Monthly Archives: July 2016

Jersey Boys

Jersey-Boys-editOriginal Broadway Cast, 2005 (Rhino) 3 out of 5 stars (3 / 5) Jersey Boys tells the true story of the rise of the phenomenally successful 1960s pop singing group The Four Seasons — or, at least, true to whoever is in charge of the story at whatever point in the show. Rather than presenting a straightforward narrative, book writers Rick Elice and Marshall Brickman have each member of the group — here played by John Lloyd Young (Frankie Valli), Christian Hoff (Tommy DeVito), Daniel Reichard (Bob Gaudio), and J. Robert Spencer (Nick Massi) — take turns in telling the audience their version of the group’s rise and fall. The idea works because all four men make insightful, humorous, and (due to frequent contradictions with each other) unreliable narrators, giving the show an extra edge. This recording includes much of that well-crafted narration without interrupting the musical flow of the album. All four leading men have an easy charm and a singing style that lends the recording a sense of authenticity — as does the fact that it was produced by the real-life Bob Gaudio. In particular, Young does an excellent job of adapting his voice to resemble Frankie Valli and his famous falsetto without sounding like an imitation. Ron Melrose’s vocal arrangements and Steve Orich’s orchestrations are essentially period-appropriate. Unlike other jukebox musicals, Jersey Boys doesn’t aim to do anything new with the preexisting songs but, instead, offers a fun, fresh representation with smart, dramatically compelling commentary. — Matt Koplik

JB-SoundtrackFilm Soundtrack, 2014 (Rhino) No stars, not recommended. In bringing this hit jukebox/bio-musical to the screen, director Clint Eastwood remained mostly faithful to the stage material but chose to capture it through a more somber filter. This might have made for an emotionally compelling film, but in fact, it robs Jersey Boys of most of its charm and energy. The soundtrack album reflects this, despite the efforts of the talented quartet representing the Four Seasons: John Lloyd Young is back as Valli, with Vincent Piazza as Tommy DeVito, Erich Bergen as Bob Gaudio, and Michael Lomenda as Nick Massi. Oddly, the album’s producers opted to insert the real-life Frankie Valli’s renditions of certain songs in various places, giving the listener whiplash as we go from Valli to Young to Valli and back. There are also some excerpts from the Broadway cast album, which makes things even more confusing. Young is still in strong voice, and Bergen, Lomenda, and Piazza do a fine job of filling out the quartet — although, without any of the characters’ dialogue included here, Bergen is the only one of the remaining three to get a chance to shine (in “Cry For Me”). Because of the lack of dialogue and any sense of narrative, this soundtrack pales in comparison to the Broadway cast recording of Jersey Boys or any “Best of The Four Seasons” compilation album. — M.K.

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder

GentOriginal Broadway Cast, 2014 (Ghostlight) 3 out of 5 stars (3 / 5) Based on a novel by Roy Horniman that also inspired the film Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949),  A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder is pure wit and charm, but at a slight cost. The musical tells of an English Everyman, Monty Navarro, who discovers that he’s an heir to the prestigious D’Ysquith family’s fortune and then schemes to bump off each member of the family who stands in the line of succession before him. Though this may sound like nasty stuff, songwriters Robert L Freedman and Steven Lutvak present the story in a highly affected, proper-British, light-operetta manner: Agatha Christie meets Gilbert and Sullivan meets Oscar Wilde. They succeeded in making a fun and clever musical, one for which Lutvak composed many hummable melodies and, with Freedman, some exceptionally witty lyrics. Yet the cast album is a bit of a slow burn for the listener; early songs such as “You’re a D’ysquith” and “Foolish to Think” demonstrate Lutvak and Freedman’s difficulty in creating a strong narrative structure for much of the show’s first act. But as Monty (here played with dewy innocence by Bryce Pinkham) gains more confidence with his schemes, so does the show, and by the time we get to the door-slamming farce “I’ve Decided to Marry You” in Act Two, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder has risen from commendably intelligent to wonderfully hilarious. The recording boasts a stellar cast: Pinkham glides easily through the score with his silken voice, Lisa O’Hare is perfect as the shallow Sibella, and Lauren Worsham brings operatic flair to the role of the goodhearted Phoebe. Best of all is Jefferson Mays, clearly having a ball playing all eight moribund members of the D’Ysquith family. (This device was carried over from Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which  Alec Guinness plays the victims.) With sophisticated yet daffy orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick to boot, this album offers a great deal of fun to any musical theater fan who’s willing to put in the time and listen through to the end. — Matt Koplik

