Threaded Order Chronological Order
| re: Any more comments on The Day Before Spring at the York? | |
| Last Edit: AlanScott 08:43 pm EST 02/16/19 | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 08:39 pm EST 02/16/19 | |
| In reply to: re: Any more comments on The Day Before Spring at the York? - kieran 07:21 pm EST 02/16/19 | |
|
|
|
| Using the original production's conductor's score found by Dominic McHugh, a concert was done in England a couple of years ago that employed a reconstruction of the original orchestrations, based on the instrumental cues in that score. It would be nice to have those orchestrations used if a recording is done. I'm told they sounded fantastic. I'm linking an article on that concert. I saw Mufti's previous production, which was done before McHugh found the conductor's score, and a certain amount of guesswork was involved the putting the score together for that production. I read that this Mufti was only 90 minutes, which would mean a great deal of cutting was done to the book and perhaps some was also done to the score. I know that the director did revise the script for this production. I'm guessing that little of the extensive dance music was used, which makes sense under the circumstances. Much as I would love a recording of the score, which has lots of wonderful music, I'd sort of hate to have happen what happened when Mufti's Billion Dollar Baby was recorded. That remains the best Mufti I've seen, but the recording is disappointing. They added a few musicians, and created a small orchestration for the recording, but still most of the dance music — again, a show that had a lot of dance — was missing, and the small orchestration really is not what I want to hear again and again. It's better than nothing, but I wonder if it makes another recording less likely. It remains sad to me that Comden, Green and the Morton Gould estate did not chip in to make a really thorough recording happen using the orchestrations. It would have been expensive, but these things don't cost millions, and I'd think it would have been feasible, if complicated and not cheap. Gould's daughter was at the performance I attended. She spoke at the talkback afterward, and she seemed quite pleased. Comden and Green were also closely involved in the production, making some revisions for it. I think both shows are perhaps too problematic and perhaps too little-known for Encores! to ever do, though I'd love to be wrong about that, if only because I would love to hear both scores performed with full orchestra and to have recordings with full orchestrations. At the talkback for the Mufti Billion Dollar Baby, original cast member Danny Daniels said that whenever he wasn't onstage, he would be in the pit so he could hear the orchestrations, which he thought were fantastic, up close. The original BDB orchestrations seem to exist, unlike the Day Before Spring for which a reconstruction had to be done that undoubtedly is not 100-percent correct, but may be the closest we will ever get. Fortunately, there are already recordings of most of the Day Before Spring songs. It does seem that the Loewe estate is concerned about having good recordings made and is willing to put in money for recordings, so perhaps I can hope that if this production does lead to a recording, the orchestrations used in Sheffield might be employed (expensive though it would be to do that). |
|
| Link | Day Before Spring concert |
| reply to this message | |
| re: Any more comments on The Day Before Spring at the York? | |
| Posted by: NewtonUK 08:26 am EST 02/17/19 | |
| In reply to: re: Any more comments on The Day Before Spring at the York? - AlanScott 08:39 pm EST 02/16/19 | |
|
|
|
| This show is interesting, as the book is really really mediocre - and that's being kind. The score alternates uncomfortably between 'by the numbers peppy musical theatre numbers, and some lovely Viennese operetta inflected numbers. The mind had a lot of time to wander during this piece, and it makes me think that the Lerner/Loewe ouevre is fairly limited. MY FAIR LADY is undoubtedly their masterwork, In 1944, they had a deserved flop with WHAT'S UP. THE DAY BEFORE SPRING lasted 20 weeks in 1945-46. 1947 brought BRIGADOON, which ran almost 18 months, a hit. Some lovely songs to be sure, but revivals are stymied by the book which hasn't aged well. PAINT YOUR WAGON stuck around for 9 months. They talked to the trees and named the wind. This score is bit of a mixed bag, and the less said about the book, the better. There have been several major rewrites done, and none have solved the show's problems. 5 years later - MY FAIR LADY. And 4 years later - CAMELOT. A great score, lumbered with a ponderous book. The legend i that Moss Hart wasn't well enough to help wretsle the book into shape with Lerner after its 4 hour plus opening in Toronto, I believe. The film of GIGI was kind of delightful, with some very good songs. And that's it. Lerner's work without Loewe was fairly mediocre as well. LOVE/LIFE with a good Kurt Weill score (one lyric was recycled in GIGI), but a book that failed in many of the same ways that Hammerstein's ALLEGRO book failed. Then, ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER, some lovely Burton Lane songs brought down to earth by a muddled book. And then COCO - I saw it - a leaden book (and a not very good score) which ran more than one night only because Katharine Hepburn and GEorge Rose were in it. Then he tried again with Burton Lane, creating the Sardi's wall worthy CARMELINA. Finishing in 1983 in a collaboration with Charles Strouse on the one night wonder CLOSE A LITTLE FASTER - I mean, DANCE A LITTLE CLOSER. Do we detect a theme? Lerner wrote one good book (MY FAIR LADY - much of which was directly from Shaw or paraphrased) and one pretty good screenplay (GIGI). Otherwise, every other Broadway show he worked in was sabotaged by its book. Any questions? |
