Secco Recit

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...

In the 1760s, teetering on the edge between the Baroque and Classical eras, Christoph Willibald Gluck felt that opera had become too self-indulgent. Too much time was wasted on giving the singers all the best florid lines to sing, and text was repeated so often it became meaningless. Operas in this time could run near four hours long and still convey very little story at all. Gluck worked with librettist Ranieri de' Calzabigi to come up with a list of reforms to bring opera back to basics, where the music focuses on conveying the drama as simply and directly as possible. Orfeo ed Euridice  clocks in at around ninety minutes. A nice little chestnut of an opera that's over and done with without an intermission. Hei-Kyung Hong and Jamie Barton in Orfeo ed Euridice Photo by Ken Howard Today the Metropolitan Opera opened a revival of Mark Morris' 2007 production of Orfeo ed Euridice , and at first it seems the director has taken Gluck's reforms to their logical ...

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 ...

(All historical background is from Look I Made A Hat,  by Stephen Sondheim) Circa 1953, Stephen Sondheim took an interest in a book by Alva Johnston entitled The Legendary Mizners, a biography of brothers Addison and Wilson Mizner, an architect and con man respectively (among other things) who caused the Florida real estate crash of 1925/26. Sort of kind of maybe. It's all pretty sensationalized, but historical accuracy is of no concern for a theatrician. Sondheim attempted to obtain the rights to adapt the book into a musical, but was beaten to the punch by David Merrick and Irving Berlin. A few years later, while working on Gypsy  (so, circa 1959), the Mizner brothers musical had not come to fruition, and Sondheim asked Merrick what had happened to it. It turns out that everyone involved lost interest, and Merrick had let his option on the book lapse. Between 1960 and 1990, Stephen Sondheim was pretty much continuously working on other projects. In 1993, having just ...

A friend recently posed to me the hypothetical (and I'm just now realizing probably rhetorical) question, "Where would we be if Howard Ashman were still alive?" And my immediate response was "Well, Wicked probably wouldn't exist, or at least not in the form it does today." Which led me down a rabbit hole of counterfactualizing an elaborate timeline in which Howard Ashman did not die in 1991, and continued to change the landscape of Disney and musical theater in a radical way. (NOTE: This is all for fun and intended to be rather tongue-in-cheek. I do not have the ability to accurately predict this or any other alternate futures. If I did, I would become a time-traveling theatrical producer.) Howard Ashman and frequent collaborator Alan Menken You see, Howard Ashman's role in the shaping of a generation of childhoods began in 1987/88, when he was brought in to write lyrics for Disney's new animated feature, Oliver And Company . While worki...