Knights of Broadway

Broadway Musical and Top Forty Music Analysis by William S. Deaver

Archives for December 2016

“Hallelujah” by Pentatonix

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I have a very high opinion of Pentatonix…they’re a vocal ensemble comparable in quality to the cast of Glee, only this one doesn’t come attached to an ineptly-written television franchise. They really do have beautiful voices, and their harmonies are some of the best heard from a Pop group since the days of the Brian Wilson-era Beach Boys. Some people, perhaps understandably, resented this cover for charting above Leonard Cohen’s original version in the wake of his passing, but it seems a bit harsh to blame Pentatonix for that fact. Like the Glee cast, their covers of contemporary Pop songs frequently surpass the original singers’ versions, but it’s probably understandable that they didn’t manage that feat with this song. And this really is one of the most beautifully sung covers of this song ever recorded, and given how often this particular song is covered, that title does not lack for competition. The vocals are simply breathtaking, and if this rendition does not really pay as much attention to the lyrics as it might have, it at least struck a correct tone of melancholy and anguish instead of trying to make it sound uplifting like so many covers. Granted, Cohen’s version managed to do both at once, but he was, after all, Leonard Cohen, and it isn’t really fair to fault this cover for not matching the depth of his original. And to be honest, in terms of sheer sensual musical beauty, this is actually prettier than even the Cohen version. Pentatonix, for some reason, only seem to chart when they release their Christmas singles, and this is easily the best of those singles to date…and even if a lot of that it thanks to the superior source material, they still do a more than respectable job of interpreting it.

Verdict: Good.

Tuck Everlasting

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We’ve had a surprisingly large number of what Ken Mandelbaum used to call “Heartbreaker Flops” in the past few Broadway seasons…shows that fail, but for one reason or another still qualify as glorious in their ambition and achievements. After Big Fish, If/Then, Rocky, Bullets Over Broadway, The Bridges of Madison County, Honeymoon in Vegas, Bright Star, and Shuffle Along, came the last of the current crop to debut, Tuck Everlasting. Based on Natalie Babbitt’s beautifully-written young adults’ novel, this gentle, strikingly different show tells the story of a family that accidentally gains eternal life by drinking from a magic spring, and a young girl’s life-changing encounter with them.

You know how I observed, when I reviewed Lestat, that it apparently saw itself as some high meditation on the torment of immortal existence? Well, here’s a show that actually pulls off that idea a billion times better than Lestat ever dreamed of doing (even if both shows wound up as flops). Every plausible reaction to the idea of living forever is represented by one of the members of the family…the father, Angus, who is tormented by the heavy weight of time; the mother, Mae, who tries to make the best of her situation as much as she can; and older son Miles, who is anguished by the loss of his long-dead wife and son. The only one of them who seems to enjoy his situation is youngest son Jesse, and even he seems desperately lonely under his callow facade.

Winnie Foster, the sheltered eleven-year-old girl who comes into contact with the family, has a kind of suggested love plot with Jesse, but it’s all kept well within the bounds of the kind of relationship a seventeen-year-old can have with an eleven-year-old in a wholesome family show like this (especially if said seventeen-year-old is technically 104). Jesse does consider the possibility of marrying Winnie when she grows up, though, and this leads to the show’s central dilemma…namely, is life really worth anything without death? It’s an idea that’s been brought up many times, and even musicalized before, as any good Queen fan knows. But the novel this show is based on was always one of the most eloquent of the theme’s many reiterations, and the musical preserves that eloquence in adaptation.

The intensely lyrical score is responsible for much of that eloquence, and it is for the most part exquisite. The music is drawn largely from Country and Soft Rock influences, but it not only never feels anachronistic (the show takes place in the late 1800s), but does a breathtakingly beautiful job of expressing the show’s gentle and tender feelings. And if the lyrics do occasionally descend into cliche, they are still extremely effective is communicating the show’s themes, and their poetic language compliments the music perfectly. The adorable “Good Girl Winnie Foster”, the tempting “Seventeen”, the heartbreaking “Time”, the show’s key philosophical number “The Wheel”, Winnie’s contemplation of her loaded choice “Everlasting”, and the music for the final ballet are particularly wonderful.