|
| reply to this message |
| re: Any more comments on The Day Before Spring at the York? | |
| Posted by: Michael_Portantiere 12:38 am EST 02/19/19 | |
| In reply to: re: Any more comments on The Day Before Spring at the York? - NewtonUK 08:26 am EST 02/17/19 | |
|
|
|
| "Lerner wrote one good book (MY FAIR LADY - much of which was directly from Shaw or paraphrased) and one pretty good screenplay (GIGI). Otherwise, every other Broadway show he worked in was sabotaged by its book. Any questions?" No questions. Agreed 100 percent. |
|
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| More objections than questions. Very long reply. | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 09:27 pm EST 02/18/19 | |
| In reply to: re: Any more comments on The Day Before Spring at the York? - NewtonUK 08:26 am EST 02/17/19 | |
|
|
|
| Dear Dr. Pangloss, I have no questions but I do have objections. Well, I also have two or three questions but mostly I have objections. On the one hand, I do think (and have posted here before) that Lerner rarely succeeded in his books. Even one of his few shows that was a great critical and popular success in its time (and was a standard-rep item for decades) does not hold up terribly well. I mean Brigadoon, and I do think the book is part of the problem, but it’s not just the book. Still, it’s a show that remains of interest with so much that is good that it will continue to be produced. I hope no one again tries to improve it, because it is what it is. Much as I love John Guare’s plays, I’m glad that effort died a few years ago. It almost never works when people try to fix shows from the past that we now view as having problems. No one ever makes them better. They make them worse. Or at best, they come out even. But that’s not what we’re discussing here so I should move on. On the other hand, some of the evidence you cite seems to me questionable. So let’s go one by one. I do think that The Day Before Spring has an insufficient book and perhaps even a somewhat problematic score in which lovely songs may not always sufficiently support what the show seems to want to do. Yet if you’re basing your assessment on what you saw at this Mufti, I’d say that’s a mistake. Have you seen it elsewhere? Or read the complete script? Again, I didn’t see what was at Mufti this time, but if it was only 90 minutes or so, which is what I read, it was a cut-down version, and apparently the book was not just cut down but revised. It’s possible that it made the show work better. It’s possible it made the show worse. It’s possible it made little appreciable difference. But when you’re not seeing the show that the writers wrote, I don’t feel you should dismiss that show you didn’t see. And even less should you use the show as an example of that writer’s faults. This is why it’s maddening to sometimes read and hear people say of shows at Encores!, “Well, now we can see why this show never gets revived. The book is no good.” We rarely see the complete original books at Encores! and we sometimes don’t even truly get the complete scores. I’m not saying that we would necessarily like some of the shows more if we could see the complete versions, but we shouldn’t criticize the originals when we’re not seeing them in complete form. Sometimes even small cuts and changes screw things up. For example, a friend saw the last Fiorello! and then he read it. He still didn’t think it was a great show, but he said that at least it made sense when he read it. What he saw at Encores! was sometimes simply incoherent. Sometimes cutting just one line makes a huge difference if the line that is cut clarifies what is going on. When something gets incoherent, it gets boring. I’m not saying that Encores! shouldn’t cut and adapt books (although sometimes they should be more careful about what they cut or rewrite). I’m just saying that people shouldn’t say that the original book for some musical is no good when they haven’t seen the original book, and that goes for Mufti as well. If all you'd ever seen was a 75-minute version of Citizen Kane or a 65-minute version of Vertigo on the old 4:30 movie in New York, with its 90-minute time slot, they might not seem like very good movies. I first saw Singin’ in the Rain on the 4:30 movie, in a version that was probably cut down to around 70 minutes. So when I was 10 or so, I wondered what all the fuss was about. Another thing about The Day Before Spring