Theatre Thursday :: why jukebox musicals make me sad inside

I’m not disputing that they can’t have very good productions, or very talented casts, or very talented costumes/scenic designers/orchestras/whatever.  But they take out possibly the element of a musical that matters the very most to me, the writing.  Oh, sure, there are some that pretend to have a plot, but the plot’s really just a loose construction around a variety of songs and the characters always seem to have brick-wall endings.

And there’s no original music.  I mean, isn’t that the point of a musical?  Really?  The music?

If nothing else, I think jukebox musicals and musicals with original scores should maybe be judged differently.  It seems unfair to put them against each other.  It’s like how the Golden Globes have different categories for comedy and drama.  It’s just a thought.  It’s not as if jukebox shows get nominated for best score, which I suppose is the main difference, but even beyond that they just… come off two different art forms more than not.

Or there’s the kind of jukebox musical that one one hand I hate more and on one hand I hate less.  The one that’s really just people in costume putting on a concert.  Its not trying to fake a plot can be seen as a good thing because at least it’s not going to patronize you with some cheesy story about teenage lovers who happen to have the names of characters in songs by whatever band/artist/whatever, but it also just seems like it really ought to be one of those tribute bands that tours local theatres and not considered a “Broadway musical.”

I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just a snob.  Maybe I just haven’t seen the magical jukebox show that will persuade me otherwise.  Maybe, maybe, maybe.

 

–your fangirl heroine.

Theatre Thursday :: Top 11 cast albums that changed my life

I guess this is just a week to reflect on life-changing things!  I’m not including movie soundtracks, though several of those have completely dominated my life.  I’m sure I’ll do a movie soundtracks post at some point, anyway.  I had to use 11, because I just couldn’t narrow it to 10.

11. Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002, OBC)
Well, Millie was my first Broadway show.  We didn’t see all of the originals (yes to Angela Christian as Miss Dorothy, no to most of the rest) but we did have a fantastic cast (Susan Egan as Millie, Christian Borle as Jimmy, Dixie Carter as Mrs. Meers).  Millie was also probably the first show I ever fell in love with, and my repeated listening to the cast album and that some of us even choreographed a tap number to “Forget About the Boy” to perform at the fair in order for us to have hay bales for our production of Oklahoma! ought to prove that.  I hadn’t quite learned not to cast myself as the ingenue yet, but Millie was just so darn sassy I adored her.

10. The Phantom of the Opera (1987, OBC)
I saw the film before I ever saw the stage show, but the stage show to me is afternoons freshman year, singing “Angel of Music” with the Christine to my Meg.  And those?  Good times.  It was about now that I realized that I was better suited to being the Cute Best Friend, and I still do this exceptionally well.  Not to mention Phantom influenced that ridiculous-as-hell novel we cranked out freshman year faaar too much.

9. Hairspray (2002, OBC)
And Hairspray was the first show I fell in love with before seeing it, just from listening to the album.  It’s just so sixties and fun and oh-em-gee, that cast.  Kerry Freaking Butler.  MATTHEW FREAKING MORRISON.  I have literally been on the Matthew Morrison train since I got this album freshman year of high school.  That doesn’t mean I love him more, it just means that I’m happy that other people finally have gotten a chance to see his amazing (even if Mr. Schue is kind of absurd at times, when he sings it all melts away).  Hairspray also celebrates differences, and that’s pretty rad.  Not completely revolutionary, but rad.

8. The Wild Party (1999, Off-B’way)
Though I have both the Lippa and the LaChiusa, it’s the Lippa that owns my soul.  The LaChiusa recording is closer to the original poem, but the Lippa is more plot-driven and less episodic, which is pretty neat.  Also, when Taye Diggs sings the word “dance” in “The Juggernaut,” I’m pretty sure I die of happy.  So yummy.  This was the show that introduced me to the fabulousness of Julia Murney and the extra-fabulousness that is Brian d’Arcy James, and I choose to believe that it is because I dragged my copy of it across the country for him to sign at Next to Normal stage door that he then thought of me when he needed to find someone to take a picture for another fan who’d come alone but wanted stage door pictures.  Because clearly, he realized that I was just that awesome.  I was Kate for Halloween my junior year of high school, and although literally nobody got what my pink flapper dress meant it turned out amazingly and I’m still proud of my mother for working off of one tiny 1″ x 3.5″ picture in the CD booklet and modifying a pattern accordingly.

7. [title of show] (2005, off-B’way)
I sort of just found [title of show] on a whim, but I’ve never been happier about an impulse decision.  It may not seem like much, four chairs and a keyboard, but they rock it so hard it’s insane.  The songs are cute, the adorable metafictionness of it just makes me too happy, and to top it all off, it’s really inspirational.  Probably to anyone, but especially to weirdos like me interested in a career in the creative arts.  And if it weren’t for my discovery of this show, I wouldn’t have then gone to New York to see it closing weekend (marking my first solo plane flight) and I wouldn’t have gone to the amazing Die, Vampire, Die! workshop held in Seattle and hosted by Hunter Bell and Susan Blackwell.  Were it not for [title of show], I would likely be unaware of Susan Blackwell herself, and that’s just a damn shame, because that woman is amazing.  We’d e-mailed and Facebooked a couple of times, because I am a dork, and had met at the Speech & Debate stage door, and when I was at the [title of show] stage door, she even asked me to introduce her to my friend and shook his hand.  I will never forget the awesome of that.  Or that, at the aforementioned workshop, Hunter Bell told me I was good at writing and to keep going.  When I’m feeling low, that’s something I can hold onto.  And all because of a $18 impulse buy.