Given all this, why did the show fail? Well, it does have one large artistic problem: as exquisite as it is when it focuses on Winnie and the Tuck family, it falters whenever it turns its attention to the villain (known only as “The Man in the Yellow Suit”), or the pair of buffoonish lawmen who serve as the show’s excuse for comedy relief. True, Terrence Mann is certainly the biggest name in the cast, and he does give an entertainingly hammy performance as The Man in the Yellow Suit. But these parts of the story don’t seem to have inspired the authors…the portions of the book and score that deal with them, including the cheesy villain song “Everything’s Golden” and the groan-inducing comedy duet “You Can’t Trust a Man”, are far less accomplished than the parts of the show that focus on Winnie and the Tucks. And the hyperactive overproduction of Mann’s carnival-themed production numbers does not remotely match the delicate tone of the rest of the show.

That said, I really thinks Broadway was just not ready for a show this different from what it was used to. This show is really more unusual than the above description may make it sound. The score is very oddly structured: there are really only twelve full vocal songs in the entire score. The rest consists of reprises and little musical fragments clocking at less than a minute each, and the actual climax of the story is told entirely through ballet. The same sheer refreshing sense of difference that won the show its small but devoted fanbase was just too much for mainstream Broadway, at least in a small, starless, low-key show with no overwhelming box-office draw like this one. But even with only thirteen tracks out of twenty-four being of real interest, and two of those being comparative duds, this show’s cast album is still well worth picking up. The good songs more than make up for the abundant filler, and the performers, particularly Sarah Charles Lewis as Winnie and Andrew Keenan-Bolger as Jesse, do a wonderful job with them. I hope we haven’t seen the last of this fascinating little show, because it just seems too interesting and unique to simply disappear into the mists of time.

Violet

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This poignant musical fable, an early effort by Broadway composing superstar Jeanine Tesori, took seventeen years to make the leap to Broadway and even then didn’t find the success it deserved.

Set in the 1960s, it tells the story of a young woman disfigured by an accident who makes a journey to a faith healer she believes can fix her face. On the way, she falls in with two soldiers, one black and one white, both of whom wind up falling in love with her in different ways. When she meets the faith healer, he turns out to be a pathetic fraud, but she finds comfort in the arms of the more sensitive of the two soldiers, named Flick, and the curtains falls on a bittersweet but intensely happy and hopeful ending.

Because the show was based on a short story, the plot is rather thin in terms of actual event, but the show is full of very intense feelings: the heroine’s symbolic confrontation with the spirit of her dead father and the heartrending final scene are among the most moving moments in modern musical theater, and the show’s journey from blind hope through despair to tentative happiness is one of the most moving stories to be found in any musical.

These powerful emotions are conveyed largely through the show’s melodious and intensely moving score. The score is still arguably Tesori’s best, with its only logical competitor being Fun Home, and ranks as one of the most underrated theater scores of the Nineties. Employing the Country and Classic Rock idioms that grew naturally out of the setting, it features two of the decade’s most rhapsodic ballads, “Lay Down Your Head” and “Bring Me To Light”, and two of its most inspiring anthems, “Let It Sing” and “On My Way”.

There are two intense musical confrontation scenes, “Hard To Say Goodbye” for Violet and Flick and a sequence consisting of the anguished “Look At Me” and the tender “That’s What I Could Do” for Violet and her late father. “You’re Different” is one of the deepest and most insightful character songs you’ll ever hear, as Monty, the callow womanizer of the two soldiers, privately admits just how much Violet has managed to get under his skin (one of the few flaws in the Broadway revival was the decision to replace this song with the far less interesting “Last Time I Came to Memphis”).

To lighten the heavy emotions of the piece, there are the clever “Luck of the Draw” for Violet’s father in a flashback and the sparkling “All To Pieces”, where Violet imagines all the features of famous movie stars she’d like to ask the faith healer for. And this is a rare show that manages to save its best song for its final curtain…the aforementioned “Bring Me To Light”, which is quite seriously one of the greatest final curtain numbers of all time, and does a perfect job of capturing the tentative love and joy that ends the show’s story.

