Secco Recit

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There hasn't been much new theater to criticize in a while, so here’s a quick low-level musical analysis of “Far Too Late,” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, released this morning . A little surprise for you all. Here is Far Too Late from my new @ALWCinderella , performed by @CarrieHFletcher in an empty Her Majesty's Theatre. - ALW pic.twitter.com/e3ZP4ftahF — Andrew Lloyd Webber (@OfficialALW) September 13, 2020 First off, this is a sad ballad in a major key. Bb Major. The verse starts with one two-bar phrase, repeated, slightly varied, three times. First, it’s a slightly elaborated outlining of the tonic chord, with the odd passing tone. Chord tones highlighted in blue. The second time through the phrase takes us down to the minor vi chord, pretty standard move, establishes us as sad. The repeated phrase is almost the same in its outlining of the chord, but now it overshoots the top note, and has to come back down. So we've got a non-chord tone on a stressed bea...

I have gathered that I am somewhat unusual among fans of the Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita  in that I actually like the 1996 film adaptation. Moreso than liking it, I think it's actually good. The reasons why people don't like movie adaptations of popular musicals can be subtle and complicated, and a well-known case in point has been made by Lindsay Ellis' analysis of Joel Schumacher's adaptation of The Phantom Of The Opera . In her analysis, Ellis points to elements of framing, changes to the material, and the subtleties of cinematography that make Phantom  an exceptionally weak adaptation of incredibly strong musical. But when you ask the average person what went wrong with the Phantom  movie, the answer you usually get is "Gerard Butler can't sing." And this is a pattern with a lot of movie musicals. The changes can be numerous and subtle, but the ones that people tend to notice up-front are "they cast movie stars who can't...

I was recently challenged to name what I thought the best Andrew Lloyd Webber ballad was. This is a difficult question to answer because, as everyone even remotely aware of musical theater knows, Andrew Lloyd Webber has, over the course of his career, written an imperial buttload of ballads. (I'm using imperial measures rather than metric because the UK just cannot make up its mind.) Any given Andrew Lloyd Webber musical will contain at least one memorable ballad, often more. Evita alone contains at least three, depending on how you count, all of which became popular enough outside the context of the musical to merit their own individual Wikipedia pages. In fact, more than a dozen Andrew Lloyd Webber ballads have their own Wikipedia pages, and that's just the popular ones. The first song I thought to rank was "Memory" from Cats , which I have always found to be somewhat overrated. I think the popular rating of "Memory" is perhaps somewhat skewed because a ...

A revival of the 2004 musical The Woman In White  (based on the novel by Wilkie Collins) concluded its revival run in London to generally lukewarm reviews. Better than the original production, but still not great. One of the reviews pointed out that by shortening the already-condensed show into two hours, it leaves little room for character development while also trying to cram in all that plot. Other common complaints were that Andrew Lloyd Webber's score does not coalesce, and that the drama is muddled. This makes sense. The Woman In White is a gothic thriller that takes at least a half-hour to give a sensible synopsis of. This is not going to be one of your pleasant small-theater murder mystery musicals that can be done by ten in the evening. At the same time, many of the revisions made (at least, according to reviews -- I'm not in London) seem to be in the right direction. But much more can be done. So here's an open letter to Charlotte Jones, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and...

Maybe it's a bit late in the run to do a review of Broadway's limited run revival of Sunset Boulevard , but I saw it yesterday, and wanted to write one. (Honestly, mostly because I wanted to document the lighting and the orchestrations, as well as a few individual elements I thought were interesting. Not so much a review as a list of things that struck me.) I'll go through the various production elements increasing order of amount of things I have to say about it. First, let's get the cast out of the way. Glenn Close was, of course, the star as Norma Desmond, but if you're at all interested in Sunset Boulevard , you've already heard all about her. What surprised me was how restrained the audience was. There was no applause on Close's first entrance, at the top of the stairs. Instead, the audience waited until she had placed her foot on the stage proper. (It was pointed out to me that this was because it was only when she finished descending the staircase...