Profile for Branson East

On a Clear Day, you are more than forgiven, and it's not early Alzheimer's: Harry Connick Jr. and Ray Conniff have both recorded for Columbia.

A question: Did anybody ever try to engage Vic Mizzy to do an Addams Family show? Not this one of course; he died in 2009 and he was 93. But a show. Anyone who's heard that Perfecto anthology of his themes and background music will know he was exceptionally inventive. To quote from an Amazon.com review, "The only problem I have approaching a movie or TV show scored by Vic Mizzy is the almost certain knowledge that his score will be the best thing about it." And he wrote two theme songs that w...

Why does everybody have to pick a fight? I was about to correct my entry -- I did not realize only Menken wrote these songs -- when this came along. And it's not as if I haven't tried to listen. The songs from Gleason's sixties Honeymooners revisits are no good either. Billy Joel in a bad mood could have penned this stuff. The Honeymooners has lasted fifty-five years in the public eye; this project was stillborn. Nuf said. P. S. I stand corrected -- by myself: Long ago I had a copy of the Bea...

I too have come across the songs, and I am not impressed. I don't think I've heard Menken and Ashman's cartoon scores but if this is at all typical they were vastly overrated; from what little I could bear to listen this is sappy stuff. Face it, The Honeymooners doesn't need music -- as Jackie Gleason himself proved when he tried musicalizing it. We should not forget Gleason, though unable to read or write music, was a founder of the easy-listening movement and sold millions of records. And t...

No no no no NO! There's no WAY it could be worse than Lucy and the gauze, and Lucy singing duets with herself, and Jane Connell shrieking that never-ending last note of her song, and those corny charts, and that...kid at the end -- and Pauline Kael didn't call it "too terrible to be boring". NO! On the other hand I'll confess I've never seen the la Mancha movie, so you may be right. Kael also sorta kinda liked it despite "lyrics [that] sound as if they had been translated from Esperanto". For...

This will probably be yet another unrecognizable corpse of a score, and yet another undeserving hit. Consider: You're replacing the big, virile voice of John Cullum with a crooner. This means changing the orchestrations, and changing the keys. This powerful music thus becomes a nightclub act. How do you make a propulsive, dramatic tune like "Come Back to Me" into crooner stuff -- or has that been erased? And what of Barbara Harris's numbers? How many of those get washed out to sea with this s...

To borrow a computer acronym this post perfectly documents the GIGO syndrome that's destroyed musical theater: Garbage In (crappy musicals) = Garbage Out (auditioners singing songs from crappy musicals). The cycle repeats endlessly, and the musicals get crappier. I do understand Candide being on the verboten list; one wonders if it would be immortal without the '56 cast album and Barbara Cook. I understand Guys and Dolls too; if Lady Gaga could sing "Adelaide's Lament" anybody can -- and freq...

Two from Flower Drum Song: first, from "I Enjoy Being a Girl": When I hear the compliment'ry whistle That greets my bikini by the sea, I turn and I glower and I bristle, But I'm happy to know the whistle's meant for me! Change "I'm happy to" to "at least I" and have that last line sung in a cringing, embarrassed, slightly off-key manner and it works. It does not quite work the way Pat Suzuki sings it on the cast album. But the whole song's a bit, shall we say, self-conscious, which is why Phy...

This thread serves to remind me (and I think my history is correct) that back in 1928 there was such a huge demand for tickets to the original production of Show Boat there was talk of creating a second New York company. It never happened. Show Boat ran 572 performances, a fraction of what this may run. I will say nothing further as I may already have said too much.

How many people still boast that they paid a grand to see The Producers -- and how many others would care? And how many of those people forgot the show after a week? Judging from the remarks elsewhere on Matt you have to wonder if that money wasn't wasted before the fact.

No question this show has a great score, I'd argue Burton Lane's best. A revival could work if its book stuck with the original ESP gag while incorporating Kardashian-style celebrity mania and a dose of People's checkbook "journalism" too. Alas, we know the drill: the producers will ruin it not only through what sounds like a stupid change in the characters but by mangling Robert Russell Bennett's magnificent orchestrations a la How to Succeed to suit Harry Connick's style. (Translation: Ol' ...

One may wonder, given this from Billboard.biz: After its initial first week, the "Mormon" album fell to No. 124 (4,000) and then slipped off the tally last week -- only to re-enter now at No. 3 in a post-Tonys frenzy.... [O]f the album's 61,000 haul, downloads make up an exceptional 85% of its sales week. And most of those, we can be sure, came from Amazon.com. Alleged hits like this and Lady Gaga's will not keep the record biz from declining, and BOM won't broaden the cast album's niche audi...