   |
Not Your Mother’s Original-Cast Albums
Correction Appended
A surge of oxygen pours through the original cast albums of “In the Heights” and “Passing Strange,” two musicals that have shown Broadway how to revitalize a somnolent form this season.
You can also feel that breeze in the cast album of the Off Broadway show “Adding Machine” and a faint puff of fresh air in the quiet cast album of “A Catered Affair.” There are no plans for a “Cry-Baby” recording, but its witty rock ’n’ roll parody lyrics give the last twist of the knife to “Grease”-era nostalgia; it is now irredeemably camp.
An album of the revival of “Gypsy,” with a performance by Patti LuPone for which there is only one word — volcanic — is due in August. It will include several never-before-recorded songs that were cut from the original production, with new orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick.
Until recently I imagined the Broadway musical locked inside a museum, at which a superannuated curator in a seersucker suit, bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses politely welcomed guests to the tea party. But not anymore. Once that curator extended a trembling hand to eager new faces, fresh air wafted in; the tea and cucumber sandwiches were supplanted by beer and pizza, and the music blasted all night.
That doesn’t mean that patriarchs like Rodgers and Hammerstein, haughtily gazing down from the museum walls, no longer speak to us. You can’t listen to the cast album of the Lincoln Center revival of “South Pacific” without becoming misty-eyed for an era of cockeyed postwar optimism when all America sang Rodgers and Hammerstein hits and absorbed the moral instruction in their songs.
Cockeyed optimism may not describe today’s climate. But the giddy euphoria that has always been a hallmark of Broadway musicals explodes on the two-disc cast album of “In the Heights.” Although expressed in a different musical vocabulary, this bilingual show (more English than Spanish) is as secure as “South Pacific” in its faith that a better future lies ahead.
This show’s true believers are not white, middle-class sailors and nurses fighting a just war in the Pacific. They are economically struggling Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and African-American residents of Washington Heights, the melting pot idealized in the show. For “In the Heights,” which just won a Tony Award for best musical, embodies a compelling argument that immigration is the lifeblood of America.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the blazingly talented 28-year-old who wrote the music and lyrics and stars as the Dominican storekeeper Usnavi, respects popular music traditions. Early in the show he interpolates quotations from Duke Ellington (“Take the ‘A’ Train”) and Cole Porter (“Too Darn Hot”) into the partly rapped title song, an ensemble number that introduces most of the characters. Throughout, the score echoes (but doesn’t quote outright) “West Side Story,” especially “America” and the great mambo dance sequence.
But for all its nods to old-school Broadway “In the Heights” is truly an uptown musical. The score is a fluid, authentic mix of salsa, rap and reggaetón. For a show set in a heavily Dominican neighborhood with a Dominican character as its official greeter, the absence of merengue is puzzling. But as a broadly sketched overview of Latin musical cultures that collide and merge in the melting pot, the score is still wildly exhilarating.
The rap lyrics, however sanitized for Broadway, carry pungent streetwise inflections, and Mr. Miranda delivers them with an aggressive swagger that illustrates the power of rap as a storytelling medium.
The influence of rap is the underlying story of the past Broadway musical season. Words, either rapped or sung in variations of the traditional patter song, are loosening the grip of traditional melody on Broadway. Lament it if you will, but stand-alone songs have a way of interrupting the narrative. Even in musicals without hip-hop, recitative and songs flow into each other more smoothly nowadays; the story is the thing, and language the vehicle.
Mr. Manuel and his orchestrators Alex Lacamoire and Bill Sherman twirl various styles of Latin music into a fabric that is continually changing color and pace. The sprawling ensemble numbers, “96,000,” “Blackout” and “Carnaval del Barrio,” in particular, portray a whole community of disparate voices, speaking as one and at the same time as individuals. Words that go by too quickly to be picked up in the theater can be studied while listening to the cast album with the booklet at hand. These virtuosic numbers suggest denser elaborations of the pre-rumble “Tonight” sequence from “West Side Story.”
A binding ingredient of Mr. Miranda’s score is tuneful Broadway pop that coalesces into a plaintive 11 o’clock number, “Everything I Know,” in the second act. Though not a great song, it serves effectively as the show’s emotional grounding wire.
Because “Passing Strange” has no sugar coating, in some ways it is almost anti-Broadway. The songs, with music by Stew and Heidi Rodewald (he plays guitar, and she plays bass onstage) and lyrics by Stew, describe the personal odyssey of a rebellious middle-class African-American musician who goes from Los Angeles to Europe in a search for his identity.
