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re: Herman's LA CAGE Score Tony

Posted by: Chromolume 12:58 am EDT 04/03/14
In reply to: re: Herman's LA CAGE Score Tony - RonAnnArbor 05:33 pm EDT 04/02/14
With some exceptions (most notably "Look Over There" and "The best Of Times") I tend to think the score is not at all Herman's best. A lot of the songs are serviceable and do their job, but they're not as compelling or exciting to me as the songs in Dolly, for instance. And some of them, IMO, just fall way short in terms of craft - I find "Mascara" and "Masculinity" to be sloppy writing at best, and that horrid "Cocktail Counterpoint" should have been thrown out from the start. And I think "I Am What I Am" is better than the sum of its parts - it's a stirring anthem that was very exciting for its time, but some of the lyrics just don't sit on the music very well, and there are even moments in the orchestration that I find annoying and odd.

So yes, for me, especially as a young gay male (in college at the time), the zeitgeist helped the show a great deal - I was excited to see a show that dealt so openly with gay relationships - but the material didn't really live up, at least to me. And Fierstein's overly campy book (I find the Cagelles intolerable and rather embarrassing, for instance) didn't help.

If I'm in the mood to listen to Sondheim, I might very well turn to Sunday, among other scores. If I'm in the mood to listen to Herman, it's rarely going to be anything from La Cage, when many of his earlier scores are just simply so much better crafted.


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