Spring Awakening

Spring-AwakeningOriginal Broadway Cast, 2006 (Verve) 4 out of 5 stars (4 / 5) Even with the success of such shows as Hair and Rent, the original pop/rock musical theater score has had a spotty history on Broadway, but it saw a major comeback in 2006 with the raw and highly charged Spring Awakening. Based on Frank Wedekind’s expressionist play, the musical tells of young teenagers in 19th century Germany on the verge of sexuality, and the adults who refuse to explain to them what their newfound urges mean. On stage, Spring Awakening crackled and even exploded with energy, but while the cast album offers a pristine presentation of the score, it lacks some of the energy and spirit that made the show itself so moving. The cast — including future stars Jonathan Groff, Lea Michele, and John Gallagher, Jr. — still provides impressive vocals, but they are less expressive than they were on stage. “My Junk,” “Totally F****d,” and a few other high-powered songs lose some of their edge, although the quieter, more intimate numbers (“Whispering, ” “The Guilty Ones”) remain haunting. In truth, if any show called for a live cast recording, it was this one. Still, the Duncan Sheik-Steven Sater score is exceptionally strong. Sheik has provided many gorgeous, infectious melodies and orchestrated them well to season the score’s alternative rock sensibility with small nods to the show’s 19th German setting. Sater’s lyrics have a flair for the poetic, even if there are some frustrating false rhymes (e.g. “sweet and unknown/longing for a home” “all this/my lips”). To date, this is the only cast album of Spring Awakening, and it’s a good one. But let’s hope that future recordings capture a bit more of the show’s spark. — Matt Koplik

The Little Mermaid

LM-filmFilm Soundtrack, 1989 (Disney) 4 out of 5 stars (4 / 5) After a decades-long dry spell, Disney film animation finally sprang to life again with The Little Mermaid, a musical adaptation of the children’s story by Hans Christian Andersen. Thanks in large part to its fantastic score by Little Shop of Horrors team Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, Mermaid single-handedly revived the animated musical. And in its main character, Ariel — a mermaid daughter of King Triton, desperate to join the human world — the film also birthed the first really spunky and smart Disney princess. As Disney has progressed to even more feminist stories and even stronger princesses, certain elements of The Little Mermaids’s plot have come under scrutiny, but the score has stood the test of time. Ashman and Menken created a charmingly magical work; Menken’s music ranges from funky calypso (“Under the Sea”) to sassy Broadway (“Poor Unfortunate Souls”), with Ashman bringing his usual touch of unpretentious intelligence to the lyrics. And the vocal cast of the film is still definitive. Best known to musical theater fans for her powerhouse vocals in Crazy For You and Smile, Jodi Benson here produces a purer, smoother, more intimate sound that allows “Part of Your World,” Ariel’s finely crafted “I Want” song, to deeply resonate with the listener. Pat Carroll, Samuel E. Wright, and René Auberjonois are wonderful in other roles, and the score is smartly but not overly lushly orchestrated by Thomas Pasatieri.  — Matt Koplik

LM-BroadwayOriginal Broadway Cast, 2008 (Disney) 1 out of 5 stars (1 / 5) Howard Ashman sadly died at the height of his career, and he never saw any of his work with Alan Menken make it to Broadway. The legacy he left behind may be relatively small, but it is substantial in quality and much beloved. When Disney brought Beauty and the Beast to the stage with financially successful results, it was only a matter of time before The Little Mermaid, the movie that started it all, would make the transition as well. Unfortunately, in this case, Disney should have left well enough alone. With Ashman gone, Glenn Slater was brought in to contribute lyrics for new songs to expand the score for a full-length stage musical, and while he managed to come up with a few good fish puns, none of his work here matches the heart and inventiveness of Ashman’s work. Menken wrote some lovely melodies for the additional songs, though some of them are recycled from incidental music heard in the movie. The cast — Sierra Boggess, Sean Palmer, Sherie Rene Scott, Tituss Burgess, Norm Lewis, et al. — is talented and, in a few cases, vocally superior to their film counterparts, but most tend to go for vocal tricks, making the majority of the score sound over-sung. While Danny Troob’s orchestrations add the necessary flashes of Broadway brass to the Menken-Ashman material without going overboard, they don’t bring as much flair to the Broadway additions. Even though this recording has more songs and offers vocal flair from some Broadway favorites, you’re better off sticking to the movie soundtrack. — M.K.

