Of the three songs to only appear on the very first Jekyll and Hyde concept album, this is easily the best of the three. It’s an ecstatic, anthemic ballad of epic proportions and features some of the most ravishing music Frank Wildhorn ever wrote. That said, I understand why it was not used in later productions. Presumably it fit better into the plot of the show’s early drafts, but there is no point in either the Broadway version of Jekyll and Hyde, or the version heard on the second concept album, at which it would make any sense. It’s sung to someone that Jekyll has apparently just met, so it was clearly meant to be addressed to Lucy rather than Lisa/Emma, and in all the later drafts of the show Jekyll simply does not care about Lucy even remotely enough to sing her this kind of rhapsodic love song. It sounds incredible as, essentially, a Pop song on that first album (which was basically a Pop album to begin with), but it simply doesn’t have a place in any of the more current versions of the show.
Archives for November 2015
“There Once Was a Pirate” from Spring Awakening
This was originally the Act Two opening for Spring Awakening, returning to the scene after Melchior and Wendla have sex. It’s actually one of the very finest songs written for the show…in the early, pre-Broadway productions, critics routinely singled it out as a highlight, or even the highlight, of the show. The reason it was cut is that the lyrics, while actually better written than most of the show’s lyrical material, are built on a very obscure metaphor for the situation onstage (to clarify, Melchior is the ‘pirate’ in the song, and Wendla is the ‘maiden’). So while it does actually have a concrete connection to the dramatic situation, audiences tended to be confused by the opaque lyrics, so the song was replaced by “The Guilty Ones”, which is almost as lovely a song, so it isn’t too much of a loss. Instead of employing a metaphorical narrative, the new song addressed the feelings of shame and uncertainty that the two lovers were feeling directly (well, as directly as Spring Awakening‘s lyrics ever address anything, which admittedly isn’t very).
“Love Has Come of Age” from Jekyll and Hyde
I wouldn’t consider the songs on the second Jekyll and Hyde concept album that didn’t make it into the Broadway production ‘cut songs’ in the classic sense of the term, since that album’s version of the material is widely considered superior to the later versions and makes up many people’s primary experience of the show. However, the three songs that were only included on the first concept album, which consisted solely of Colm Wilkinson and Linda Eder sampling a few of the songs for Jekyll and the female leads, are a different story. This song was reportedly intended, in the earliest stages of the show’s writing, to be the centerpiece of the entire score, and while it is very pretty in a frothy, lightweight way, as a centerpiece it would have been rather underwhelming. Moreover, the song that replaced it, “Take Me As I Am”, is both prettier and has more dramatic weight, as well as having far more to do with the show’s actual story, so I don’t think we missed out on too much with this one.
Sunday in the Park With George
Sondheim fans are all too willing to honestly acknowledge the flaws of some of his shows (sometimes moreso than is actually deserved, as in the case of Follies), but many of them seem to be in denial about this one, especially as compared to his other work about artistic integrity from the same period, Merrily We Roll Along.
I’m aware the show has some rather monumental merits. Approximately three-quarters of the score ranks with the most beautiful music ever composed for the stage, in an utterly unique style that transcends traditional ideas of melody and sounds nothing like any previously existing musical idiom. Sondheim’s lyrics are the wisest and most profound of his career, sounding more like his mentor Oscar Hammerstein than he ever did anywhere else. And the elaborate onstage visual collages, based on real Georges Seurat paintings, are frequently breathtaking. But the sad truth is that, in spite of the beauty of the music and visuals, most of this show is as boring as watching paint dry.
Its defenders tend to argue that that is an inevitable consequence of the show’s concept, which is to be more essay than drama, a meditation on abstract themes rather than a linear story, and while I admit that with that concept one doesn’t expect a conventional suspenseful thrillride, the show is still much duller than it needed to be. This is mainly due to two (let’s be blunt) mistakes on the part of the authors.
The first is the excessive emphasis on the supporting characters throughout the first act. These ‘characters’ are really only there to be the people in the painting—they are, in essence, living stage props, and yet they receive a great deal of stage time and dialogue and several unnecessary songs. Their trivial subplots are completely without interest and have nothing to do with the point of the show, and even a genius composer like Sondheim can’t find interesting music for these people. “No Life” for a rival painter and his wife, clearly meant as a stealth attack on Sondheim’s own critics, comes across as weak and perfunctory, without the stinging panache of the “Who Wants To Live in New York?” scene from Merrily, and there’s a huge, 8-minute-plus ensemble number built entirely around the idea that Sunday is “The Day Off”. Granted, without these diversions the show would be much shorter, but frankly this show would have been both easier to take and more concise in its intellectual arguments as a 90-minute one-act like Assassins or Passion.
