| I enjoy overtures on cast albums, but I don't much like them in the theater. It's too difficult, when you haven't heard the score before, to sort out a medley of tunes from the show on one hearing. My favorite overtures in the theater are very short ones, like the one for 1776; otherwise, I prefer a dynamic opening number to set up the world of the show. Someone once posted that if only more of Sondheim's show had overtures, they would have been hits. I felt like mentioning A Chorus Line and Fiddler, which presumably wouldn't have had such short runs if they'd been blessed with overtures. |