Film Soundtrack, 2023  (Walt Disney Records) 1 out of 5 stars (1 / 5) Another year, another Disney remake. To be fair, the soundtrack for this “live action” adaptation of the 1989 animated classic is less bad than some of the other cinematic cash grabs that The Mouse House has made — but that still doesn’t make it “good.” From the very first track, almost all sense of fun, magic, and whimsy has been sucked out of Alan Menken’s iconic score, here polluted with overblown orchestrations and self-conscious performances. Songs such as the Oscar-winning “Under the Sea” don’t inspire nearly the same level of joy as the versions heard on the original film soundtrack recording. and while Menken is once again on hand to provide new songs for the film, with lyrics by Lin Manuel Miranda, they can’t compare to those he wrote with Howard Ashman. (The less said about “The Scuttlebutt,” the better.) On the bright side, we have the most vocally well-equipped cast of any of the Disney remakes so far. Though “Wild Uncharted Waters” isn’t much of a song, Jonah Hauer-King holds his own as Prince Eric, and if Daveed Diggs is not as bubbly and charismatic a Sebastian as Samuel E. Wright was, he at least keeps his numbers afloat. The two best performances belong to Melissa McCarthy, properly camping it up as Ursula, and Halle Bailey, who as Ariel is given numerous opportunities to showcase her wide range and crystal-clear voice. Like Sierra Boggess in the Broadway recording, Bailey sometimes over-sings her material (particularly the first half of “Part of Your World”), but her work here in general is very strong. She and McCarthy keep this otherwise unnecessary recording from being totally skippable. — M.K.

Billy Elliot

Billy ElliotOriginal London Cast, 2006 (Decca Broadway) 2 out of 5 stars (2 / 5) Based on the film written by Lee Hall, who did double duty for the stage musical as librettist and lyricist, Billy Elliot tells of a Northern English boy who discovers a love for ballet but has to hide it from his family — including his father and brother, who are on strike with the miner’s union at the height of Thatcherism. A smash hit in London (this cast album represents that production) and on Broadway, Billy Elliot was a moving, theatrically exciting piece due in large part to its thrilling staging by director Stephen Daldry, who also directed the film, and choreographer Peter Darling. What becomes clear on the cast album, however, is the obstacle that Hall and Elton John faced with this project: How does one write a compelling musical theater score when your leading character only feels comfortable expressing himself through dance? Their answer was to create a score that more or less provided a platform for Daldry and Darling to leap from. This is not to say that the songs are bad; they do exactly what they need to do. Without the umbrella of Disney, Elton John produced some inventive melodies (e.g., “Solidarity”) that are given extra character by Martin Koch’s orchestrations, even if John occasionally tends to lean back into his specialty of pop power ballads that don’t quite fit the piece. Hall, a first time lyricist, does an admirable job of keeping the songs in the language of the working class characters. Due to the physical demands of the title role, three young actors rotated as Billy in the original London production (and on Broadway), though only one, Liam Mower, is heard on this recording. Mower does a fine job, as does the rest of the cast, most notably a crackling Hayden Gwynne as the dance teacher who guides Billy out of his shell. Listeners who haven’t seen the show may wonder why Billy Elliot was such a phenomenon; the answer is that this musical, even more than most others, truly needs to be seen to be experienced. — Matt Koplik

Next to Normal

Next-to-NormalOriginal Broadway Cast, 2009 (Sh-K-Boom) 5 out of 5 stars (5 / 5) If Spring Awakening marked the successful comeback of the original pop/rock musical theater score, then Next to Normal helped insure its future. Part of the reason for the show’s success is that, despite its vibrant energy, it’s a very intimate piece that wears its large heart earnestly on its sleeve. The musical tells of the inner turmoil of a suburban family due to the mental instability of the mother, Diana, who has struggled with bipolar disorder ever since a traumatizing event years earlier: Her son, Gabe, whom she still imagines to be present, died when he was a baby. Although the plot at times borders on being that of a Lifetime Movie, the smart, pulsating score, given a crisp representation on this recording, keeps Next to Normal fresh and inventive. Brian Yorkey’s lyrics are strong and well defined, often bringing a touch of humor to cut the tension in the plot (for example, “My Psychopharmacologist and I”). Tom Kitt composed a score with both fire (“You Don’t Know,” “Didn’t I See This Movie”) and sweet sadness (“I Miss the Mountains”) that he orchestrated excellently with Michael Starobin, making the work electric yet still inherently theatrical. The cast, on the whole, is excellent. Alice Ripley tears into the role of Diana with an abandon that’s fearless, thrilling and at times unnerving. Occasionally, the performer seems so at one with the part that you might fear she won’t even make it to the end of the number — but she always does. J. Robert Spencer is very moving as the silently suffering husband, Dan, and so is Jennifer Damiano as daughter Natalie. Because of the surprises in the plot, listeners who haven’t seen the show will find it especially important to read the synopsis included in the CD booklet in order to make full sense of the story and songs such as “I’m Alive” and “There’s a World,” both sung by Gabe (Aaron Tveit). But they’ll have no problem understanding the emotional potency of each song. — Matt Koplik