March 2022 at Musical Cyberspace is all about songs with people’s names in thetitle.
Given the universal hatred for the English language adaptation of this show that appeared on Broadway, perhaps I should have titled this post “Für Sarah”. With music by Jim Steinman and lyrics by Steinman, Michael Kunze, Kirke Kangro, Daniel Wyszogrodzki and/or Miklós Tibor – depending on which version in which language you’re talking about – the show holds a far higher status in Europe than in the United States. This particular song is a moving ballad, let down only by the inconsistent application of the rhyme scheme set up at the start of the song.
If you’re keen to share your thoughts on “For Sarah”, then 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.
“Blow, Gabriel, Blow” is a thrilling showstopper in the gospel “get happy” mould from the classic Cole Porter show, Anything Goes. It’s a straightforward piece, beautifully crafted and neatly set up in the script without – in line with the conventions of musical comedy in the 1930s – having to be overly concerned with an organic integration between the book and score. Written to showcase Ethel Merman’s powerhouse belt, many divas of the musical theatre stage from Ethel Merman and Elaine Paige to Patti LuPone and Sutton Foster have put their stamp on this song.
Who’s your favourite? I’m partial to Patti LuPone – can anyone else sing the hell outta “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” the way she does? Head on to the comments and let us know!
March 2022 at Musical Cyberspace is all about songs with people’s names in the title.
Jerry Herman loves title songs, especially in the form of a tribute to a fabulous female character written for a musical theatre diva to belt out while a chorus dances with and around her. “Mame”, from the show of the same name, is just such a song, written for the electric Angela Lansbury, who was the star of the original production.
Many a star has since played Mame Dennis, including Celeste Holm, Ann Miller and Christine Baranski, but few people think that anyone has given Lansbury a run for her money. If only she’d been cast in the film…
Keen to share your thoughts on “Mame”? 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.
“In Buddy’s Eyes” is one of the most poignant songs in Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s Follies. On the surface, the song is about a woman who loves the way her husband sees her after many years of marriage. But this is a song by Sondheim, which means there’s more to it. Sally is actually more concerned with how Ben sees her than Buddy. Ben, who she has obsessively loved her whole life, is the reason she has come to the Follies reunion and it is by reminding Ben of the Sally she was so long ago that she hopes to win him back. Tragedy waits in the wings…
There are many fantastic performances of this song from productions and concerts. There would likely be a strong contingency of fans who name Barbara Cook’s rendition as the best of the bunch. For me, that’s fine if you’re looking for a performance of the song by Barbara Cook, which is what you get even in her rendition of the song in Follies in Concert. For a performance of the song as Sally, it is Dorothy Collins who sets the bar. Some have come close to that remarkable interpretation of the entire role, but Collins trumps them all every time.
Keen to share your thoughts on “In Buddy’s Eyes”? Head on to the comment box at the end of this post.
Jodie Prenger in Oliver!, Jessie Buckley in Cabaret and Samantha Barks in Frozen
This past week, the world celebrated International Women’s Day and so one of the things I wanted to do with The Saturday List at Musical Cyberspace this week was to celebrate a few women in musical theatre. Having recently watched I’d Do Anything again, I thought it might be a good idea to take a look at where the 12 musical theatre performers who competed for the role of Nancy in the 2009 revival of Oliver! are today. The 2008 BBC talent show cum reality series also searched for performers to play the title role and proved to be a family favourite at the time, although some viewed the show as a problematic way of casting musical theatre roles within the wider context of the entertainment industry.
12. Amy Booth-Steel, whose dress was lime green was the first potential Nancy to be eliminated. This didn’t seem to be too much of a stumbling block for her: some of the credits she has racked up since the show aired include Tori Amos’s musical, The Light Princess, Sister Act and The Sound of Music in the West End and the UK tour of Betty Blue Eyes.
11. The “lilac” Nancy, Cleo Royer, was eliminated second. A self-confessed music nut, Royer seems to have faded into the background somewhat, although she appeared in the West End production of Dirty Dancing. Here she is singing “Oom-Pah-Pah”, with all of the other Nancy hopefuls.
