It's delightful, it's delicious, it's dlevy!
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“New Words” as heard on If I Tell You (2013)
music/lyric Maury Yeston
performance Laura Osnes
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Ever since the track listing for this album was announced I was excited for a new recording of one of my favorite songs. Ms. Osnes does a lovely job here.
This is lovely, but you would think Mr. Yeston hadn’t written any other songs for the number of times this one gets recorded.
(via somethingbypuccini)
Probably the best showtune about the exodus that you’ve never heard. (thanks to Jo for bringing it to my attention)
Marvin Hamlisch’s funeral service this morning. I didn’t think I could write anything about this. But now I feel like I just have to. It was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever experienced. At 7:30AM, I was walking through Central Park, wearing all black, nervous and sad. Walking into Temple Emanu-El on 66th Street, within minutes, I was part of a 600-person choir rehearsal, all singing “What I Did For Love”. Hundreds of people. Some of our greatest composers and lyricists were there, amongst the chorus, honoring Marvin, including Sheldon Harnick, David Shire, Andrew Lippa, Maury Yeston, and Craig Carnelia and David Zippel, two of his great collaborators. I stood next to Anita Gillette, in front of a row of A Chorus Line alums, and behind Jonathan Tunick. And it was the most unbelievable thing.
Someone seems to have put a professional-quality video of the entire Australian production of Titanic (the musical) on YouTube. I’m going to have to make time to watch the whole thing.
I saw Titanic on Broadway sort of by accident. I had gone to TKTS (the booth at the World Trade Center — the last time I was ever at the towers) hoping to score a seat at A New Brain. A New Brain wasn’t being offered that day, so I picked Titanic as a last-minute replacement. I wasn’t so excited to see it; I liked the score but had heard all about the show’s rough tryout period and wasn’t sure what I’d see.
So I was totally unprepared for the emotional response I had to the show. I was a college student, seeing the show by myself, sobbing uncontrollably while trying not to attract any undue attention from the families of tourists seated around me. I remember thinking to myself that the show deserved a longer life than it was likely to achieve, so I bought a t-shirt to make up for the half-priced ticket I bought. I wanted to support the production.
And yet… there were so many missteps in the direction of the original Broadway production. The two most egregious could have been so easily rectified. On either side of the proscenium were two LED screens used to indicate the time and place of each scene. I didn’t object to the super-title approach, but the LED screens were so technologically out of place with a show set in 1912 that they constantly took me out of the story. How hard would it have been to use title cards or projections or any other way to share the same information that wouldn’t look so computerized?
The other, and worst, directorial misstep was the end of Act I. After a beautiful, tense choral number heightening the moment when the ship is about to strike the iceburg, the elaborate set left the stage, and two spotlights picked out a really cheap-looking, small toy boat chugging across the stage towards an equally cheap-looking, small foam iceberg. It took an enormous exertion of energy for the audience not to lose themselves with giggles, but whether the giggling was audible or not, what should have been the most dramatic moment in the show became the biggest missed opportunity.
Despite the missteps of the original production, I’m convinced the show is an under-appreciated masterpiece, right up there with Nine as Maury Yeston’s best work. I’m shocked that a first-class orchestra isn’t presenting an all-star concert version of the score this year for the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titantic. I have no doubt that in my lifetime we’ll see another first-class production of the show that earns it its rightful place in the musical theater canon.
The 1980s are not known for being a particularly bright moment in the history of Broadway. The decade is largely remembered for the rise of the British-import poperas, the most norotious flop in Broadway history, and seasons so slim with musicals the Tony Awards aired “songs for future productions” to fill out the broadcast.
But as someone who learned to love Broadway in the ’80s, I can get defensive. (Just you try to tell me that Big River isn’t perfect. I will cut you.) While fully acknowledging the shortcomings of the decade, I want to highlight one of the decade’s strengths: Act I Finales.
This morning, I was listening to Nine, and I totally got swept up in The Bells of St. Sebastian. Unfortunately, I can’t find video of any of the major productions, but I think this gives you a decent sense of the song:
When I was a freshman in college, one of my friends was obsessed with this song, and sang it (rather poorly) at every performance opportunity available, so I sort of wrote it off. But here’s the thing - as an Act I finale, it’s pretty damn perfect. The song starts quiet and builds. It conveys important information about Guido — we’re finally getting to the heart of what makes him tick — and moves the story forward — he’s finally getting to understand what makes him tick. While it isn’t quite the cliffhanger that leaves you on the edge of your seat wondering what will happen after the intermission, it does push things so close to a boiling point that you’re eager to jump back into the story.
That got me thinking about other Act I finales from the 80’s, and the first batch that came to mind are all amazing — in fact, each of them is even better than this one:
Dreamgirls: “And I’m Telling You”
Sunday in the Park with George: “Sunday”
La Cage aux Folles: “I Am What I Am” (A performance unfortunately weakened by George Hearn appearing in a tux rather than his costume from the show.)
