MUSICALS! Doc's Corner

[Doc]

Back in 1977-78, I absolutely fell in love with the sound track of a certain Broadway
musical, "On the Twentieth Century". Actually, there were a few of us in my village that emjoyed the album a lot. In fact, my best friend at the time, Troy Zulinski, (not his real name) and I DROVE 19 hours to New York in my little red 1977 Dodge Piece of Crap.
We decided to take in 5 musicals. "Side by Side by Sondheim" was my first ever Broadway musical experience. Wonderful, but a small review with 3 singers and 2 pianists, though I loved it and do love Sondheim's genius music. But I wanted "larger" fare. So, we saw the Wiz. Classic, wonderful. A couple more then at last we sat down in the St. James theatre to view "On the Twentieth Century".

I was in adrenaline apoplexy throughout. How I loved every moment. It was a month from the close of the show; Judy had along ago replaced Madeleine Kahn in the leading role.

www.amazon.com/review/product/B0000025D2/ref=cm_cr_pr_link_1?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

But she was fantastic.

Still, after returning home, I continued to listen to my album until it was scratching up and finally I lost it in a move.

Damn. So, hadn't listened to it since around 1980.

So, I recently remembered it, and needed to reconnect. I bought a new CD from Amazon, it came, and I have well, been enjoying it again, Soon I must "put it away".

BUt I do love it.

And Cy Coleman's music, the man who wrote the songs. (With Betty Comden and Adolphe Green, brilliant.)

So, I got all over google one night reading about Cy Coleman, and then, oddly, came across this picture, from left to right Cy Coleman, Paul McCartney, Carly Simon (!) and Miss Linda. Carly Simon has always had the most beautiful face.



stolen as I do from this site:

www.cycoleman.com/

Do all musical winding roads lead back to Macca? Whazzup widdat?

Anyway, he has good excellent taste in musical comedy composers.

[Doc]

Here is the opening number from "On the Twentieth Century", performed on the Tony Awards in June of 78:

www.bluegobo.com/production.php?var=200015199&mode=P&vid=0

The four train porters were a great feature to the show. Three of them, Joseph Wise, Ray Stephens, and Quitmann Fludd, Jr., were all from Atlanta. I know only Joseph and Ray. I have seen Joseph in the last 4 years. Sadly, Ray died in the 80's, an early victim to the AIDS horror in New York. In the line up, Joseph is usually the porter second from the right; Ray is the one on our far right. At the very end, when the orchestra plays the last heralding octaves, Ray is seen on the right of the screen, he bows his head.

Ray had an incredible voice, like a baritone Stevie Wonder. He was sure to have had an R&B career if he had lived. Saddens me, but it was so long ago....

Later in the show, as the Entr-acte to Act 2, the porters do their own wonderful number, "Life is Like a Train". As I sat and watched the show back in January, 1979, (that's actually when I was there, not 78) as that number went on, I felt so much proudness of my fellow Atlantan's who were up there on the Bway stage, doing what they do best.

This show is a modified drawing room farce (hehe, set on board a train), with an operetta styled score, in spoof really, and not the kind of thing most people like, but I love it. I enjoyed the keenly kinetic way the chuga-chuga-chuga of the score, the train motif, played into the story, and kept an adrenalized pace thru out. Cy Coleman's score is harmonically chocked full of sentimental harmonic patois; neapolitan passing chords, Viennese inversions, soaring string strettos leaping above Romance period melody, and Hershey Kay's crisply accented and pounding orchestration laced with century old European conventions that were de rigeur for Verdi's time.

I was born in the wrong century, the twentieth century! I should have come along in the nineteenth!

But, it's a dead show that seldom gets done in summer stock and will likely NEVER see
a Broadway revival. Perhaps it's ilk has seen the last of the Great White Way.

Madeleine Kahn had already been fired er, replaced by the time this aired, and way before I saw it. The lovely and capable Judy Kaye rose out of the chorus, hand ppicked by the genius Hal Prince himself, and became Lili Garland. Her voice is divine.
She swept me away the night i was there! Acting was, of course, in this over the top, stylized kind of style, Jeanette McDonald on speed, but yet underneath, very real and very easy to believe in spite of it all.

I would have like to have seen Ms. Kahn, I adore her as many did. Perhaps film was a better place for her subtleties; she did not like to "act big" and broad in the way that stage acting requires......


Well, enough. Thank you, and good night.

[Doc]

Like so many others, "On the Twentieth Century" was based on a movie of the same name, in this case, from 1934 starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard.

Barrymore is at his most outlandish overacting; a scenery chewing, overbearing theatre director of the golden age of Broadway plays in the 20's and 30's. Some say it is his last excellent role before descending into alcoholism, though he continued to do films for a time afterward. Charmingly funny, the tale of the co-dependent, needy actress neophyte who can't break the cycle of dominance by the eccentric control freak director. Their's is a rare love, a sick love, though not dangerous, but just toxic and comic, all at the same time. At least there is laughter in their mad dance of control and escape...

Many lines and scenes were very nearly lifted right into the musical comedy version. There are no songs in this version.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8_Jr4LEEOQ&feature=PlayList&p=4689085F23321D24&index=0&playnext=1

[Doc]

But, from the lovably ridiculous all the waaayyy back to the sublime, here is a clip of another favorite of mine, the broadway show "The Light in the Piazza", again a film lovingly remade into a supremely beautiful and moving musical, really more like opera, but not opera comique or operetta, but really a merger of musical and perhaps almost a sort of verissmo.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verismo

Not a note or word is wasted; it lyrically conveys the story of a mother and daughter who viacation in Florence, Italy and have their lives changed forever when the daughter, who is 25 and mentally challenged, meets and falls in love with a young single Italian man. Lines are crossed, borders are transgressed (no, not sexually) when the mother learns to trust that her needy child can form relationships with not only her young suitor, but his entire extended Italian family, a rather passionate bunch.....

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verismo

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMJDCs2frmY&feature=PlayList&p=86F0A07CAA44F9E6&index=40&playnext=2&playnext_from=PL

A most sumptuous and delightful score by the brilliant Adam Guettel. Mr. Guettel is, coincidentally, grandson to the legendary Richard Rodgers, but his compositional voice is entirely his own.

This is art at it's best.

[Doc]

Theatre of the Stars, the well established and leading theatrical producer in the southeastern US, is hosting this show this fall at the FOX theatre:

www.theaterofthestars.com/rain.htm


Of course I will be attending. Sadly, there are no keyboard parts in the pit this production! haha How unneeded! Anyway, looking forward to attending this. This may well be coming into many of your neighborhoods in the US of A.