Archive for the ‘ Musicals ’ Category

Music to shed tears to


I have mentioned before that certain songs can make me cry.  Of course, with my mental wobbliness factor, I don’t necesarily need any songs to accomplish this goal, as at my worst somebody saying hello or a black cloud or nothing at all can open the floodgates, but there are definitely songs which can cause me to well up even when I am in a stable mental state.

I have expressed my tearful admiration for ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’ before, and it sits alongside other songs written for Broadway shows before the Second World War which have stood the test of time in both singability and the power to move listeners to tears.  The Gershwin brothers’ ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ and Jerome Kern’s ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ (lyrics by Otto Harbach) are the greatest examples of this for me.  Songs of love either lost or never found in the first place, expressed with simplicity, directness and a velvety melody.  From the other side of the coin, Irving Berlin’s ‘How Deep is the Ocean?’ (not from a show as far as I know), which speaks of a love of incredible depth and fortitude can make me start to well up, as can ‘All the Things You Are’ by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein.

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2007
07/01
CATEGORY
Music
Musicals
Ramblings
TAGS














3 comments

Jason Robert Brown


One of the most talented people writing for theatre at the moment is one Jason Robert Brown.  I tend to get blank looks if I mention him in real life, though I’ve recently discovered some fellow fans of this amazing man.  He not only writes and arranges music, but he plays piano like a demon (a very musical demon) and has an incredible voice with range, depth and passion.  You can tell this from his printed music, full of twiddly notes in the accompaniment and including long, held notes that probably have tenors the world over cursing his name.  Not me, though, as I’ve not yet attempted to learn any of his songs.

In terms of theatre, he’s written a few diverse musicals, none of which I’ve yet seen, though I have tickets to see Parade in September, at the Donmar Warehouse.  Most exciting.  This is his most ‘traditional’ musical, really, and tells the tragic true story of Leo Frank, who was lynched in 1915 for a crime he did not commit.  His other shows are Songs for a New World, which is a song cycle notable for ‘Stars and the Moon’, which has been recorded by a whole host of female artists; The Last Five Years, a two-person musical telling the story of a relationship from beginning to end and end to beginning at the same time; 13, which has a cast of teenagers and centres around a bar mitzvah; and a chunk of the score for the stage adaptation of Urban Cowboy.  They have little, if anything in common, other than JRB’s gift for composing technically challenging, emotionally revealing, passionate music.

Recently, I’ve been listening again to his album Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes, which is just as excellent, passionate and engaging as his theatrical scores.  I wish I could explain what it is about his music and performance which impress me so much, but I must simply say that it’s well worth checking his work out.  He’s often referred to as a successor to Stephen Sondheim, but that’s not entirely right, as Jason Robert Brown has a unique musical voice quite different to Sondheim’s, though comparisons on grounds of composing talent are entirely justified.  Brown has a great website which includes a bunch of his songs that can be listened to on-line.  There’s also a blog, which he often uses to address questions from his fans in a consistently amusing fashion.  Do yourself a favour and investigate this talented man.

2007
06/17
CATEGORY
Music
Musicals
TAGS

4 comments

Acting like a duck


You keep paddling like the clappers,
Just keep paddling with your flappers,
While seeming to be dreaming and calm.
Just beneath the surface
You may struggle to get by.
But nothing can deter you
If you hold your head up high.

So sing a mother and son pair of ducks in Honk! as the ugly duckling learns to swim.  The image of a duck or swan gliding serenely across the water while its legs are working nineteen to the dozen beneath the surface is particularly apt for theatre.  No matter how polished a performance the audience may experience, you can guarantee that backstage is complete chaos, involving many people whose existence would surprise the paying punters in the audience.  Actors may be dashing about at breakneck speed, changing costumes and locating props.  Crew members all in black will be changing microphones, getting sets into position, acting as crowd control, clearing the stage of hazards, grappling with velcro, safety pins and gaffa tape.  There’ll be a deputy stage manager constantly whispering into his or her headpiece to communicate with cast, crew, lighting people, sound people and more.  Miles of electrical cable coil like snakes around the building, clothing rails are hidden in the strangest places, the sewing machine is very rarely turned off and at any given point, several people will be in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