is that it was very dependent on dance. In some ways, it may have been even more dependent on dance than Brigadoon was a few years later. Just as Brigadoon can’t work without the de Mille choreography or at least choreography that manages to make the same dramatic points, I suspect that The Day Before Spring greatly suffers without versions of the dances that were originally there to clarify the characters and make the dramatic progression . . . progress. Take the second-act ballet out of Carousel and see what happens. Have you read, seen or heard What’s Up? I’ve no reason to believe that it didn’t deserve to flop, but even I haven’t read or seen it or heard much of the score, just the two songs I’ve heard on recordings. One is nothing much, but the other is rather nice. I happen to love Paint Your Wagon in the original version, which for decades went unseen (or at least rarely seen) because what was licensed was Lerner’s tour revision, which I think screwed things up. The original got a mix of very favorable reviews, mixed reviews and decidedly disappointed reviews. London saw the original version in 1953 (for whatever reason, Lerner did not insist on his revision being used there), with the de Mille choreography, and it was a rare case of an American musical running longer in London than it had on Broadway and probably getting better reviews overall there. It ran 477 performances in London, which was longer than Kiss Me, Kate, Fanny, Wonderful Town, and Damn Yankees, to name a few, ran there. (Some sources give the London run of KMK as having been 501 performances, but that is incorrect. It ran a couple of weeks under a year.) It was also done rather often in stock and community theatre at least through the late 1960s. I suspect that the attempts to fix it it just made it worse. Actually, I don’t think it needs fixing. I prefer it to Brigadoon and Camelot. The latter may have a better score, and a great beginning and a great ending, but I think that in between it has some unfixable problems. And similarly to The Day Before Spring, Brigadoon, Oklahoma!, and Carousel, the original Paint Your Wagon was very dependent on dance. There was a lot more dance than we got at Encores! While it was perhaps not as crucial to the development of the central characters as dance was in some of those other shows — in fact, Brooks Atkinson, who voted it best musical in the Drama Critics Circle voting, felt there was a bit too much dance, good though the choreography was — but it surely provided mood and thematic underpinning. These things do make a difference. In any case, again, the dance in The Day Before Spring was crucial to that show. You really object to “I Talk to the Trees” and “They Call the Wind Maria”? Or is it just that poetic lyrics are easy to mock? I can be pretty critical of Lerner’s lyrics. I think he was perhaps the sloppiest of the great Broadway lyricists, but I think those are both excellent. I think “They Call the Wind Maria” is as good as almost anything by anyone. You wrote, “LOVE/LIFE with a good Kurt Weill score (one lyric was recycled in GIGI), but a book that failed in many of the same ways that Hammerstein's ALLEGRO book failed.” The show is called Love Life. Brian Stokes Mitchell's one-man show was Love/Life. And, really, the lyric was not recycled. The title was reused, and the basic idea was reused, but except for the title phrase and the reply "Ah, yes, I remember it well," the lyric is completely different. I know both Love Life and Allegro well. Could you be a bit specific on the many “same ways” in which both books failed? I can see some similar ways, but the two shows are so different in really basic ways that I would never say anything like “The Love Life book failed in many of the same ways that the Allegro book failed.” We can start with the fact that Allegro focuses on a rather large group of characters, while Love Life focuses almost exclusively on two. We can add that there is nothing in Allegro like the commentative numbers that provide Love Life with around half of its long score. That is the score, not the book, but often you really cannot separate the score from the book when considering certain shows. There is a commentative chorus in Allegro, but it functions completely differently than do the vaudeville numbers in Love Life. We can also add that Love Life is built around a surreal framing device, which does involve a good deal of dialogue, and that there is nothing remotely like that in Allegro. I know that I’m not the only person who has come to appreciate the score for Coco over the years much more than I did in 1970. The combination of Hepburn’s singing and the poor sound quality on the cast recording managed to hide much that was good about it. I’m not saying it’s a great show. It may not even be a good one. But the score has its points and — here’s a minority opinion — I think it was done no favors as a show by Hepburn. She did it favors at the box office, but I think her relentless steamroller of a performance made the show seem worse than it was in the writing. Again, the writing has problems, and the Sebastian character is painful today — I’m amazed the character