6. Next to Normal (2009, OBC)
This show came along at exactly the right time in my life, I’m pretty sure.  And it still knocks me off my feet even just listening to it.  Considering that until the actual recording was released, I had been surviving on scratchy Vixy’d YouTube bootlegs of the off-Broadway production (that we saw), the album came along at the right time too.  It’s just such an emotional show, but it’s so beautiful.  I love it so extremely much and thank it for being that rare thing, a completely fresh story on the Broadway. 

5. Little Shop of Horrors (1980, off-Broadway)
When I saw Little Shop at the high school I would attend, at the tender age of twelve, I didn’t realize that it was setting me on an unalterable course.  Sure, I had always been a drama geek to an extent.  But Little Shop is what made me fall in love with musicals.  It was sassy and fun and a tiny bit dirty and kitschy and morbid and all other number of things that I still look for in musicals to this day, quite honestly.  It was the first cast album I bought, and the first one I memorized beginning-to-end.  Of course, the revival album is lovely, too, and the revival production of it I saw on tour in 2003, with ANTHONY FREAKING RAPP, was pretty life-changing as well.  I don’t know.  I’ll always have a soft spot for it in my heart, and no high school production will ever be able to compare (that doesn’t mean I won’t keep going to them, though).

4. Wicked (2004, OBC)
This also seems to be a list of  firsts, because Wicked was the first album that I got, then proceeded to campaign to go see the New York production (not even just the tour, oh no) until it happened.  It’s also the first show that I compulsively dove into the source material for.  And, yes, I think the book is better.  In absolutely so many ways.  But the stage show is just sentimental and sweet and I’m not even sure why I love it so much but I do.  I think it’s likely another that I have specific friend-related memories of, and that makes it dear to me.  I’ve also seen it three times now, so I can geek about it with the best of them.

3. The Light in the Piazza (2005, OBC)
I’m pretty sure this was the first cast album to inspire me to pick up phrases in another language.  I have no idea if I pronounce it correctly, but I can say one whole thing in Italian, “sei mia luce nella piazza,” which means “you are my light in the piazza.”  Not particularly useful if I ever go to Italy and need to, you know.  Get anything done.  But that’s okay, it makes for a good letter sign-off.  This also has two other firsts with it: it is the first show that I was able to fall in love with without trying to cast myself in, and it is the first show that I saw (mostly) the complete original cast of.  And I still regret not stage dooring it.  Piazza is still jaw-drop gorgeous, not just the music, but the story, the set, the clothes (when, ages ago, I saw a “Piazza Dress” on ModCloth, I immediately jumped to the conclusion they had been inspired, and felt smug and awesome for picking up on it).

2. Rent (1996, OBC)
Yet ANOTHER first.  Rent was the first show that made me do what I refer to as “induced emotional hyperventilating,” which is basically crying but without actual tears.  For some reason, I am usually incapable of crying at fiction.  It was also the source of my first (okay, really only) infamous lip-sync performance and the running joke that came from it (“Over the Moon,” and my thing for cartoon cows and cowbells).  People can say whatever they want about la vie Boheme, but that isn’t really the actual point of Rent, although it’s a big one.  Rent is about the people, the relationships, the life they live even in the face of death, and as such it’s touching and heartbreaking and insane.  Oh, another first: Rent was also the first time I saw someone’s butt on stage.

1. Spring Awakening (2006, OBC [mostly])
(I say mostly because there were some changes between the cast recording and the actual Broadway final copy of the score, but it’s labeled an OBC anyway.)  Oh, geez.  What is there to say about Spring?  Never before has a show lived so thoroughly in me.  Even though I’m not a fourteen-year-old German kid getting abused and having sex and committing suicide, and most of the people who see it probably aren’t, it touches people.  Deeply.  My parents, so long-removed from their youth, are touched by it.  And they’ve seen it almost as many times as I have (three to my four).  Spring was the first show I met the entire original cast of, the first show we sat in the front row for, the first show I had a “moment” with one of the actors during (Skylar Astin’s words, not mine), the first show I’ve ever organized an almost complete cast of dresser-uppers for Halloween for (and the first show we’ve won awards for doing this for and that the cast has complimented our photos regarding), and – though likely partially because I’d found out not a week before that the Broadway production was closing, and my fourth time seeing it – the first show I cried during.  And I bawled like a baby during “The Song of Purple Summer” that last time.  Spring is too cool.  The LIGHTS!  The costumes that are, in my weird opinion, something I would actually wear day-to-day, because I am ridiculous like that.  The score that at one point I could play almost all of on the piano.  There is not a single thing about this show that I would change, and I am so massively thankful that I took a chance on the album just ’cause I heard it was rock’n’roll and dirty.  It’s so so much more than that.

— your fangirl heroine.