzan at the end of the song is great fun.
Post a song from a musical which disappointed you.
About halfway through the first act of We Will Rock You, I was dumbfounded. The Queen songs are wonderful but the book is a disaster. Ben Elton’s dialogue is basically a series of clunky one-liners, some of which raise a mild chuckle but which basically fall flat. There is no consistency in the story: one thing I found immensely jarring was the fact that, for someone who is trying to suppress and destroy rock music, the Killer Queen sings an awful lot. And the love story is never resolved – all right, there’s a poor attempt at a resolution after the curtain calls and at the end of the encore (“Bohemian Rhapsody”). Galileo and Scaramouche share a kiss as they sing, “Nothing really matters to me.” A little odd, no?
All I could think the whole way through was how the show would be quite interesting as a Dragonball Z style cartoon feature. I don’t know why; perhaps the 1-D quality of the visuals would help disguise the 1-D quality of the script?!! And of course all the design elements in the show recall that kind of visual feel…
I could not even access the show on the level that it was “so bad that it was good”. I did not find it engaging at all and I, personally, wouldn’t make any particular effort to see it a second time. It’s a devastatingly awful piece of theatre.
The first time I heard “Someone in a Tree” was in a documentary about the making of Pacific Overtures, the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical (with additional material by Hugh Wheeler). As much as the creation of the song to fulfill a dramatic moment made a huge impression on me, the song itself astounded me even more. That the essence of life itself could be distilled into just a few words forever convinced me of the worthiness of lyric-writing as an art:
It’s the fragment, not the day.
It’s the pebble, not the stream.
It’s the ripple, not the sea
That is happening.
Not the building but the beam,
Not the garden but the stone,
Only cups of tea
And history
And someone in a tree.
After a great deal of thought, I thought I would choose “This Nearly Was Mine” from South Pacific. It’s a beautiful piece of music, a heartbreaking waltz from Richard Rodgers, with words that match it step for step by Oscar Hammerstein II, that will stay with you forever once you’ve heard it. Here is a section of the broadcast of the recent revival. The lead up to the song starts at 07:46.
Post a song from your least favourite musical by your favourite composer.
I’ve never liked Stephen Sondheim and Burt Shevelove’s The Frogs much. I just haven’t taken to it. As much as I like classical Greek theatre, I just can’t seem to find a connection to this adaptation of Aristophanes’ play as a whole, although there certainly are bits that I enjoy a great deal and bits that certainly are breathtaking and brilliant.
Musical Cyberspace 