All in Top Ten
With Encores! announcing their 2015 season of Off-Broadway pieces to revisit (including the wonderful A New Brain, the bankable but unnecessary Little Shop of Horrors and the intriguing but uneven Lippa's The Wild Party), I thought it might be interesting to look at some Off-Broadway titles that are ripe for exploration through this series.
Every season, we are inundated with a long list of musicals that are in development and that are based on famous source material. We speculate about their potential and wonder if they will work, often resigning ourselves to the fact that they will never live up to the movie, play or book that we adore. Sometimes, we are surprised when we enter the theatre and find that the music and lyrics, along with a fresh viewpoint, concept and/or casting choice can illuminate the piece in ways we hadn't imagined. This article is a valentine to the musicals that DID work and either captured their source material beautifully, or improved up them. I am limiting my list to pieces that I personally saw AFTER I had read the play, book or watched the movie from which they derived.
2014 has been both an exciting and disappointing year for me in regards to Broadway musicals, with shows I deeply loved closing quickly and others that I felt lacked content and artistry plugging away. For me, the hardest thing to digest was the premature departure of The Bridges of Madison County, a piece I found both musically haunting and arresting in its simplicity. We move ahead, however, and file productions like "Bridges" in our hearts and memories, to recall when we are faced with the next big musical machine void of nuance or real emotion.
With Christmas just a few days away and the New Year poised to ring in, my Top-Ten List for this week is an itemized list of my wishes for 2015 and what I hope it will hold in terms of musical theatre.
As I was writing my piece on Falsettos earlier this week, I was thinking about how William Finn captured so much in the lyric "Keeping up my head as my heart falls out of sight" in the terrific "Holding to the Ground." It got me thinking about what lyrics stopped me in my tracks with their efficiency and complexity in summing up a character in just a few short words. This week, for my "Top-Ten List," I have decided to explore that theme a little further: The Top-Ten Lyrics that Perfectly Capture the Moment and Character. Since I have already delved more deeply into "Holding to the Ground" in a former article, I will leave that one off of this list (for the opportunity to explore an additional song).
