The trees do not talk in Paint Your Wagon; Julio sings that HE talks TO the trees, "but they never listen to me." The same goes for the stars and the breeze. And I don't know what's wrong with someone who can't or won't respond emotionally to "Out here they've got a name for things like wind and rain and fire/ The rain is Tess, the fire's Joe, and they call the wind Mariah." People often personify elemental forces when they are living close to nature, and especially when they're living alone or nearly alone, with no one else to talk to or share their feelings with. That applies to Julio's song, too.
Love Life was an ambitiously experimental musical that didn't quite work, but is nothing to be sneezed at.
There is nothing wrong with the book of On a Clear Day that couldn't be fixed within an hour. As I've said before, all you have to do is eliminate the doctor's wife--already an offstage character anyway--and have the doctor fall in love with Daisy when he eventually realizes that Daisy IS Melinda and Melinda IS Daisy. (That, after all, is how reincarnation works.)
And I believe Ken Mandelbaum called the book of Lolita, My Love the best musical adaptation of a novel he'd ever seen, or something very close to that. I trust Mandelbaum's judgment enough to suppose that he's probably right. |
