Rock Of Ages Original Broadway Cast Rarity
A comparison of the original cast albums from this season’s two most Tony-decorated new Broadway shows, “Billy Elliot: The Musical” and “Next to Normal,” with those of the most acclaimed revivals, “West Side Story” and “Hair,” reveals a glaring distinction between now and then.“Billy Elliot” has several show-stopping theatrical moments, but all of them have more to do with dance and musical staging than with songs. “Next to Normal,” the groundbreaking exploration of the failure of psychiatry to alleviate a troubled woman’s anguish, has a sophisticated musical structure (it deserved its for best score) but no ready-made standards.By contrast Leonard Bernstein’s music for “West Side Story” is the most indestructible element of a show that in almost every other way feels dated. Although it yielded no immediate hits when it opened in 1957, many of its songs went on to become standards. “Hair” was the last show to yield four Top 10 hits; five if you count the Fifth Dimension’s melding of “Aquarius” and “Let the Sun Shine In” into a pop anthem. A show that heralded the beginning of something — the arrival of rock ’n’ roll on Broadway — marked the end of something else.Until recently the format of the traditional Broadway musical allowed for moments when the action paused long enough for a star to deliver a so-called 11 o’clock number, a song that audiences could hum or whistle as they left the theater. But when was the last time you actually heard that happen on the way out of a show with a new score?
Nowadays the songs, the book and the musical staging are expected to flow together uninterruptedly. AdvertisementThe Broadway musical is still struggling to shuck off its longstanding image as a quaint cultural outpost disconnected from the rest of popular culture. That image, however, is changing rapidly as the form’s old masters and their audiences fade away. As Broadway, out of economic necessity, embraces rock, country and pop-soul music, it has increasingly turned into an elevated East Coast answer to Las Vegas, with Richard Rodgers and George Gershwin standing for tradition in New York, where the Rat Pack and Liberace epitomize Sin City. The ascendance of the jukebox musical (like “Mamma Mia!” and “Jersey Boys”) accelerated the narrowing of the longstanding gap between theater music and records.
Though on paper a Broadway musical incorporating 1980s arena rock songs into a comedic love story sounded like a long shot, Rock of Ages became a surprise hit, striking just the right mix of nostalgia, outright silliness, and healthy respect for the glory of big hair hits. The cast performs in the musical 'Rock of Ages.' 'The original director lived in London so I was in charge of keeping the show going and looking into how it. On rare occasions, he spoke in public about his personal story.
It is a sign of the times that Broadway is now a popular default setting for contestants. (Constantine Maroulis in “Rock of Ages” is the latest “Idol”-minted marquee name.)Sound technology has evolved to the point that producers have discovered exactly how much volume an audience can take (the optimum sound is big but not deafening), and shows like “Rock of Ages” now offer a scaled-down version of the rock experience. Its sound design, like those of “Mamma Mia!” and “Jersey Boys,” is as critical to box office success as the familiarity of its recycled hits. The arrival next season of Julie Taymor’s “Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark,” with a score by the U2 rock gods Bono and the Edge promises to close the gap further.Here is a checklist of the original cast albums of the season’s major Broadway shows and their place in the musical-theater continuum.BILLY ELLIOT: THE MUSICAL Although the score by Elton John (music) and Lee Hall (lyrics) includes some of Mr. John’s catchier theater tunes, like all his music for Broadway the songs are not as indelible as his early-70s hits.
Since “Billy Elliot” is a dance musical, it makes sense that his score borrows vamps from “A Chorus Line” (the song “Shine”) and Kander and Ebb. But the stronger numbers have the flavor of English barroom singalongs. Hall’s lyrics always address the subject at hand, and Mr. John’s music follows suit. A stomping protest march, “Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher,” which echoes the Kinks’ “Well-Respected Man,” captures the embattled anger of striking miners stretched to the breaking point.Here, and in “Solidarity” and “Once We Were Kings,” a stalwart militancy that has been a lurking presence in Mr. John’s music from the beginning, marches confidently to the fore. “Deep Into the Ground,” a miner’s lament, borrows from a strain of English folk music that goes back centuries.
Hall’s blunt lyrics are a refreshing change from the stilted poetic pretensions of Mr. John’s longtime collaborator Bernie Taupin and keep the songs rooted in the real world. Even the anthem “Electricity,” in which Billy describes the liberating thrill of ballet, has an insistently stolid beat.Released several years ago, the original cast album of “Billy Elliot” (Decca, $19.98) is the only recording of the show. It includes a bonus CD of Mr.
