"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
Add me to the group of "not a Close fan in this role." Friends who saw her play it near the end of her run said she did everything but lick the banister on her way down the grand staircase. Even Gloria in the movie, though a peculiar delusional creature, kept it together somewhat until her final mad scene. Close took the mellow out of melodrama waaaay too early IMO.
back in the day I got the US Cd way before getting the London one, and singing asside, I just found the "acting" came through way better in the US cd than the London CD, Joe on the London CD too often sounds so flat and generally uninterested in what ever was going on.
As for possible concert casting/revival casting, I'd love to see Julia Murney play Norma, I love her vibrato heavy voice and her facial bone structure would make a stunning Norma
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27199361@N08/ Phantom at the Royal Empire Theatre
I'd love to see Julian Ovenden as Joe. I really liked him in the New York Philharmonic Show Boat concert. I agree that this would be better as a Philharmonic concert rather than a Broadway revival.
Patti's original keys were wonderful and thrilling. Norma's singing on the original record is just not good. I don't know what Lloyd Webber sees in her.
"Contentment, it seems, simply happens. It appears accompanied by no bravos and no tears."
Oh, I would love to see Sierra as Betty. This is something I can get behind. If we all have to sit through Close mirroring the plot in her real life, at least give us a pretty sounding Betty! Andrew, are you listening?
They/them.
"Get up the nerve to be all you deserve to be."
If Patti and Webber did make up and 20 years later Glenn performs the role in London and Patti brings the concert to New York I think the universe would implode.
Can Betty be black? Because I'd like to hear Cynthia Erivo sing that track. Love the idea of Ramin as Joe, also possibly Christian Borle (Sutton and Christian as lovers... um).
Caption: Every so often there was a rare moment of perfect balance when I soared above him.
I'll never forget as long as I live- Patti did a show in Orange County circa 1996. Before she sang a song from Sunset, she said to the pianist "Please play this next song in the key in which it was written".
Very pointed, and awesome. Very Patti. I ADORE that woman.