I’m kind of a fan of old movies and musical theatre, partly due to my parents (my dad jokes that he introduced my brother and I to his CD collection, full of greatest hits of songs from when he was a kid in the 1960s-1970s so that we wouldn’t end up liking popular contemporary musical artists and as kids in Malaysia they were exposed to quite a bit of Western pop culture) and partly due to my own initiative and stuff my brother introduced me to. When I did after-school one-on-one singing lessons in high school I sang mostly older classic songs.
One of them was “The Riff Song,” from The Desert Song, which my brother introduced to when he got me to listen to The Blanks on YouTube. (Of course being a woman, “The Riff Song” sounds quite different when I sing it to when a man or group of men sing it). After that, I got interested in The Desert Song itself and now it’s my second-favourite musical. Just like with *Evita *I can sing all the parts except for Margot’s and Ali Ben Ali’s.
Recently I started rewatching clips from the first movie version (made in 1929, some clips are available on YouTube here) and just realized that I feel a bit sorry for Myrna Loy’s Azuri, the part-French, part-Moroccan dancer who wants revenge on the heroine Margot. I mean, it seems as though Captain Fontaine dumped her as soon as he could go back to France and marry Margot, and from her own words in the betrayal scene about being taught to “sell anything for silver” she quite understandably is bitter for a reason.
Does anyone else who knows/has seen a production of this musical feel the same way or is it just me overthinking something that’s clearly not meant to be serious?
“The Riff Song” from the 1929 movie, with John Boles doing funny gestures with his arms.