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...

This title is misleading, because it implies that there is a problem with the classic Cinderella story. But that would require there to be one definitive Cinderella , which there is not. There are countless variants on the story across many many centuries, independently evolved in many cultures, brought together by convergent evolution, split apart by divergent evolution, and so on and so forth. For this, and other reasons, I would like to take a moment to call out those who snarkily berate Disney and other adaptors for "sanitizing" the "original Brothers Grimm version" to make it more "kid-friendly," usually citing the part in the Disney movie where Cinderella's stepsisters conspicuously do not chop off bits of their feet to fit in the glass slipper. To that I say: The idea that Disney or any other adapter is somehow at fault for changing elements of a story in their adaptation is blatantly untrue. Every adaptation of every story ever by definitio...

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...