Profile for Cuneas

I'll grant you that about half of The Beautiful Game's score was pretty terrible, but I still think a major cause of its failure was that it wasn't what audience expected from an Andrew Lloyd-Webber show. I discuss the issue on my own site here: http://www.knightsofbroadway.com/2003-2004-season/ (it's near the bottom of the page, if that helps). I also discuss the reason for Whistle Down the Wind's failure here: http://www.knightsofbroadway.com/2007-2008-season/ (Again, near the bottom). To s...

I'll grant you that most artists could do with a few checks and balances (John Kander even talked about that function in a songwriting collaborator in "I Miss the Music), but do you have any reason whatsoever to believe that Webber is not the one responsible for his successes other than your personal desire to have an excuse to denigrate him? You seem to be basing this judgment on what you _want_ to think, not on any kind of actual evidence. As I stated, Webber has had flops, but until extrem...

Yes, but Preston, Harris and Lansbury were all _listenable_ singers, which Bacall really wasn't. There's a difference between being more of an actor than a singer and being an actor who genuinely _can't sing_. Bette Davis and Vincent Price were fine actors, too, but that doesn't mean they belonged in a musical.

Sue me...it's how I write on my own site. If the Forums didn't want people to make posts that long, they'd have a tighter word count limit. Although, granted, that's a pretty adorable cat, so props there, I guess.

I was implying more that Applause and Woman of the Year were bad _shows_ (the former because of its terrible score, the latter because of its horribly dated gender politics), that, apart from Bacall being Bacall in the book scenes (and a good supporting performance here and there), didn't really have much of anything going for them. Even Woman of the Year really only had one song of any consequence. And when you combine the poor quality of the vehicles she was given, and the fact that she cle...

I had never really been all that familiar with her, except from the 'First Impressions' cast album, so when I heard the news I picked up a couple of her classic-era albums. I felt I owed her that much, especially as I had always really liked what I'd heard of her voice. It's been an eye-opening experience. She was truly an amazing talent, and I feel really guilty that I never really knew that until now. Cheers, Ms. Bergen. We will remember.

Oh, God, no. If she could write music, one imagines she would have started the day her primary collaborators handed her the lyric sheet that said 'lovely lady lumps'. I could see her as a Broadway performer, maybe, with luck, but I have serious doubts she's gonna pull some amazing gift for songwriting out of her ass. I'm officially no longer excited about this project.

Like I said, standard irrational hatred. Name one show that Webber did prior to The Woman in White that shows an actual lack of effort or quality control. He's had flops, granted, but even _Sondheim_ has had no shortage of flops, so that's not a very useful standard. Okay, _maybe_ Starlight Express qualifies as Webber on autopilot, although songs like "Only He" and "There's Me" show that at least a little effort went into it. But Aspects of Love was a bad libretto with wonderful music, which ...

I'm not normally an admirer of Lachiusa, but I think Hello Again is the best thing he ever wrote, and it's certainly his only score accessible and catchy enough to have the slightest chance of succeeding as a movie musical, even if it _does_ only have two traditional songs in it. But are we talking a big-budget mainstream movie or a smaller, more independent production in the vein of the 'Hedwig' and 'Repo' movies? Because those kinds of films don't have to be commercial hits to have a cultur...

Assuming Fergie can act (I've never seen any proof either way on that) and is willing to perform like a Broadway star and not a pop singer here (unlike her ghastly performance in the 'Nine' movie), this could actually be interesting. She does have a beautiful voice when she bothers to use it properly, and I always thought if she could get away from that Will.i.am idiot who wrote most of her pop songs, she couls actually amount to something...

Remember that Tyne Daly recording of Gypsy? Where an actress who was not vocally up to the role to begin with was trying to sing it while recovering from a case of laryngitis? If you put Bacall in the role immediately after Applause, as her relative vocal peak, Daly's recording would probably have sounded like Judy Garland compared to the inevitable result. Bacall was a great actress...a _truly_ great one, but the fact is, she just point blank couldn't sing. And given the quality of her two B...

I never actually heard him do Phantom, but after hearing Timothy Nolen's performance on the Grind cast album (he was, if I'm not mistaken, the first to play the role on Broadway after Crawford vacated it), I really wish I could have.

Joshua Logan, director of such legendary shows as South Pacific, did this is every one of his shows. And yes, he was widely mocked for doing so, with many people even at the time realizing he was a raging closet case... ...but this isn't a new thing. If Logan's show could survive a little gratuitous beefcake, so can this. Okay, most of Logan's shows were flops, and granted, given the circumstances of the production, odds are this revival will suck, but you get my point.

From what I've gathered, Webber fired LuPone because he didn't think she was as good in the part as Close (this is not a new thing...Webber has always valued the quality of the show over personal loyalty. Look at the tempest over the "Memory" lyric.) And let's face it...he was right. Close was vocally overparted, but she perfectly captured both the tortured insanity and the genuine grandeur of Norma. Now, I love LuPone, but the entire reason she was so unforgettable in Evita was that she foun...

It Depends On What You Lay You must admit, a much more appropriate title for a, er, "Cape Song"...

So, do you think there's any frontrunners for next year's "or or arrghhh" awards?

Well, as for the whole Gerschwin/Virgil Thompson thing, look at it this way: Thompson, a classically trained musician with all kinds of formal credentials writes a mediocre English-language opera for Black performers that is really notable only because Gertrude Stein wrote the libretto and did her usual fascinating work to cover up for Thompson's uninspired music. Then a little upstart who had no classical training whatsoever and had cut his teeth on what was basically pop music in those days...

I listened _religiously_ to "Aspects of Love" for _years_ without picking up on the implication that maybe, just maybe, Alex is Jenny's real father. I can't tell you how much more sense the character motivations made when I realized that. In my defense, no-one ever comes out and says it (Alex's "We _are_ just cousins" and "unnatural" comments are probably the strongest implications, and they're pretty subtle...) Still, I considered this my second favorite show of all time for about five years...

There's a picture on the back of my copy of "The Season" of Goldman, a woman and two kids, labelled "William Goldman and his family". And either the kid of the left is a boy, or Goldman's youngest daughter must have gone through a pretty severe "ugly duckling" stage in her elementary school years. So whether Goldman was talking about his real son in TPB or not, I have to assume that either he does indeed have a son or he's so fixated on his TPB "backstory" that he got three actors to pose wit...

I don't know if it's directly relevant, but I absolutely HATE William Goldman's book "The Season". First of all, there's something questionable about a Hollywood screenwriter who is BOTH not a professional critic AND has never had anything remotely resembling a hit on Broadway to be writing a supposedly all-emcompassing expose on how the theater "works". But I get that that isn't entirely fair, and I could have gotten past it, I really could have. But come on, people! Look at the actual book ...