You may ask, if the show has all these good qualities, why every one of its production in a major venue has failed. I can’t say for certain, but if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it had something to do with the thinness of the plot. Remember, the show is based on a short story, and for all the sheer emotional punch it packs, there simply isn’t enough happening in this plot to fill two hours of theater. Don’t underestimate how fatal this problem can be…a number of otherwise wonderful musicals (most famously The Baker’s Wife) have been consigned to perennial failure by a lack of sheer plot.

This show seems like it would be a natural for local productions, given its modest set demands and overall simplicity, but it has one difficulty: the title role is extremely challenging, because nearly all productions of the show choose not to use a cosmetic scar for the character. The actress has to convey the impression of being scarred, through her bearing and her reactions to the world, which means the show essentially cannot be done without a superb actress in the lead.

But with its incredibly moving story and largely glorious score, the show deserves far more success than it has received, and I can only hope its short-lived Broadway mounting will at least draw enough attention to it to lead to more productions. After all, the phenomenon of the Broadway flop that becomes a sensation in local theaters is a reality now (9 to 5, 13), and this seems like exactly the kind of show that would do well in that market, even if it is a bit hard to cast.

In any case, this is one of those cult flops scores that should be mandatory listening for serious theater fans. The original Off-Broadway cast album with Lauren Ward is probably the best overall recording, though I know most modern Broadway fans will probably gravitate to the Broadway cast album with Sutton Foster because of name recognition. Either way, this is a score well worth hearing, all the more now that Fun Home has made Tesori one of the biggest names on Broadway. The last two Broadway seasons have given us more than our share of genuine Heartbreaker Flops (Big Fish, The Bridges of Madison County, Rocky the Musical, If/Then, Honeymoon in Vegas, Bright Star, Shuffle Along, Tuck Everlasting), but this is something special even by those standards, and if you’re serious about Broadway, you owe it to yourself to check this one out.

A Christmas Story: The Musical

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The original 1983 film A Christmas Story has its detractors, but it occupies such a special place in the pantheon of Christmas classics that nothing can destroy it…not even being made into a musical that has no interest in any of the qualities that actually made it great.

The thing that makes the original film so unique among the canonical Christmas movies is just how aggressively real it is…at once a model of old-fashioned simplicity and displaying an almost brutal honesty about how childhood actually feels in the moment. That’s why this slick, manufactured Holiday-novelty-item approach is so profoundly wrong for this material, even more so than it was for the other holiday classics thus adapted.

Of course, the most interesting thing about this show is that the songwriters are Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who, thanks to Dear Evan Hansen and the movie musical La La Land, are now one of the most acclaimed teams in modern musical theater. Unfortunately, it’s clear from the noxiously bland score they contributed here that they were working on autopilot for this project. This isn’t a case of artistic immaturity, either…Pasek and Paul were responsible for the brilliant and brutal off-Broadway masterpiece Dogfight that very same year, so they clearly already knew how to make honest and dramatic music. Presumably they just saw this show as a piece of soulless product not worth their actual effort.

One could argue this is similar to Jeanine Tesori working on ‘commercial’ projects that are unworthy of her talents, but when Tesori ‘slums’, she at least elevates the material by her presence (for example, the Shrek musical would have been far worse without her tuneful and sophisticated music). Here, Pasek and Paul’s score might as well be the work of any random hack songwriters. That’s a shame, because their other scores point up exactly the qualities that might have worked in a true musicalization of A Christmas Story, so they were ironically the perfect team for the job if they or the producers had had any interest in actually matching the film.

The only number that is even remotely successful at capturing the feel of the film is the touching “What a Mother Does”, particularly as performed by Liz Callaway on the cast album. The two centerpieces are a pair of grotesque, embarrassing production numbers, “Ralphie to the Rescue” and “You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out”, and the score in general follows the Young Frankenstein school of musicalization, simply turning every famous joke into a musical number…even the familiar flagpole scene becomes a song, “A Sticky Situation”. The lyrics are mildly clever in places but have no real content, mostly just continually rehashing aimless wordplay to fill in for the lack of it, and the music sounds like your typical borderline-Muzak Christmas novelty music.

The score also has a very non-period-specific sound, which might be an advantage in a musical fairytale like How the Grinch Stole Christmas but drains a lot of the character out of a movie that was specifically focused on capturing the authentic color of a bygone era…the movie is full of very meticulous period detail, and it needed a period-flavored score to match it.

