The greatest musical in the world is...

Cafe Society
61

Because I didn’t read RealityChuck’s opinion, I read yours. IOW, I was not aware you were responding to RC because your post quotes Hrududu, not him. Besides which, I don’t think his post was of the same type; he said Sondheim is “tuneless” but he never implied you or anyone else didn’t hold a valid opinion by disagreeing with him.

Honestly, I wasn’t trying to bust your chops personally. It just bugs me that on the Boards discussions of things that are obviously only matters of taste and opinion, so often devolve to one side or the other (or both) implying that only a brain-dead troglydite could disagree with their assessment. There is a particular poster – not you, not anyone even participating in this thread – who is a past-master of the “I’m right and you’re stupid” school of artistic criticism, and I guess it’s become a bit of a hot button for me. Sorry if I over-reacted.

62

Fair enough. If it helps, I’m currently sitting through hour four of a seven hour meeting during which I will probably not speak even one time, so my mood is highly questionable. I think that RealityChuck’s tone - through most of his posts, and there have been several - was dismissive of the opinions of others in just the way you describe (“you expect lousy music from Sondheim”), and I think being deliberately provocative - so I responded in kind. Sorry for being a bit of a putz about it.

63

I hope they’re at least pacifying you with donuts. :slight_smile:

64

Gaah. I am so sorry. Here [!P!] is your Putz Pass for the day; you’re earning it.

65

Speaking as someone who hates pretty much all musicals, All That Jazz is the only one I’ve ever really liked. Since it was about a Broadway choreographer, it was at least remotely plausible that people would drop everything and break into song and dance.

Plus, I recall great racks. :slight_smile:

66

Yes to both.

Sondheim’s so-called “sophistication” involved the characters singing and clearly stating what’s exactly on their mind. There is no depth: it’s all there on first listening. Listening the second time gives you nothing more. And the words never reflect back upon themselves to find new meanings and definitions.

For an example of true emotional sophistication, take a look at “Shall We Dance?” from The King and I. It’s a song about how much the two characters are deeply in love with each other – and it never even comes close to mentioning this. It manages to make the line “We do it again” one of the most romantic in musical comedy history.

Or how about “The Bride’s Lament” from The Drowsy Chaperone? It’s a song with deliberately bad lyrics:

Yet, the composer takes these lyrics – raw material worse than anything Sondheim ever started with – and turns them into a touching song about choices and regrets, even turning the absurdly stupid image into something poignant and wonderful. And it has a much better tune than anything Sondheim wrote, of course.

Then there “Nothing” from A Chorus Line, in which the word “nothing” changes its emotional meaning from verse to verse.

Sondheim never does that. Admittedly, it is uncommon on Broadway since you have to depend on the audience getting the point, but there is nothing in his songs that shows anything more on additional listening and nothing is revealed except by shouting it out at the audience.

The strength of Into the Woods is due to James Lapine’s book. The score is lame, of course, but the story carries it. The same with Sweeney Todd.

I can sit through a Sondheim show because I know not to expect much from the score. I’m still waiting to be proven wrong, since so far I’ve seen Forum, Follies, Sunday in the Park with George (or tried to – it’s such pretentious crap about the “artiste” that I gave up on it twice), Sweeny Todd, Into the Woods and Assassins. All those musicals, and only two great songs, both in Forum (plus “Send in the Clowns”). A piss poor track record for any Broadway composer. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber – who is pretty much a hack, too – can write a great song every once in awhile. Sondheim can’t.

67

I gotta agree with Skald’s preference of The Bitter Suite to OMWF, as far as TV goes. I think TBS had better, and more ambitious, score. And I liked the performances more in the Xena show, with Lucy Lawless, Ted Raimi, and the late great Kevin Smith all singing beautifully. I know Gabrielle and Calisto were dubbed, but Renee O’Connor and Hudson Leick still rocked, actingwise (and dancing, in Hudson’s case). Plus, TBS really got to me, dramatically speaking. Gut-wrenching stuff.

As far as those who balk at WSS’s singing street gangs, I can understand that, but I just think that’s all part and parcel of accepting the musical genre and suspending your disbelief. I mean, fans of various musicals gotta accept the following singing categories:
[ul][li]Animals (not just cats, but lions, hyenas, apes)[/li][li]Violent French revolutionaries, pimps and street whores[/li][li]Starving orphans, pickpockets, and killers[/li][li]Nazis[/li][li]Cossacks[/li][li]Skads of tuberculars on their deathbeds (okay, maybe that’s mostly opera)[/li][li]Vampires (well … forget that. This is pretty believable, they’re such drama queens) and Frankenstein’s monster [/li][li]Teapots, a candlestick, a clock, and various other inatimate objects[/li][li]A Siamese king, an Argentinian dictator and his wife, German schoolkids, Japanese warriors, and Vietnamese peasants – all singing in English for some reason[/li][li]The entire second continental congress of the U.S.[/li][li]Mobsters and gamblers[/li][li]Several serial killers, plus at least one serial killer/rapist[/li][li]A plant[/li][li]Prisoners (particularly, murderers)[/li][li]Navy soldiers (possibly believable, if the Village People knew what they were talking about)[/li][li]Charlemagne, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Annie Oakley, Gypsy Rose Lee, Noah, Franklin Roosevelt, Fiorello LaGuardia, John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, James Garfield, Gerald Ford…[/li][li]Jesus Christ (while suffering on the Cross, yet!), Pontius Pilate, and all the apostles[/li][li]Bleedin’ trains[/ul][/li]
So for some reason, seeing West Side Story’s gangs using dance and music as metaphor for their pent-up energy and violence never really threw me! :slight_smile:

