Many of my favorites have been mentioned, but some great Phil Lang Overtures have not:
TAKE ME ALONG
JAMAICA
LI'L ABNER
Take Me Along's Overture is impossibly lush, with layer upon layer of detail. Listen to the huge sound of this Overture and weep for the anemic little bands we get nowadays, where you are lucky to have half as many musicians. The rollicking title song keeps popping in here and there until it positively explodes near the end of the Overture.
Jamaica's Overture, at least according to the CD liner notes, had not been released previously. It's a devilishly difficult piece of writing that the Broadway orchestra juuuuuuust about makes it through alive. Lots of tricky, shifting rhythms. Again, Lang builds and builds 'til "Push de Button," and the orchestra tears and swings through it. Great stuff.
Li'l Abner is again, another punishing piece of writing. Lots of soaring brass and furiously bowing strings and again, Lang smartly builds to one of the best numbers, "Jubilation T. Cornpone".
A couple of others that I greatly admire:
- Robert Russell Bennett's Overture to On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.
What's on the album is a combination of the Overture and the Entr'acte. But it's some of the liveliest writing he ever came up with. I LOVE the whirling circus music version of "On the SS Bernard Cohen".
- Eddie Sauter's Entr'acte to It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman.
Sauter's stuff is always unusual, sounding not quite like any other orchestrator. (Henry Sweet Henry, The Apple Tree and 1776 are some of his other shows). The Superman Entr'acte is fun and surprising and then ends with a fiendishly difficult bop version of "You've Got What I Need". On the CD, you can hear the reeds trying deperately to get through it, and they JUST make it. The one professional production of Superman that I saw, the orchestra wasn't nearly so lucky.
- Sid Ramin and Robert Ginzler's Overture to Wildcat
It's probably Sid Ramin's work, but he and Ginzler worked so closely together that you can never tell who did what. (Like in Gypsy). Wildcat's score is a mix of highs and lows, but the Overture starts off like a bat out of hell, and never lets up. It also makes the show sound like a million bucks.
"Gif me the cobra jool!"
Updated On: 12/4/04 at 07:51 AM