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2007
04/05
CATEGORY
Musicals
Opera
Singing Librarian flashback
Theatre
TAGS





1 comment

After the show


Nearly six months of rehearsals, several false starts, numerous sleepless nights over administrative problems, thirty-nine cast members, dozens of crew and musicians dressed in black, six performances, one visit from the Lord Mayor and a very subdued after-show party, and it’s all over.  There is now a Kiss Me, Kate-shaped hole in my life, and I have the potential to study, or perhaps even relax, on Tuesday evenings and Sunday afternoons.  Since I am young, male, and now on the radar of the local performing groups, this doesn’t mean a quiet life (I’m already back in rehearsals for The Sound of Gershwin at the Whitstable Playhouse and have a July concert to work towards), but I really am going to miss this show.

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2007
04/03
CATEGORY
Musicals
Ramblings
Theatre
TAGS


7 comments

Singing Librarian flashbacks: Disasters


This week, I have given much thought to those times when theatre just goes horribly wrong.  When the set decides to cave in, the follow spot overloads the electrical system, the pyrotechnics explode three scenes too soon, or everyone forgets what they’re supposed to do.  It happens to everyone involved in theatre at any level sooner or later, as I have been reading.  In Great Operatic Disasters, one discovers terrible disasters that have overtaken performances in venues as prestigious as La Scala and Covent Garden, while the ever popular Art of Coarse Acting describes the ways in which amateurs and others essentially bring such disasters down on their own heads.  The schadenfreude-seeker in me is now anxious to get hold of a new compendium of real disasters called Stop the Show!, and of course there are many further examples to be gleaned from the biographies of our great stage stars.

Of course, over the years, I’ve encountered a few of these wonderful moments, though nothing to top the more outrageous events recounted in these books.  Continue reading →

2007
01/28
CATEGORY
Musicals
Opera
Singing Librarian flashback
Theatre
TAGS








3 comments

Another Op’nin’, Another Show


You know, Kiss Me, Kate really doesn’t have the most musically-advanced opening number in the world, and the lyrics are pretty simplistic, but it has a power and appropriateness which is hard to match.  As I have been rehearsing the number over the past few weeks, I’ve been struck by this again and again.  Sometimes less really is more, even in musical theatre.

The tune is simple and catchy, though the revised version of the show currently doing the rounds adds some tough harmonies to the number.  It drives  along, expressing the combination of dread and elation that performing a show brings with it.  I sincerely doubt that a musical analysis of the song would provide much insight even if I had the skills to do such a thing, so let’s look at the lyrics…

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2007
01/22
CATEGORY
Musicals
Ramblings
Theatre
TAGS



6 comments

Whose High School Musical?


Over the festive season, the BBC decided to screen the phenomenon of 2006 – High School Musical, a Disney production that took the teenage world (or perhaps just the female portion of it) by storm.  I sat down to watch it, not entirely sure what to expect, and found it to mildly entertaining with one annoyingly catchy song and a couple of fairly clever set pieces set in the school canteen and gym.  I can see why teenage girls love it, and thus being neither a teen nor a female, it’s hardly surprising that I didn’t find it quite so thrilling.  I am pleased it exists, though.  It has a better moral message than that other teen favourite, Grease (the opposite message in fact – Grease says ‘conform to get the guy’, High School Musical says ‘be yourself’).  And the inevitable, very swift release of a stage version for amateur performance should hopefully encourage more youngsters to get involved in live theatre.  I dread to think how many productions of the show will spring up in America this year.  It’s also nice to see a musical do so well in the music charts, even getting a top 10 single in both the US and the UK with ‘Breaking Free’.

Having watched the film, and decided that I have no need to buy the soundtrack or the DVD, I was interested to discover that the success of High School Musical is causing a bit of a stir with regard to intellectual property.  A man named Paul Cozby has filed a lawsuit against the Disney Corporation (which is terribly brave of him), as he feels they stole his idea.  He wrote a stage show called High School Musical a few years ago, which received a number of productions in Texas, and he feels that as well as the title being identical, the film shows a striking resemblance to his own work.