An even bigger problem comes from the fact that in the film, the child actor playing Ralphie barely speaks at all…the vast majority of his ‘dialogue’ comes from his future self as the narrator, looking back on his own internal monologue at the time. But because Tom Wopat’s adult narrator doesn’t participate in the music, the original film’s ruefully philosophical commentary on childhood becomes much more of a straightforward story from the perspective of a child, which makes the material far less sophisticated and interesting. In short, this is ultimately just a glorified Radio City Music Hall-type production…big, flashy production numbers to entertain the kiddies in the audience…that tries to cash in on the name recognition of the film without actually understanding it.

Fortunately, this is not one of those terrible adaptations that wind up eclipsing their more worthy predecessors…the musical is already forgotten just a few years after its debut, while the film itself is still being marketed to the point of overexposure. And while the critics were fairly generous at the time, it should tell you something, given what passes for seasonal holiday fare on Broadway, that this show has not made another appearance there. Remember that such dubious items as the Grinch and Elf musicals were brought back multiple times over the years, whereas this show essentially vanished after one holiday season, leaving nothing behind but an incomplete cast album and a bad taste in Broadway-goers mouths. I hope Pasek and Paul’s next ‘commercial’ project, the upcoming live-action film version of Disney’s Snow White, goes better than this, but given their apparent belief that they have to ‘turn off’ their talent on projects like that in order to communicate that such things are beneath them, I’m not especially hopeful.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again

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This was probably the best of the crop of live television musicals up to that point. It probably isn’t as good as Hairspray Live, given that it doesn’t live up to its source, but to be fair, that source was a pretty hard one to top.

Apart from importing a few lines from the audience participation script into the actual show and reinserting the stage version’s final song, “Super Heroes”, the script is almost dogmatically faithful to the original screenplay. Indeed, given today’s politically correct world and the pressures generally placed on primetime television, I was amazed at how much of the transgressive debauchery that made up the original plot was unapologetically retained in the finished version.

Much was made of an actual transgender actress, Laverne Cox, playing Frank N. Furter, but I tend to judge these cases solely on an artistic level. Fortunately, Cox more than passes muster on that front. If she doesn’t equal Tim Curry’s original (which, let’s be honest, no-one will ever do), she still has all the evil charisma and twisted sex appeal to be worthy to fill his shoes, and that alone is more than you’d expect from practically anybody.

The supporting cast are equally excellent. If I had to lodge any criticism, it would be that Reeve Carney and Christina Milian as Riff-Raff and Magenta, while certainly capable enough, are a bit too normal compared to the terrifyingly weird Richard O’Brien and Patricia Quinn in the original.

But several of the performances actually improve on the ones in the first film. Ryan McCarten is much more likable as Brad than Barry Bostwick, although I suppose you could debate whether that’s really a good thing given that being unlikable is essentially the point of Brad’s character. But Annaleigh Ashford is a much more human and touching Columbia than ‘Little’ Nell Campbell’s hyperactive cartoon, and Victoria Justice is indisputably a huge improvement on Susan Sarandon in singing, acting, and even looks.

Ben Vereen is, to be frank, a far more interesting Dr. Scott than Jonathan Adams, and, in a nod to the show’s legacy, Tim Curry plays The Criminologist, providing a sense of gravitas that is at least equal to Charles Gray’s original. And Adam Lambert is a natural choice for Eddie, given that he is modern Pop’s closest equivalent to Meat Loaf, albeit thinner and prettier.

This may not equal the legendary project on which it was based, but it did as good a job at recapturing what made it work as anyone could possibly expect. It’s often helpful to think of these TV adaptations of musicals that are already famous on film as revivals, rather than remakes, and if this were a stage revival, it would be the best we’d gotten since the Tom Hewitt Broadway revival back in 2000.

Certainly it did a vastly better job than any previous live TV musical except perhaps The Wiz Live, and that one was dealing with a much more minor classic whose earlier film adaptation had been an unmitigated disaster. This one, on the other hand, chose source material that seemed impossible to improve on and even pointless to attempt to duplicate, and if its reach to equal the original ultimately exceeded its grasp, its frankly astounding quality serves as a reminder of the benefits of reaching for the impossible.

