From Tony's List to Your Living Room
Before we move into the fall, let's wrap up the season with a look at original cast recordings. Ragtime and The Lion King divided the new-musical Tony Awards between them, with The Scarlet Pimpernel and Side Show coming up empty-handed.
Ragtime won for Terrence McNally's book, Stephen Flaherty's music, and Lynn Ahrens' lyrics. For this listener, the CD goes the stage production one better: It's more vibrant and distinctive than what is, in the theatre, too often mechanical and lacking in spontaneity.
The title opening number sets the tone. From simplistic, white-bread optimism, it subtly edges into a darker jingoism when New Rochelle WASPs feel threatened by Harlem denizens and European immigrants. Foreshadowing the destruction to come, each group is given its own overlapping, conflicting rhythm and style. This is Tony-winning orchestrator William David Brohn at his best.
Ragtime music serves as the show's leitmotiv, symbolizing a society's separations as well as its eventual reconciliations, fueling plot points as well as emotions. In "New Music," the New Rochelle crowd can't grasp the power of "haunting and somehow taunting" melodies.
True, much of the score is calculatingly hyper, a string of punched-up anthems. Relief comes from the easy humor of "What a Game" and "The Crime of the Century," in which Lynnette Perry is a deliciously gleeful Evelyn Nesbitt.
On disc, strong roles and personalities come off best: Brian Stokes Mitchell, Audra McDonald, Peter Friedman, Steven Sutcliffe, Alex Strange as the little boy, and, of course, Perry.
McDonald wraps her rich voice around the excesses of "Your Daddy's Son" and joins the heroic Mitchell in the explosive, break-out "Wheels of a Dream." But, as on stage, both Marin Mazzie's "Back to Before" and Mitchell's "Make Them Hear You" are late-evening sermons gilding the lily of what we already know.
This is a generous, ambitious two-disc recording, carefully packaged and reflecting the show's generosity of spirit. Music is endemic to the theme, not pasted on. The album could well become a classic.
(Ragtime, 2 discs, 17 numbered tracks including bonus symphonic suite, 121:26; booklet with credits, background, lyrics; RCA #09026-63167-2)
Less Without the Look
Best Musical winner The Lion King suffers when transferred from stage to disc. Tony-winning director Julie Taymor's wondrous dreamworld is diminished without its breathtaking anthropomorphic animals, its heat-filled golden scenery and costumes. Elton John and Tim Rice's conventional musical comedy numbers ("The Morning Report, "Chow Down," and "Hakuna Matata"), first heard in the animated film, don't convey the astounding live experience, although the call-and-response opening, "Circle of Life," pulsates.
It remains for the African rhythms to evoke sky and veldt. The indigenous music and lyrics, principally by Lebo M, echo the majesty of beasts ambling the grasslands. Both "They Live in You" ("Night and the spirit of life calling") and "Shadowland" ("This shadowed land, this was our home") evoke mysterious worlds from which humans have been exiled. The African rhythms do something else: They flavor the show with an adult sensibility otherwise lacking in a musical short on intellect.
Making impressions are Tsidii Le Loka as the shaman Rafiki and Geoff Hoyle as Zazu. Heather Headley and Jason Raize give a contemporary rendering of the John-Rice "Can You Feel the Love Tonight," a pop melody ennobled by a lovely flute passage. Samuel E. Wright is a dignified Mufasa, with John Vickery's campy Cyril Ritchard knock-off wafting a certain nostalgia.
In her program notes, Julie Taymor says that, unlike in the film, "African rhythms purposely collide with pop songs to create a unique sound." Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work out that way, although the chorus and the orchestrations by Robert Elhai, David Metzger, and Bruce Fowler are geared to integrating the two styles.
(The Lion King, 20 numbered tracks, 64:42; booklet with introductions, credits, lyrics; Walt Disney Records #60802-7)
Short on Personality
Which brings us kicking and screaming to The Scarlet Pimpernel. From ominous overture to finale, it's a score to grace any Errol Flynn swashbuckler. The first track sets the tone: "Madame Guillotine" is immediately pounding and about as French as French fries. Like most numbers, it ends on a swelling, end-title crescendo.
Few tracks actually indicate what the show is all about, with the exception of "Guillotine" and "The Creation of Man." Frank Wildhorn's generic pop sounds are exchangeable with the same composer's Jekyll and Hyde, although Jekyll at least has a compelling melodramatic story to tell.
Nan Knighton's lyrics are ludicrous ("As waves lean on the sea/My love, come lean on me") when they're not being bland ("Where's the girl with the blaze in her eyes/Where's the girl with that gaze of surprise?").
Terrence Mann, who played a villainous Javert in Les Misƒrables, shows up here as the similarly villainous Chauvelin, spouting similar sentiments. As the hero, Douglas Sills is a rhapsodic presence. Christine Andreas' soprano is lilting.
We mustn't be snobbish. Wildhorn's desire to bring pop tunes into theatre is admirable, but the music and lyrics ought to have more to do with the show. Writers appropriate, but Pimpernel lacks its own personality. Hum the thematic "Into the Fire" and you find yourself falling into the title song from Man of La Mancha.
Attempts at a period flavor are sprinkled throughout: a harpsichord sound here, an accordion one there, a few French words, occasional references to the Revolution, as in "They Seek Him Here." But the score, on the whole, is a series of pretty melodies strung together, outfitted in Kim Schranberg's tumescent orchestrations. This is a music-lite score, vapid and artificial.
(The Scarlet Pimpernel, 25 tracks, 67:41; booklet with background, synopsis, lyrics, credits, no track timings or listings; Atlantic #83079-2)
Careful Listening Well Rewarded
Side Show, short-lived and mourned by many, has an eclectic score by Henry Krieger, richly melodious and suggestive of the thwarted search for love by Siamese Twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Combining various styles, Krieger has written affectionate music for a subject that proved too uncomfortable for potential audiences.
The songs don't always transcend the subject matter. Despite their analogs, some are, much like Pimpernel's, basically generic. Sure, there are the wonderful pastiches, especially "When I'm by Your Side," which mocks both show business and the joined-at-the-hip situation ("We're an unusual duo, don't always swim with the tide").
Bill Russell's lyrics teeter from provocative to prosaic and cannot always overcome an edging toward unintended farce. Reality and fantasy intertwine as the serious "Leave Me Alone" is juxtaposed against the purposely disdainful "We Share Everything," both tracks variations on the idea of the sisters forever linked to each other.
"We Share Everything" faces head-on the central problem of a muddy story and an inherently repetitious take on one joke and theme. "Two different voices, identical choices, never an argument here" sets up the basic situation of one sister who wants marriage, one who wants fame, climaxing in the driving "Tunnel of Love," wherein the audience's salacious and overriding fascination with how the girls would have sex comes into focus.
Skipping an overture, the show begins with an invitation to "Come Look at the Freaks," exploding into malevolence with Ken Jennings' viciously powerful performance as the ringmaster-boss. Credit orchestrator Harold Wheeler for keeping a tight rein on the variations.
Other performances are as richly dramatic, with Norm Lewis--shamefully ignored in this year's nominations--as soaring here as in the theatre. The vocal contrast between Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner as the Hilton sisters helps differentiate their separate yearnings.
This is not an original cast recording in which the story's details are easily discerned. But careful listening to Krieger's wit and style will uncover depths to what, on the surface, seems a familiar tale of unrequited love and show-business failure.
(Side Show, 23 tracks, 72:46; booklet with summary, lyrics, track listings but no timings; Sony #SK60258) q
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