Posted: 5/11/24 at 10:43am
macnyc said: "When I was watching the show, I was disappointed that the musical numbers were few and far between. I think the play would have benefited from some subtle cuts off its three-hours-plus running time and had a few more of Butler's tunes inserted.
For those of you who have listened to the album, is there a reason the songs were not included? Maybe they didn't fit into the narrative?"
What you’re essentially asking is why this wasn’t a more traditional musical. And the answer to why it’s not is that David Adjmi wrote a play, not a musical. It’s fine if you didn’t like it as much as if it were more aligned with traditional musical sensibilities (songs driving the narrative vs. supplementing it), but I generally find questions of “Why didn’t they do X instead of Y?” pretty useless, since the only real answer is “Because they didn’t.”
That being said, Will Butler wrote songs for specific moments where Adjmi wanted music to play. And instead of writing 10-second snippets or 1-minute starts of songs for the times where we don’t hear the whole thing, he found a way to write whole songs that could be repurposed however they fit dramatically. It’s similar to how Sondheim wrote “A Weekend in the Country” for A Little Night Music: stage the scene, plot it out, and write the song to meet the play where it’s at.
At the end of the day, it’s a play about a band recording an album and all that entails for their interpersonal dynamic. The music we hear is deployed for specific dramatic effect, and all the other songs on the album that we don’t hear were possibly a part of it in some way at some point, but they were cut (or cut down/repurposed for incidental music used in act transitions) for time for the same reason dialogue is cut: to focus the narrative.
Updated On: 5/11/24 at 10:43 AM