“Drink a Beer” by Luke Bryan

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This was the first decent single Luke Bryan had released since his breakthrough hit “Do I”. Since then, he has been known mostly for either dull, near-identical midtempo ballads or idiotic, posturing Pop-Country party songs. The reason for this song’s unusually high quality is obvious when one looks as its writing credits today, but of course in 2013 no-one had any idea who Chris Stapleton was yet. Yes, the current Messiah of Neotraditional Country was responsible for penning this song, which makes this sort of a pattern for Bryan, since “Do I” was penned by the members of Lady Antebellum. But regardless of who really deserves the credit for this song, about the one thing country music still did as well as it had ever done circa 2013 is dirges for the wartime dead, and this one was the most touching to make the Country charts since Lee Brice’s CMA-winning “I Drive Your Truck”.

Verdict: Good.

White Christmas (stage musical)

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This stage version of the classic musical film has traveled the country continuously as a regional holiday-fare staple, but it only played a very brief limited engagement on Broadway. This suggests that it works best when the audience has fairly low standards, which tells you a lot about the show right there. Its Broadway incarnation also received rather scathing reviews and garnered the equivalent of ‘damned with faint praise’ at the Tonys that year, with only two nominations for ‘Best Choreography” and the ever-prestigious “Best Orchestrations” award. In this case I can’t say I blame them…I may be passionately opposed to snobbery, but that doesn’t mean I have no standards. This show was essentially a throwback to the notorious Seventies and Eighties trend of taking famous stage musicals and making perfunctory, lifelessly imitative on-stage reenactments of them.

To be fair, the original movie was already a jukebox musical composed mostly of pre-existing Irving Berlin songs, so the stage version’s decision to interpolate a few more (like “I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm”, used as the stage show’s finale) was a perfectly reasonable move. But the movie, for all its glorious qualities, still shows its age when transplanted to a Broadway stage. Like so many musicals of the ‘classic’ era, it featured an extremely contrived plot even by romantic comedy standards…stage musicals had grown out of this kind of forced plotting by 1952, but some film musicals were still relying on it. It also suffered from that perennial flaw of Jukebox Musicals—songs that have virtually nothing to do with what’s actually going on in the story. Even in the original movie, most of the songs that aren’t straight-up diagetic performance pieces have, at best, only a tenuous connection to the scenes they grow out of, and there’s not much the stage show can do to fix it.

But the biggest problem is that the White Christmas screenplay doesn’t really have characters so much as it has placeholder sketches that were filled in by the personalities of the legendary stars that played them. And while there have been some talented people like Brian D’Arcy James and Stephen Bogardus who have filled these roles in the more high-profile stage productions, modern Broadway performers are generally trained in portrayals, not in essentially playing themselves and lending their natural personalities to otherwise underwritten parts. The kind of performers these parts were written for just don’t exist anymore, at least not on Broadway, and while these Broadway semi-names do at least moderate justice to the score vocally, they simply don’t have the natural personality to make these fairly two-dimensional characters seem like fully rounded people.

And in any case, I can’t really come up with any conceivable reason to sit through this massively inferior glorified cosplay in an era when the original movie is only the click of a computer mouse away, especially since the price of the movie is merely a fraction of the price of even regional theater tickets. I don’t care who you cast in any given stage production, they’re not going to remotely compete with Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Danny Kaye or Vera-Ellen. That’s the danger of adapting an iconic movie so straightforwardly to the stage, especially one that was already a musical…you don’t necessarily have to improve on the original, but you do have to actually provide something the original didn’t have. 42nd Street, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and some of the more successful Disney musicals managed to at least meet that bare minimum, and so they succeeded, but this show just doesn’t. This isn’t the worst holiday fare Broadway saw around this time…compared to the stage versions of How the Grinch Stole Christmas or Elf it seems positively respectable…but it’s redundant enough that I can’t really advise you to waste your time on it when the real thing is so much more easily available.

Hairspray Live

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At last, we finally have a decent video resource for the Broadway musical classic Hairspray. The earlier film version has its admirers (mostly among people who never actually saw the stage show), but it completely fudged the tone of the piece and offered a horribly uneven cast capped by a terrible performance by John Travolta as Edna.

