| re: Overtures in general | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 06:46 am EDT 06/28/19 | |
| In reply to: Overtures in general - BigM 09:28 pm EDT 06/26/19 | |
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| I do like overtures in the theatre, at least if they're good ones. Some of the old shows have overtures that go on forever, and those very, very long ones were often cut down on the cast recordings. (I think that relatively few people know that the complete overture for The King and I has been recorded only four times, or at least I know of only four complete recordings of it: the Music Theater of Lincoln Center recording, the Munich cast recording, the Rodgers and Hammerstein overtures CD conducted by Mauceri, and the TER/JAY recording. I'm linking the overture from that 1964 Lincoln Center cast recording. It's more than 5:40, and Franz Allers takes some of it quite quickly, arguably a bit too quickly in places.) I think overtures suit some shows, and they don't suit others so much, and for the most part the original creative teams made the right choices for the classic shows, even if a few of the very, very long ones can perhaps be profitably cut down a bit in the theatre. I have a theory that the very long overtures — I'm talking about the ones that go on five minutes or even more — were that long so that shows could ostensibly start on time or nearly on time while giving latecomers a chance to get seated. I would love to hear the overture that was put together for Company, some of which, if we can trust Banfield's Sondheim's Broadway Musicals, ended up in "Tick Tock" when it was completely redone out of town. Some of the shows that did not have overtures did have entr'actes, although some of those were very workaday pieces. No one raves about the Fiddler entr'acte, for example, although some older shows have truly fantastic entr'actes. (South Pacific, Tenderloin and Superman have fantastic overtures and fantastics entr'actes.) I wouldn't mind if more Sondheim shows had fuller entr'actes, although I don't long for overtures on the Sondheim shows that don't have them. I do wish that the original version of the Sweeney prelude as it was heard in the theatre at the very beginning of the run had been recorded, instead of a shorter version. |
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| Link | King and I overture, or Anna's very long trip to Siam |
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