didn’t get more backlash even then — but I think it’s a better show than it seemed then. Much as I’m against revisions in general, this is a show that perhaps could be improved by a smart revision, starting with getting rid of Sebastian entirely or perhaps finding a way to give him some sort of believability and humanity. I don’t know Carmelina well, but the score certainly has its points. A lot of people think this was a show that suffered greatly from not having a better director. I think that Lerner became afraid of strong directors, which was a very big mistake on his part. On Dance a Little Closer, which had a mostly excellent score and a mess of a book, he made the mistake of being his own director, which was perhaps why it really was a disaster onstage. I think a good director could have requested changes to the book that, if Lerner had made them, would have helped. Maybe not enough, but it would not have seemed a disaster. It was ineptly directed. Perhaps after 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Carmelina, he thought it couldn’t be worse if he did it himself. He was wrong. And trying to finish up, I’ll say now something I've mentioned here several times in the past but I can't expect people to remember it: It’s a myth that the first performance of Camelot in Toronto lasted four-and-a-half hours. Lerner himself wrote that, whether because it felt that long to him or he just didn't remember and someone told him that it was that long or, with his penchant for exaggeration, he thought it sounded better to write that than to write the truth. If you’re gonna flop, flop big. If Louis Calta of the New York Times could be trusted (and he was very specific with the starting times and ending times), it ran around three hours and 30 minutes with an intermission that may well have been around 20 minutes. This is long, but a bunch of musicals that are classics lasted that long or even longer at their first pre-Broadway performances. Hey, My Fair Lady seems to have also lasted three-and-a-half hours, or very close to that, at its first performance in New Haven. Carousel, The King and I and Fiddler were also around three-and-a-half hours at their first performances, maybe a bit a longer in the case of Fiddler. (Carousel has sometimes been said to have lasted more than four hours at its first performance, but that is almost certainly incorrect, based on what was written at the time.) Show Boat is known to have lasted more than four hours at its first performance in D.C. People who went to first performances of musicals in places like New Haven and Boston were pretty used to such lengths. Camelot was in Toronto, where they were not so used to such things. In Lerner’s defense, it’s true that the curtain did not come down till !2:20 a.m that first night in Toronto (again, if Calta is to be trusted). What he may have forgotten is that the curtain didn’t go up till 8:50. Again, I’m not disputing that Lerner had problems coming up with workable books, a point he would have been the first to agree with. I’m just saying that you threw out there a bunch of statements that I think are, at best, questionable (and some of them are simply incorrect) to make your case. |
|
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: More objections than questions. Very long reply. | |
| Posted by: Billhaven 10:28 pm EST 02/18/19 | |
| In reply to: More objections than questions. Very long reply. - AlanScott 09:27 pm EST 02/18/19 | |
|
|
|
| I just wanted to add that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue may have a disaster of a book (I didn’t see it) but there are gems included in the score. Duet for One is a brilliant piece of music and clever character driven lyrics that provide the right performer (Happy Birthday Ms. Routledge) with a genuine showstopper. When Lerner was good he was very good, indeed. | |
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
| re: More objections than questions. Very long reply. | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 11:35 pm EST 02/18/19 | |
| In reply to: re: More objections than questions. Very long reply. - Billhaven 10:28 pm EST 02/18/19 | |
|
|
|
| I agree that the score of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is filled with gems. It has some of Lerner's best lyrics, and a lot of terrific music. The only reason I didn't mention it was because NewtonUK didn't. The problems Lerner had with directors on that show may have been crucial in leading him to choose a very weak director for Carmelina and to direct Dance a Little Closer himself, although I also wonder if high-level directors were simply not interested, either because they thought the shows were weak (and in the case of Carmelina, just too old-fashioned) or because Lerner was felt to be too much of a handful. Of course, if he'd lived longer, he might have ended up being the lyricist or co-lyricist on Phantom, which would have brought him together with Hal Prince and with a massive hit (presuming it would have been just as much of a hit with his lyrics as it was with Charles Hart's). |
|
| reply to this message | reply to first message |
Time to render: 0.017530 seconds.