68

Yeah. The convention of breaking into song is that you do it when your feelings can’t adequately be expressed without it – and really, aren’t teenagers more like that than anyone else? Plus, good choreography for *WSS *showcases and dramatizes athleticism, competition, and violence, rather than fancydancyness.

69

Wouldn’t The Sound of Music have to at least be on the list?

70

*You left out puppets–Lion King, Little Shop & Avenue Q all depend on them

71

Heh. Well, puppets have been breaking out into song at least as far back as Sesame Street, and probably dating to Punch & Judy, so I figured they were at least as easy to swallow as the vampires.

72

What musical had singing TRAINS in it?

73

Starlight Express, by the same guy who brought you singing Christ, cats, Che Guevara and Potiphar.

74

Starlight Express. It didn’t do so good in London and Broadway, but it ran in Las Vegas and Bochem, Germany for over a decade.

It was originally done on roller skates, and there was also “Starlight Express on Ice.”

ETA:

Same disgusting wealthy guy

75

storyteller, I take your point.

76

Oh…my. And…this was played totally straight?

77

I’m a bit leary of getting into a shouting match here, but I definitely find a lot of (although not all of) Sondheim’s music to be frustratingly non-melodic. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in the context of a song-in-a-musical, and in fact is probably a deliberate choice in some cases. But I think it leads to fewer songs that I, at least, can hear being sung and enjoyed on their own terms. Of course, that’s just a matter of personal preference, but for me a show like A Chorus Line or Les Miz is both gripping to watch, and also has songs that I enjoy on their own, for their own sake, whereas something like Sunday In the Park with George is far more of a work of self-contained art, whose parts are far harder to enjoy out of context.

Look at the big furor recently with that British woman singing “I dreamed a dream”. Could you imagine her getting up on stage in a context like that and singing “finishing the hat” or something like that?
Now, obviously, this argument slightly leaves me open to ridicule, as there’s no way that the greatest musical in the world should be determined by how likely it is to make a hit on a British reality TV show. But I’m trying to point out a difference between the style of music that Sondheim frequently writes and more traditionally melodic (for lack of a better word) showtunes.

Oh, and to respond to something that choie said (bolding mine):

There’s plenty of wonderful musical music that I love that I find to be melodic and tuneful the way much of Sondheim isn’t which is musically complex and interesting. It’s not just pablum. And even if it is, songs that have become total cliches of goopy musicaldom like “Memory” became goopy cliches because they’re darn beautiful songs, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
To repeat myself, I’m not trying to say that my opinions are right and yours are wrong, or that I can objectively prove that there is anything wrong with the way Sondheim writes, but I do think there is a distinct difference in style between the way he writes individual songs and the way a lot of other composers do, and it’s clearly one that doesn’t endear him to a fair number of people.

78

I agree that dramatically and performance wise speaking it was better. You might be right about the score, I wouldn’t be surprised. But the lynchpin of a musical is the songs, and the OMWF songs were much much better.

It’s probably less that it was a musical per se than that they were so wussy. A gang musical could work with the right genre of music and style of dancing. But then the tough guys in Grease and that Pony Boy movie seem pretty wussy and funny to me too, although I like Grease despite that and because they were going more for cool than actually menacing.

Although it can seem like certain composers aren’t as good at melody or have talky songs, I wouldn’t point the finger at any particular composer because the problem is often just as much with a particular production or performance. For example, most stage productions of JCS tend to talk-sing a lot of the numbers, but the IG version really rocks each and every song, making them well, songs and not exposition with musical accompaniment. I’ve seen both sorts of performances from varying versions of Les Mis and Rent too. It really saddens me when I’ve heard something sung like a power ballad and then hear someone else sing the same thing like it’s just dialogue.

79

Anything Goes

Nothing like old school Cole Porter. Also, it was my very first summer stock performance, so I’ll always have a soft spot for that one.

80

I’ll concede that the single best song of OMWF was better than the single best song of TBS. But TBS is much tighter, simply because Xena never suffered from Buffy’s biggest weakness: cast bloat. The tightness of focus that results from keeping on track that way is ultimately what makes Xena a better series.

That and the fact that Renee O’Connor is hotter than Alyson Hannigan, and Lucy Lawless is hotter than Sarah Michelle Gellar.