| Lloyd Webber's dramaturgy | |
| Posted by: peter3053 02:23 am EDT 04/19/20 | |
| In reply to: re: Streaming PHANTOM — can we start a petition to fix Ramin Karimloo’s vowels? - Michael_Portantiere 07:28 pm EDT 04/18/20 | |
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| I wonder to what extent Lloyd Webber's dramatic instincts were refined by working with Prince on Evita and Phantom? It's often hard to know who brought what to the final feast, but Prince's ideas for Evita electrified the stage version, and the literalness of the movie sank it. Prince's rocking chair sequence for the generals was both theatrically and dramaturgically solid - setting up that sense of the wheel of fortune which brought the Perons up and then brought them asunder. It seems that Prince introduced the conflict into the scene which makes "Music of the Night" a dramatic song when it could have been a stage wait. I wonder how much actual structuring Prince did for the Phantom book. Even he says that it was always Lloyd Webber's idea to have the chandelier onstage at the start - and what a great effect that led to. I think that in Lloyd Webber's memoir he says that in the brief time Trevor Nunn came in as potential director of Phantom, Nunn's idea of the set was for the audience to see the show through the wings, so to speak - so the chandelier would go sideways. It seems to have been that sort of idea which made Lloyd Webber insist Mackintosh go back to Prince. Am I remembering rightly? Are any of Lloyd Webber's shows that were done without Prince as dramatically secure and suspenseful? I remember wanting to flee Aspects of Love before I fell into a Sleeping Beauty-like slumber for a hundred years; Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat leaves me feeling my brain has turned to marshmallow. Sunset Boulevard's songs tend to be stage waits - the action continues after them; it'd make a good non-musical movie if somebody like Billy Wilder directed it! But then, to pay him his credit, Lloyd Webber knew it needed to be sung-through, and it was Billy Wilder who apparently told Sondheim that it had to be an opera because it's about royalty - Hollywood royalty - which made Sondheim, who had just done Sweeney, turn off it. (If I remember my reading correctly.) Interestingly, Prince wanted to direct Superstar. I wonder what a Prince production of that would have been like - although I suspect we might get an inkling from his staging of Turandot for Vienna State Opera, captured on DVD - the most stunning and intriguing version of it I've seen; Pontius Pilate could have been up a stairway that tall! Nonetheless, having viewed the Albert Hall Phantom stream, one has to confess to being in awe of it as a composition both musical and dramatic, and of Lloyd Webber as progenitor. |
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| Previous: | re: Streaming PHANTOM — can we start a petition to fix Ramin Karimloo’s vowels? - Michael_Portantiere 07:28 pm EDT 04/18/20 |
| Next: | re: Lloyd Webber's dramaturgy - WaymanWong 04:09 pm EDT 04/19/20 |
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