10. Tara Bethan – seen here in the orange dress singing “It’s a Fine Life” with the eight remaining Nancies – has performed in Bugsy Malone in London and the UK tour of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat since her appearance in I’d Do Anything. She has also worked in television, notably in the Welsh soap opera Pobol Y Cwm.
9. Following her involvement in I’d Do Anything, Francesca Jackson – who wore the baby pink dress in the competition – has toured in Dreamboats and Petticoats, travelled to Paris to perform in A Little Night Music and appeared in the Barry Manilow jukebox musical, Can’t Smile Without You. In the 2011-2012 season, she performed in the West End production of Million Dollar Quartet. Most recently, she has appeared in Tina the Musical, playing the role of Tina Turner’s friend and confidante, Rhonda Graam.
8. One of my favourites in the competition, the gold-clad Keisha Amponsa-Banson‘s career bloomed following I’d Do Anything, with appearances in The Pajama Game, From Here to Eternity, The Lion King, Stand Tall: A Rock Musical, Footloose and Little Shop of Horrors all keeping her on the stage, where she belongs. Her latest credits include Sunday in the Park with George, School of Rock and Caroline, or Change.
7. Sarah Lark, the pale Green Nancy, was an early favourite of mine and ended up as an understudy for the role of Nancy in the West End production that followed I’d Do Anything. She has since performed in two Snow White pantomimes, as Miss Mona in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and in Les Miserables.
6. Dark Blue Nancy, Ashley J Russell‘s musical theatre credits include Sister Act, We Will Rock You, Shrek and The Phantom of the Opera. She also appeared in the workshop of Love Never Dies at Sydmonton. She’s also toured the world with Mamma Mia!
5. Like Sarah Lark, Niamh Perry also appeared as a pantomime Snow White, while also appearing in Love Never Dies, Mamma Mia! and The Little Prince. She’s also appeared in the Boy George musical, Taboo and the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler classic, Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. She’s also taken on the roles of Mary in The Beautiful Game, and Girl in Once.
4. Rachel Tucker, who wore the yellow Nancy dress, has had a fine career since the show ended. As well as appearing in a reading of Love Never Dies as Meg Giry, Tucker has played Elphaba in Wicked and made her Broadway debut in the Sting musical, The Last Ship. Most recently, she has appeared in Come From Away, both on the West End and on Broadway, and john & jen, the popular Andrew Lippa-Tom Greenwald two-hander.
3. Blue Nancy Samantha Barks is one of the best known of the I’d Do Anything contestants internationally, having played Eponine in the film version of Les Miserables, a role she played on stage in London. She has also played Sally Bowles in Cabaret, Nancy in Oliver!, Velma in Chicago, Jules in the workshop of Bend it Like Beckham and Mallory/Avril in City of Angels. Alongside further film and television roles, she has also done stints in Amélie, Pretty Woman and Frozen.
2. Runner up Jessie Buckley – who wore the dark green Nancy dress, turned down understudying Nancy to play Anne in A Little Night Music. She’s done a fair amount of work on film, including Judy and The Lost Daughter, the latter of which has earned her an Academy Award nomination. We’ll hear whether she wins that award when the Oscars are presented towards the end of this month. Her television credits include The Woman in White, Chernobyl and Fargo. On stage, she’s done a fair deal of Shakespeare and is currently playing Sally Bowles in a high-profile revival of Cabaret opposite Eddie Redmayne.
1. Purple-clad Jodie Prenger won the competition and the role of Nancy in the 2009 UK revival of Oliver! Appearing in Les Miserables in between the competition and the opening of that production, she has subsequently appeared in Monty Python’s Spamalot, Shirley Valentine and A Taste of Honey as well as pantomime productions of Dick Whittington and Robin Hood.
Having just had the opportunity to revisit I’d Do Anything and its twelve finalists, do you think the right person won the competition? Who would you like to see more of on stage in the future? And what other shows do you think could have similar series leading up to opening night? It would be great to hear your thoughts in the comments section below!
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.
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