John singing three songs, including “Electricity,” “Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher” and “The Letter.”NEXT TO NORMAL (Ghostlight Records, $21.98). The songs in the show, composed by Tom Kitt with lyrics by Brian Yorkey, are intensely emotional, as befits the story of a woman suffering from bipolar disorder, although her delusions point more toward schizophrenia. So much information is packed into Mr. Yorkey’s lyrics that repeated listening to the album deepens the experience and increases your respect for the clinically precise descriptions of complex psychological states and pharmacological side effects. Kitt’s medium soft-rock tunes aren’t especially original. But they flow together into a fairly seamless, mostly through-composed narrative that is a huge improvement over the Andrew Lloyd Webber technique of layering continuous music over dialogue like wallpaper.The husband-wife argument, “You Don’t Know/I Am the One,” in which Alice Ripley playing the troubled central character, Diana Goodman, and her husband, Dan (J.
Robert Spencer), try to explain themselves, brings confessional soft-rock into a psychiatric realm rarely visited in popular music. My major quibble with “Next to Normal” is the importance given to Gabe (Aaron Tveit), a teenager who prances about the stage gloating, “I’m Alive” in his signature song. Dramatic as he is, this fantasy who resists being driven out of Diana’s thoughts feels like an exaggerated contrivance in an otherwise realistic show.
“Next to Normal” culminates with “Light,” an uplifting finale that feels tacked on to end it on a note of tentative hope.That said, “Next to Normal,” which has refined rock-inflected chamber orchestration by Michael Starobin and Mr. Kitt, signals a future path for higher-minded Broadway shows.
Its temerity to criticize the mystique of modern psychiatry and its clinical mumbo-jumbo is admirable.WEST SIDE STORY (Masterworks Broadway, $18.98). Who would disagree that Leonard Bernstein’s semi-classical score raised the bar of Broadway composing to a level of complexity and emotional depth that has only been approached by Stephen Sondheim?Melodies worthy of Puccini — “Maria,” “Tonight,” “Somewhere,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “I Have a Love” — mingle with bebop (“Cool,” “Jet Song,” “The Rumble”) and symphonically expansive mambo music (“America,” “Dance at the Gym”). Like last season’s cast album of “South Pacific,” the new recording of “West Side Story” has the disadvantage of competing with an original cast album (and an inferior movie soundtrack) whose every inflection is graven in many people’s minds.The translation of some lyrics into Spanish for the revival turns out to be a cosmetic gesture that adds only a gloss of authenticity without deepening the show. More than ever the lovers seem like stick figures. Matt Cavenaugh’s Tony, a Ken doll with a gym body, has a sweet voice but, like the show’s other battling street fighters, little physical dynamism. Larry Kert’s original Tony had more verve.
Rock Of Ages Original Broadway Cast Rarity Season
Josefina Scaglione’s Maria more than matches Carol Lawrence’s original, but the character is still a void. Karen Olivo’s Anita lends the production and the cast album a desperately needed jolt of heat. In “A Boy Like That/I Have a Love,” her duet with Ms. Scaglione, the lyrics suddenly matter. The show now revolves around that number.HAIR (Ghostlight Records, $18.98). The cast album wisely doesn’t try to update the quaintness of the original score by dressing it up in contemporary finery. “Hair” arrived on Broadway in 1968, just as the technology that created heavy metal was being refined, and its arrangements retain the clattery, mid-fidelity sound of the pre-metal era.
Rock Of Ages Songs
The charm of its songs lies in the primitivism of these exclamatory fragments by childish urban street people whose personal vignettes are woven into a meandering tribal mosaic stirred to musical life by Galt MacDermot’s sweetly upbeat tunes.The score’s integrity owes to its homemade iconoclasm. The musical stands as an inspired one-of-a-kind achievement reflective of its moment, but I much prefer the Julie Taymor film “Across the Universe,” which majestically covered the same territory using Beatles songs that are far cleverer than the pie-in-the-sky ditties erupting from the members of “Hair’s” shaggy tribe. Revisited today, its hippies look and sound more than ever like sad lost souls headed for defeat, their youth their only armor. “I Got Life,” the checklist of functioning body parts proudly announced by Claude (Gavin Creel), sums it up; they are the only things he has.