The galumphing rock score in which a song can suddenly change character without warning reflects the character’s uncertainty about who he is. The Narrator (the grown-up Stew) observes the life of his younger self, Youth (Daniel Breaker), with an affectionately critical eye. When Stew riffs on electric guitar and declaims his lyrics in a gruff holler, you hear echoes of Jimi Hendrix. Later on he morphs into a punk rocker. There is a broad, sarcastic parody of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” when the young Stew ingests psychedelics.
The young man’s naïve infatuation with Europe, where he dives into a bohemian paradise of sex and drugs, inspires an amusing rock parody of “A Man and a Woman” and a sarcastic Kander and Ebb spoof, “The Black One,” which is a scathing response to his being fetishized as an angry black militant by a group of German cultural revolutionaries:
“Who lends the club that speak-easy air?/The black one, the black one!/Who dances like a god and has ‘wunderbar’ hair?/Der Schwarze.” In conclusion he wonders if he is “the postmodern lawn jockey sculpture.”
The term postmodern indicates the intellectual seriousness of the show. As the character matures and becomes bored with easy pleasure, his search carries him into a philosophic realm rarely visited by the Broadway musical. “What’s Inside Is Just a Lie/And Now I’m Ready to Explode” describes a psychic earthquake in which Youth decides “our feelings and our dreams have actually been put there by a system.” In desperation he determines to turn his life into a work of art, that work being “Passing Strange.”
The show’s final song, “Love Like That,” offers the closest thing to a comfortable answer to his questions: “Cuz the Real is a construct.../It’s the raw nerve’s private zone/It’s a personal sunset .../You drive off into alone.” “Passing Strange” is too true to its own vision to culminate in an explosion of joyful affirmation. It ends with a sigh.
Joshua Schmidt’s score for “Adding Machine” is just as harsh and darkly funny. The protagonist of this musical adaptation of Elmer Rice’s 1923 expressionistic play is a repressed number-crunching boor, Mr. Zero (Joel Hatch), who hates his job and his shrewish wife.
Mr. Schmidt’s music is percussive, mechanistic and frequently discordant as characters robotically chant lists of numbers, the monotony broken by bursts of rage and frustration. The score, at once hypnotic and corrosive, goes beyond Brecht-Weill in evoking a dystopic world. The one catchy tune, “I’d Rather Watch You,” sung by Daisy (Amy Warren), Zero’s office mate who has a secret crush on him, is a slowed-up 1920s-style barroom waltz.
The fiendish cosmic joke occurs when Zero, executed for the murder of his boss, lands in Elysian fields, where he discovers that freedom in the afterlife is unbearable because there is no morality. A mocking chorus sings, “And we must each/Believe, believe/Our lives will all/Add up to something in the end.”
Although wistfulness and anger crop up in John Bucchino’s music and lyrics for “A Catered Affair,” the kind of nihilism trumpeted by “Adding Machine” is nowhere to be found. The main characters, Aggie (Faith Prince) and her husband, Tom (Tom Wopat), are softened, realistic descendants of the careworn working people in “Adding Machine” and they’re observed tenderly instead of harshly.
“A Catered Affair” is a delicate, 1950s kitchen-sink chamber piece. Mr. Bucchino’s score, his first for Broadway, is true to the mood of the show, which has finely shaded performances by Ms. Prince and Mr. Wopat and an irritatingly outsize one by Harvey Fierstein, who can barely sing. Ms. Prince’s touching big number, “Married,” is delivered with appropriate Shirley Booth-meets-Edith Bunker plainness. The score’s one moment of high drama, Mr. Wopat’s “I Stayed,” is an eloquent swatch of narrative songwriting that breaks the mood of weary resignation at exactly the right moment. It is a modest, touching male answer to “Rose’s Turn” in “Gypsy,” a perfect moment.
The biggest impediment to falling in love with the new cast album of “South Pacific” is the memory of the 1949 original with Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin. The orchestra for this Lincoln Center Theater production, even beefed up, sounds smaller. That 1949 recording begins with a thunderous overture that sweeps into “Bali Hai” like a tidal wave. The supercharged sense of inevitability that permeates the original is only fleetingly captured in the Lincoln Center production.
Paulo Szot, who looks like a younger Pinza, sings wonderfully but without the same rock-bottom authority. Kelli O’Hara’s Nellie Forbush is irresistible to watch, but less so to hear on the album, because her voice lacks the personality of either a Mary Martin or a Reba McEntire, who sang the role in concert with Brian Stokes Mitchell. Ms. O’Hara is perfectly fine but not definitive.
The wonder is how fresh the score still sounds. “South Pacific” caught a wave of American history at Broadway’s high tide, like no other show has since. The museum that opened it doors to Stew and Mr. Miranda was built around musicals like it.
Correction: June 28, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about cast albums of current Broadway musicals misidentified an award won by
No comments:
Post a Comment