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Showing posts with the label Evita

A Tale Of Two Evitas (Analysis and Review)

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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...

The Best Andrew Lloyd Webber Ballad

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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 ...