The Last Ship previews — Page 9

Then why oh why almost everytime I see a new musical, I am depresssed forlorn sad and bored and unable to hum anything decent?

Exceptions: Beautiful, Wicked, Book of Mormon

What have they done to the Broadway Musical?

We don't have Cy Coleman or Kander and Ebb or Bock and Harnick or Jule Styne or Bob Merrill or Jones and Schmidt. Those guys wrote scores. Even Larry Grossman and Hal Hackaday who wrote the fabulous Minnies Boy's score is preferable.

What passes for composers nowadays pales in comparison. Sting? Cyndi Lauper (overated) La Chiusa, Tom Kitt, Tim Minchin.

No wonder we are relying more and more on the Beach Boys, Motown and Carole King for decent music.

I personally don't think all scores should try to be memorable, if they end up being memorable, then they earned it!

I think there's actually been a burst of ravishing music in recent Broadway scores--

Steven Lutvak's GENTLEMEN'S GUIDE...
Jason Robert Brown's BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY
Frank Wildhorn's BONNIE AND CLYDE to name just 3.

And even Tim Minchin wrote a bunch of lovely hummable numbers in MATILDA-- I'm thinking of "Quiet" and the gorgeous "When I Grow Up" for starters.

I can understand your argument, GilmoreGirl, but once the songs begin to take on a predictable pattern, as they do here, they stop working in the moment/context of the piece. (It was like "here's a big, upbeat dance number, then here's a dreary ballad, here's another upbeat song..." you get the picture.)

I like to have a couple of songs in my head, but I know that's not everyone's thing. But, I don't like predictability in scores as a rule and the paint by numbers musical creation is really dull.

"Hummable" is also partially an artistic choice. You'd be hard-pressed to leave Phantom without those melodies in your head, but a lot of that is just the sheer amount of times they are repeated and repeated and repeated. If they played those songs/melodies once, they would still be as lovely, but you might not have had as much time processing them were it not for the repetition.

I found The Last Ship memorable in part because I watched Sting's live broadcast of them at the Public, so in some ways I had got them into my head in advance. Similarly, the inclusion of earlier songs from his catalog had the same effect, so hummability isn't a brilliant melody that you can't shake. It's a math equation that not everyone wants to include in their shows.

Not to mention the flip side of hummability, which you can often experience at Beautiful, where everyone in the audience knows all the songs and wants everyone around them to know that they know them, so they are saying the lyrics and humming the melodies of the orifinal recordings, despite that not being the way they are being presented onstage. Leading to the deep gravelly voiced senior behind to say "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" a good 10 seconds before Jessie Mueller got to it.

Updated On: 10/22/14 at 12:43 PM

"I was just talking about the idea that some have that if a score isn’t hummable/catchy, that automatically makes it “bad” and vice versa."

Actually, it seems to me that the reverse argument is, if not voiced, then certainly used as the prevailing criterion of our " cultural elites." To wit, if a score is catchy and hummable, then it's automatically worthless; and those scores that are neither are automatically masterpieces.

And we've seen just where that has gotten us: 40 years in the desert with no manna in sight. Just the way the snots like it.

The truth is, the question is not one of hummability or catchiness; it's one of beauty or ugliness.

The public wants beauty.

The elitists want ugliness -- lots and lots of ugliness ---that they will then champion as beauty, and impose it on the rest of us, all too successfully, alas.

As for the score to The Last Ship, it wasn't painful to listen to. Basically, it was just nondescript and boring.

Updated On: 10/22/14 at 02:06 PM

"The public wants beauty."

I don't even know why I try with A8, but most of the shows I find ravishing (BRIDGES, BONNIE & CLYDE, the stunning AFTER MIDNIGHT), die a quick death in the public marketplace. The scores I find either ugly or utterly pedestrian (KINKY BOOTS, LEGALLY BLOND) live a long and profitable life on Broadway and tours.

GENTLEMEN'S GUIDE with its lovely score was limping toward flopdom like the others until... wait for it... the ELITES crowned it best musical, at which point the public embraced it to their breasts. It's nonsensical to claim beautiful scores are rewarded in today's marketplace as a natural fact.

And we've seen just where that has gotten us: 40 years in the desert with no manna in sight. Just the way the snots like it.

The truth is, the question is not one of hummability or catchiness; it's one of beauty or ugliness.

The public wants beauty.

The elitists want ugliness -- lots and lots of ugliness ---that they will then champion as beauty, and impose it on the rest of us, all too successfully, alas.

Despite the highly subjective terms mysteriously applied to the singular all-inclusive "public", you seem to be contradicting yourself. With no "manna" in sight for 40 years, which successful elitist ugly scores have prevailed with long runs despite public opinion?

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After Eight is full of it. I don't know what qualifies someone as being part of the "cultural elite," but I must be part of the "public" because I search for beauty in the theater. Beauty like Bridges and Piazza, which rank right up there with Carousel and Most Happy Fella for melody lines that soar and warm the soul as they break your heart.

As for the "elites" wanting ugliness- I've never met a single person who seeks out ugliness in a score. Perhaps I don't run in elite enough circles!

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This debate brings to mind something about which I have long wondered: how could Rodgers and Hammerstein create the Big Five in which almost every song is familiar and has been covered by hundreds of vocalist to this day.

For example, the songs of King and I, for which revival tickets just went on sale on Sunday, can probably be rattled off by most. "Getting to Know You," "Whistle a Happy Tune," "Hello Young Lovers," "Something Wonderful," etc.

But for what I call the bottom three, Allegro, Me and Juliet and Pipe Dreams there are no "hit" songs. Yes, I know that Perry Como or Andy Williams or one of those types might have had a moderate hit with a song like "No Other Love," which got its melody from Rodgers' score for the TV documentary Victory at Sea. Essentially the scores for the bottom three might as well have never been written.

That leads me to wonder how it is possible that the two men in their prime could have written the amazing Carousel and South Pacific and sandwiched in between them Allegro.

Which further leads me to wonder if so many of the Carousel and South Pacific songs became "hits" because the shows were around long enough to permit the public to hear the songs and their many covers often enough for familiarity to form and humming to commence.

As a corollary, what if Pipe Dreams had run for a year and a half. Would we now have a thousand covers of the very catchy title song, the lament "Everybody's Got a Home But Me," the Love Song "All at Once You Love Her," and the climactic, boy wins girl song "The Next Time It Happens?"

There is an Encores live recording of Pipe Dreams if you are curious.

Some would consider "Flower Drum Song" to make it their big six.

Wait, After Eight, is that really you? I would love it if that actually were you.

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