As often happens on Twitter, once I mentioned these numbers, friends chimed in with their own suggestions:
City of Angels: “You’re Nothing Without Me” Unfortunately, for the Tony Awards broadcast they mashed up the finales from both acts, so you don’t get the full impact here. The show tells two stories at once: Stine, a writer of detective story potboilers, has been hired to adapt his novels for Hollywood, but he’s uncomfortable with the level of “adaptation” being asked of him. Meanwhile, we follow the story of his detective, Stone, in glorious black and white. This is the number where those two worlds finally collide, with Stone accusing Stine of selling out and screwing up the story.
(Has anyone written a great academic look at the interaction of artists and their characters in 1980s musical theater? Because City of Angels, Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George and others all have variations on this trope…)
Les Miserables: “One Day More” - This performances is from a Royal Variety concert, but is the closest to the original staging I could find. This number might feel cliche now, but when it was new, it was breathtaking. Junior High show choirs around the world adapted that march-in-place step that came to define Les Miz as much as the turntable or the logo.
Merrily We Roll Along: “Now You Know” Speaking of numbers that are hard to track down in their original versions! This isn’t the entire number, just the (otherwise unrecorded) dance break. But in addition to foreshadowing the emotional trainwreck to come in the second act, “Now You Know” is Sondheim writing a BIG BROADWAY SHOWSTOPPER in a way that he hadn’t since Follies.
42nd Street: “We’re in the Money” - The nostalgia craze on Broadway may have started with No, No, Nannette in the 1970s, but it reached its pinnacle with 42nd Street in the 1980s. Unlike the rest of the numbers featured, the curtain doesn’t drop right after the number - we need to see headlines Dorothy break her ankle so the chorus girl can become a star. But 42nd Street isn’t really about plot - bookwriters Michael Stewart & Mark Bramble were (insultingly) credited for “lead-ins and crossovers.” This was Gower Champion and David Merrick showing the rest of the main stem how it used to be (and someday would again be) done.
Me And My Girl: “The Lambeth Walk” - The same nostalgia engine, with a British overlay, plus the introduction to America of Robert Lindsay, such a major talent that there was strong doubt the show could work without him. (He was succeeded by Jim Dale, who succeeded. I saw Dale. He was brilliant. Then again, I was probably 10 years old, and the internet tells me I actually saw Tim Curry, not Dale, so what do I know?)
Smile: “Until Tomorrow Night” Even the flops had great numbers. (See also: Merrily We Roll Along, above.)
Baby: “The Story Goes On” - Liz Callaway alone on a bed is just as effective as the bombast of any of those other shows.
Anything Goes: “Anything Goes” - then again, there’s something to be said for bombast.
At this point, I went to my trusty Show by Show by Stanley Green. (Naturally, I have the third edition, which ends at Jerome Robbins’ Broadway in 1988.) The first show listed for the ’80s is Barnum! Of course! This, coincidentally, is the first show I did in High School - I was the ringmaster/Bailey and got to lead a couple of showstoppers of my own. But the Act I finale is one of those numbers I wish I got to do. It doesn’t do a heck of a lot for me on the cast album, but put Barnum on a high wire above the stage while singing it and suddenly it’s a masterful theatrical moment:
And then let’s not forget My One and Only, The Tap Dance Kid, and who knows how many others I’m forgetting, can’t find on YouTube, or am too tired to include. What’s your favorite Act I closer (from the 80s or any other decade)?
Back on the show-and-tell train, another album I picked up in London that no-so-coincidentally features Elaine Paige is the 1992 concert production of Nine.
This is an interesting recording for several reasons. First, even though it’s a cast recording from a concert production, it’s not a live album. The performers from the one-night-only concert were reassembled in the studio to record the album. Second, the orchestra and chorus is HUGE - 165 voices in the cast! - which makes the score sound great, for the most part. There’s a unique take on the overture, in that it includes male voices (although there’s a bonus track of the original, all-female arrangement). And apparently the score was cut down a bit for the concert, but those lost pieces were restored for the album. Finally, Elaine Paige wasn’t actually part of the concert at all! Sarah Brightman had been announced for the part, but last minute complications around recording the theme for the ‘92 Olympics required her to pull out of the concert. Elizabeth Sastre stepped in for the concert, but they must have wanted a bigger name for the album.
A single-disc highlights album had been available in the US for many years as part of a licensing deal RCA had with TER, which meant the two-disc complete set was only available as an import. I believe now that the RCA license has expired, you can get the full recording in the US. But I had held out so long (due to my general disdain for highlights albums), it made sense to buy this in London.
Jonathan Pryce plays Guido in this production.
