All tagged George Forrest
The composing team of Robert Wright and George Forrest were attracted to taking the music of other composers and adapting it into scores for musicals. They did this this with the musical of Edvard Grieg for the 1944 operetta Song of Norway and the 1965 Anya which drew from the works of Sergei Rachmaninoff. This is not the say that the team merely stole the music from these composers. They wrote lyrics to the music, adjusted music where necessary, assembled it in motifs, and even wrote their own melody here and there. Their most successful venture of this kind would be the 1953 Kismet, a show that utilized the compositions of Russian composer Alexander Borodin.
With the announcement by Encores! that Grand Hotel will be a part of their 2018 season, it has the wheels of my brain turning about a possible Broadway revival of this magnificent, but challenging, piece of musical theatre. It has been almost three decades since Grand Hotel premiered on Broadway. That production was, in itself a reimagining of a failed attempt to musicalize Vicki Baum’s 1928 novel (and subsequent 1932 film) called At the Grand (1958). That version of the show featured a score by Robert Wright and George Forrest, with a book by Luther David. Many of those songs and parts of the book made it into the 1989 Broadway production of Grand Hotel which would garner many Tony Awards and run for 1,017 performances.
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.