The other problem is the dialogue, which throughout the first act is written in an extremely simple and formal style, which is supposed to sound like a French translation but actually just sounds stilted. This stodgy dialogue style makes the interesting scenes less interesting than they should be and the dull scenes almost unbearable. The second act is much more consistent musically and features much more naturalistic dialogue, but the fact that virtually nothing at all happens in it in an external sense means that it too is rather dull when the music isn’t playing.
This show’s score and staging provide a pretty strong justification for its existence, but it’s still not very effective as theater, especially when compared to Merrily We Roll Along, which is often portrayed as Sunday‘s poor cousin but which, for all its problems, at least contained several elements with the potential to be conventionally entertaining (and fulfilled that potential in the current draft of the show, I might add).
We Sondheim fans have a tendency to let Sondheim off the hook for the flaws in his shows’ books on the basis that he ‘only wrote the score’, which is admittedly usually the best part of his shows, but that excuse doesn’t really hold water for a composer like Sondheim—given how much he has to do with the creative conception of his shows and how closely his scores are integrated into his collaborators’ books, he’s presumably got a fair amount of control over the book material himself.
The truth is that Sondheim, as consistently near-perfect as he is as a composer and lyricist, is kind of hit-or-miss as a theatrical dramatist, which, to be fair, is only what you’d expect of an experimenter of his courage and audacity; after all, part of the definition of experiments is that they often fail, and when you play a high-risk game, you can’t reasonably expect to win every time. And while I don’t generally feel much impulse to watch this show in the theater, or even to rewatch the video version made of the original production, I’m certainly not sorry he took on this experiment…if nothing else, it gave us one of the best theater scores of all time, and say what you will, there’s certainly no other show like it.
Phantom
Most of the Phantom of the Opera musicals other than the famous one that has been playing on Broadway for the past three decades are low-budget mockbusters taking advantage of the fact that the show’s source material is technically public domain. This version, however, was written and prepared contemporaneously with the Webber version, only to be shunted into obscurity after the other version got its funding first and wound up becoming the biggest hit in history.
This has led many of the people who hate the Webber Phantom for no good reason to proclaim this version as some kind of superior alternative, but an actual examination of the material makes this claim seem rather absurd. The book has two serious problems that it never manages to overcome.
Firstly, the Phantom is this version is entirely too nice: he seems less like a tragic psychopath and more like a fairly decent, largely normal guy making the best of a bad situation. This not only drains a lot of the tension from the story (especially since, much like Billy Bigelow in Carousel, much of our fear regarding the Phantom’s actions is of the harm they might do to himself), it also makes it rather unconvincing when he still goes around casually killing people, as that doesn’t really fit in with the way his character is portrayed the rest of the time.
The other problem is that the show overemphasizes the Oedipal elements of the Phantom’s infatuation with Christine in a way that drains a lot of the romance out of their relationship. Granted, this device (having Christine bear an uncanny resemblance to the Phantom’s dead mother) was also used in Susan Kay’s beloved novel Phantom, but there it was only one facet of the extremely complex relationship between the two, whereas here, it seems to be the only reason he’s interested in her, which comes across as less romantic and more creepy.
The score is admittedly much better than the book. Maury Yeston, the composer of Nine and the Titanic musical, is one of the monumental talents of the theater world, and while his work here is not his best, there are lovely things like the opening waltz, “Melodie de Paris”, Christine’s ravishing ballads “Home” and “My True Love”, the haunting duet “You Are Music”, the sparkling “Who Could Ever Have Dreamed Up You?”, the monumental eleven’o-clock number “My Mother Bore Me”, and the heartbreaking father-son duet “You Are My Own”. But the music never equals the heights of Webber’s score, the lyrics are often heavy-handed, and the score contains two colossal duds in Carlotta’s vulgar villain song “This Place Is Mine” and the maddeningly repetitive “Phantom Fugue”.
Ironically, the show’s best-known incarnation was as a TV miniseries starring Charles Dance that removed the songs entirely, thus removing the only thing of interest about the show in the first place. The sad truth is that, the often lovely music notwithstanding, this is not a particularly good dramatization of the Phantom story, and would probably have failed when it came to Broadway even if the Webber version’s success had not derailed its journey there. There are certainly worse shows out there, and this is still probably the best Phantom musical outside of Webber’s, but the people who try to paint it as an underrated masterpiece purely to spite the Webber musical are merely being contrarian, and ignoring the obvious facts in the process.