Secco Recit

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 ...