This live TV version, on the other hand, sticks quite faithfully to the stage show, only making some slight cuts and abbreviations here and there for the sake of the running time, and features superb performances across the board. Above all else, Harvey Fierstein reprises his legendary performance as Edna Turnblad, offering a chance for the non-theater-going public to see how this role is supposed to be done (Fierstein, a successful playwright and musical librettist, also did what little adaptation had to be done to the stage book for this production).

Newcomer Maddie Baillio makes an absolutely delectable Tracy. As good as Nikki Blonsky was in the earlier film, she lacked the fundamental sex appeal that is so important to this role. A good Tracy should be not only adorable, but also genuinely sexy; Baillio has both qualities locked down, and her singing, dancing and comedy skills are almost on a par with Marissa Jaret Winokur’s legendary original.

Ariana Grande did an impressive job of not hogging the spotlight…she’s worked well in ensembles before, of course, but that was before she was the most famous person in the cast, so it’s impressive that she didn’t overpower her colleagues in the role of Penny. That said, she was also beyond adorable as the pig-tailed, bespectacled wallflower and steamingly sexy after she comes out of her shell, and she sang with all the power we know she possesses.

Kristen Chenoweth was show-stealingly marvelous as villainess Velma Von Tussle, even managing to make the cheesy “Miss Baltimore Crabs” seem thrilling. Dove Cameron was an amusing Amber, if perhaps just a bit too likable for the part…even on her most venomous lines, she came off a bit too nice in this version. That said, she was a damned sight better than the annoying Brittany Snow in the first movie version.

Garrett Clayton was a less interesting Link than Matthew Morrison in the original Broadway cast or Zac Efron in the first film…he has the basic style of the part down and is likable enough, but neither his singing nor his acting approach that of his two famous predecessors. But Ephraim Sykes is just as dynamic and charismatic a Seaweed as Elijah Kelley was in the earlier film, and Derek Hough is easily the best Corny Collins in the history of the role, stopping the show with a big number interpolated specifically for him, “Ladies’ Choice”.

Jennifer Hudson looks a bit too slender in the role of Motormouth Maybelle…they really should have padded her costume more…but that’s the only conceivable complaint about her performance; her singing and acting were superb, especially on the unforgettable eleven-o’clocker “I Know Where I’ve Been”. Martin Short does somewhat overplay the part of Wilbur…the role really calls for a subtler actor like Dick Latessa…but at least his overplaying was actually funny, rather than just annoying like Christopher Walken in the first film, and he does have the warmth the part needs.

More than any one performance, though, what makes this film such a revelation is that it actually captures how the show plays on stage in a way the earlier movie didn’t even attempt. The feeling of a musical-comedy fantasy landscape just real enough to make you care about the racial issues at the story’s center is preserved, and the jarringly indecisive mood swings of the alternately blithe and gritty movie version are nowhere to be found. In particular, Hairspray has one of the most thrilling final scenes of any musical ever seen on Broadway, and for the first time audiences can witness its glories in the comfort of their own living rooms.

The show does interpolate the two songs written for the movie (including the film’s credits song “Come So Far (Got So Far To Go)”, which might be a mistake as it comes off as quite anticlimactic after the epic finale), and deletes the stage show’s weakest and least plot-relevant song, “The Big Dollhouse”. But apart from that, and a few trimmings to the plot to keep it within the allotted TV running time, this really is basically the stage show transplanted to the screen. Even the occasional fourth-wall breaks (which, to the producers’ credit, were far less relentless than they had been in Grease Live) don’t really hurt the effect, as Hairspray is, as I stated, a musical-comedy fantasy that winks at the fourth wall a few times even in the original stage script.

The dancing is just as thrilling as it was in the stage production, which is key in this show where the very plot itself revolves around dance, and the production has the same energy that characterized the Broadway show. Apparently this did less well in its initial viewing than some of the other live musicals (such as The Sound of Music, Grease, The Wiz and Peter Pan), but that’s to be expected, as it’s a newer and slightly less well-known show than the old-school classics those were drawn from. But now that people have actually seen it, I imagine it will at least equal The Wiz Live and Grease Live and far outstrip the inferior Peter Pan and The Sound of Music adaptations in its actual legacy. After all, which would you rather watch…a production of Peter Pan starring Christopher Walken, or a flawless recreation of the Broadway production of Hairspray with Harvey Fierstein in his original role? Seriously, it’s not even a choice.