Since the board is quiet now, I thought I would ask an old question I have. I saw Matilda on Broadway, and the tricky wordplay in the lyrics is very clever, but hard to take in on an initial listen. One of the cleverest songs IMO is School Song, in which the lyrics go through the alphabet but not in a way that's obvious when listening. The relevant lyrics start as
So you think you're A-ble [able]
To survive this mess by B-ing [being]
A prince or a princess, you will soon C [see],
There's no escaping trage-D [tragedy].
And then they go through the whole alphabet. It is much easier to catch on if you are reading the lyrics, but you aren't reading them in the theater. I did not catch on to this bit until well into the alphabet. In the Broadway version, if I remember correctly, an ensemble member contorted his or her body to the shape of each letter as it is said, which helped make it clearer what was happening. I later saw a local production, where the whole alphabet run-through was essentially ignored. I'm curious: what have people seen in local productions? How has this been handled? Was it addressed or ignored? |