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2007
01/02
CATEGORY
Musicals
Television
Theatre
TAGS




16 comments

Weill, not vile


Last week, I had the joyous task of creating a subject bibliography, my first assignment for my distance-learning MSc in Library and Information Studies.  The bibliography could be on any subject we chose, but could only cover material from the last five years and had to be arranged with a particular audience in mind.  Of course, I absolutely had to do this on a musical theatre subject, but the options are rather limited in this regard, as the only musical theatre people who tend to receive more than cursory academic attention are Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Weill and Stephen Sondheim.  I chose to compile a bibliography on the American theatre works of Kurt Weill, most famous for his German piece Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), source of ‘Mack the Knife’.  Why the American works?  Well, I don’t speak German, so I’ve always found it harder to connect with the works in that language.  Must try harder, I suppose.

This exercise was simultaneously fascinating and boring.  Searching for information can be interesting, and the hunt becomes a sort of game, but it can also be very frustrating to spend an age wrestling with a particularly high-profile data source only to find absolutely nothing of value.  I also discovered things about Kurt Weill that I never knew before, largely through use of the Kurt Weill Foundation‘s website, but also through reading extracts from some of the books and articles which I discovered.  I hadn’t known, for instance, that he provided music for a number of political pageants while in America, generally connected to his Jewish roots.  And I had forgotten that he’d been working on a musical version of Huckleberry Finn when he died, a concept that truly makes the mind boggle.

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2006
12/20
CATEGORY
Library
Musicals
TAGS



6 comments

Singing Librarian flashback: Courtenay


It’s time to buckle those swashes, brandish those placards and be generally revolting in an agricultural way, as the Singing Librarian flashes back to Courtenay, performed at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury and the Stag Theatre, Sevenoaks, during July 2003.

This show is quite unique in my experiences.  It’s the only through-composed musical I’ve ever performed, it’s the only show I’ve been in that’s based on a true story, it’s the only time I’ve had a death scene, and it’s the only time I’ve joined a show mid-way through the rehearsal process.  Courtenay is a pretty new show, first fully performed in an outdoor venue (Theatre in the Park) during the summer of 2002.  After some re-writes, the authors (Christopher Neame and Ethan Lewis Maltby) were ready to bring it to the more conventional stage during 2003, and I answered a plea for more men to add to the ensemble.  Therefore, when I came along, most of the company had been familiar with the musical for at least a year, and all (apart from myself and two other fresh recruits) had been rehearsing with each other and the new director for some weeks.  Thus I had to scramble to catch up with learning the music, at the same time as learning Dido and Aeneas.

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2006
11/25
CATEGORY
Musicals
Singing Librarian flashback
Theatre
TAGS






3 comments

Betty Comden


The world of the musical has lost a key figure – lyricist and librettist Betty Comden died of heart failure earlier this week.  Along with Adolph Green (who died in 2002), she contributed to such gems as Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town and Wonderful Townand Jule Styne’s Bells Are Ringing.  The pair also wrote various screenplays, including the wonderful script for Singin’ in the Rain, so their work is certainly going to outlive them by many, many decades.

Some of the more obscure musicals that Comden and Green contributed to (always, always a partnership) are particular favourites of mine, although come to think of it, I’ve only ever heard the music and read the libretti for these, as they are so seldom performed.  Their absolute best, in my view, was On the Twentieth Century, a farce with a score by the great Cy Coleman.  Set on board a train, it’s wonderful fun with a cast of larger than life characters who typify the comedic gifts of Comden and Green.  They created parts and song lyrics which are an absolute gift to the actor and the audience alike.  Their contributions to film and musical theatre will no doubt be greatly missed by a great many people.

I leave you with a verse from ‘Some Other Time’, a poignant song from On the Town:

Just when the fun is starting
Comes the time for parting
But let’s be glad for what we had
And what’s to come
…
Oh, well
We’ll catch up some other time

2006
11/24
CATEGORY
Cinema
Musicals
Theatre
TAGS

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