...but I WILL NOT be trawling the internet for spoilers.  No, indeed I won't.

..........

On another topic: it goes without saying that Emma Thompson is everything.  But Jason Bailey, the author of this article -- which is possibly the single best thing to emerge from the Hollywood strikes (not to discount, you know, raises and protections and dignity in general) -- has some deliciously tart words of his own on the subject of corporate degradation of language.

And TV writer/comedian Mike Drucker actually gets the ball rolling with his note-perfect tweet, quoted near the top of Bailey's article, in response to a regrettable bit of phrasing in Variety.

(Thompson herself is, by comparison, a bit more diplomatic -- she was speaking live at a British TV-industry conference last week -- though obviously no less passionate or articulate on the topic).

Some days I think maybe there is still hope for humanity.

<sigh> ...

NYT:  How Complete Was Stephen Sondheim's Final Musical?

A friend sent me the link just now.  With the show beginning previews tomorrow night, I'll be making an effort not to spoil myself with other people's hot takes before seeing it myself.  But this isn't that -- in fact, fortunately for spoilage purposes, it tells us exactly nothing about the show itself that hasn't already been covered in more (which still isn't to say much) detail elsewhere.

I wonder what the chances are, if any, of a cast album in time for the holidays...?

Review written while waiting for the cable technician, so it will probably be done in pieces.

As I said, it was an amazing experience. Audra is extremely charismatic as well as having that voice. Her between-songs banter was entertaining, and she has a definite rapport with her musical director and the musician members of her "entourage."

The concert started with the musical director leading the orchestra in "Carousel Waltz." Then Audra came out and sang "I Am What I Am" from La Cage Aux Folles, and the incredible-ness began. The songs aren't listed in the program, so I'm recalling as many as I can from memory.
"I Could Have Danced All Night"
"Summertime" (without microphone! WOW) 
"You've Got to Be Carefully Taught"/"Children Will Listen"
A song she said she was performing for one of the first times, so please forgive the lyric sheet in front of her (this song was one of the highlights of a long list of highlights, so I wish I knew the name)
A song from a Fred Astaire movie
"It Don't Mean a Thing" (with audience participation)

The second half started with the orchestra playing "Ragtime Symphonic Suite"
"Before the Parade Passes By"
"Being Green"
"What Can You Lose" (she was surprised when an audience member [not me] knew it was from Dick Tracy)/"Not a Day Goes By"
"Somewhere"
"Some Other Time"
A song from an up-and-coming songwriter (Kim Kalesti) who is actually the mother of another up-and-coming songwriter (Emily King)--she said to look them both up.
And a couple more songs in each half that I'm not recalling clearly

The encore was a duet with her musical director, where he was clearly outclassed, vocal-wise.
This has turned into a rambling instead of a proper review, and it doesn't come close to doing the concert justice, but the cable tech is supposedly here right now.

In case the lack of faces in the full "tutorial" above is too frustrating, this clip from the show's YouTube channel provides at least some closeup footage of the opening number (production B-roll, alternating with studio footage taken during the recording of the revival cast album):

"Procession Slime Tutorial" (B'way 2023, complete):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnDAohyNrSE


This is the only full-show capture I've found.  Taken from a very good seat in the left front mezzanine, it isn't pro-shot quality; but in compensation for uniformly blown-out/overexposed faces, it provides an excellent broad view of the staging and design.  Colors occasionally get digitally oversaturated (or, conversely, washed-out) by the camera, but not often- or acutely-enough to do much damage to the designers' exquisite palette (crucially that of Heather Gilbert's lighting, which generally comes through pretty well here).  The picture is well-framed in steady, if unvarying, wide-shot; and the sound is good -- again, not soundboard-quality, but crisp and clear overall.

The preshow projection image may deserve a little explanation.  The projected text is actually a photo detail of the plaque in Marietta, GA marking the site of Leo Frank's murder.  But the audience arrived to a much wider photo panorama of the present-day site (nowadays just a tiny sliver of green space wedged between a highway overpass and a Waffle House) -- with the memorial marker itself, too distant to be legible, attracting no notice among the trees, telephone poles, and cars rushing by (in tastefully motion-blurred AfterEffects).   At about five or ten minutes before curtain, this image began a subliminally slow but inexorable, telescopically smooth and seamless zoom into the plaque, its text eventually filling the stage's entire backwall, before homing in still further on the final sentence:  "Without addressing guilt or innocence, and in recognition of the state's failure to either protect Frank or bring his killers to justice, he was granted a posthumous pardon in 1986."

Intermission is cleanly excluded from this recording: the camera stops as soon as the houselights come up, then instantly restarts just as the second act begins (now in 1:1 square ratio, for some reason, instead of the previous 4:3).  But it's probably worth noting that Platt spent the entire intermission onstage in his "jail cell" gazing, hollow-eyed, into the middle distance as two years passed in fifteen minutes.  (At one point, a helpful "guard" brought him some water to drink).

The production's final moments callback to that long preshow projection zoom, returning us to the present-day memorial plaque -- this time in medium-shot, with a slight pullback reversing the original zoom-in -- while the downstage projection surface provides a postscript: "In 2019, Leo Frank's case was reopened by the Fulton County District Attorney's office.  It is still ongoing."

I just got back from seeing AUDRA in concert with the Colorado Symphony, and it was FANTASTIC. Amazing, Amazing performer. She was even better than all my expectations. She mentioned that the last time she was in Denver was in 1992 in a touring production of The Little Mermaid. (I know that I missed her in that.) She did 3 1/2 Sondheim songs as part of the concert ("Children Will Listen," "What Can You Lose"/"Not a Day Goes By" medley, and "Somewhere"). I'm just basking in the high right now. When I get my thoughts together, I'll post a more detailed review of the concert. 

Quote from: KathyB on Sep 20, 2023, 05:22 PMI've listened to the cast recording twice so far, and was prepared to hate it, but... I don't. I think Groban is excellent, and the rest of the cast sounds at least good, although the actress playing Johanna gets a little shrill at times. I wouldn't know AutoTune if it hit me over the head, so I don't recognize it. The thing that bothers me is that every instance of "tt" is guttural (is that the right word? Maybe it's glottal.), and I'm not used to hearing "a LI--le priest" and "Penny buys a BO--le". Maybe I'll get used to it.

I'd be curious what a dialect expert had to say about those glottal t's, which actually come and go freely within single songs, sometimes single lines, though someone does seem to have decided that "tt"'s deserved the most consistency.  Obviously not all Cockney t's are glottal (though I guess it's true that all tt's pretty much are), but the choices here sometimes seem so arbitrary that I suspect they may have more to do with Ashford's limitations -- or perhaps with assumptions about how much Cockney realness a mostly-American audience can handle -- than with accuracy.

The latter consideration, at least, is nothing new; I recall, many years ago, Angela Lansbury being quoted -- perhaps in Sondheim & Co. -- saying she'd devised a kind of Cockney Lite for the role, so as not to entirely confound American ears already being challenged to keep up with SJS's lyrics.  (And in turn, somewhat more recently [but still at least a decade ago], a Scottish-born actress friend of mine disillusioned me by pronouncing Lansbury's accent as Mrs. Lovett "ridiculous").

Accents aside, my ire has been mildly soothed by the new recording's finished mix (Apple Music's version, at least) and/or the lack of compression on the complete album, as compared to the YouTube tracks posted above.  I have no idea what the specific technical differences are, but to my ear they do improve matters -- strikingly enough that, after a few tracks, I went back and played some of them back-to-back with the YouTube versions to make sure I wasn't imagining things.  I don't have the knowledge or terminology to really describe what I'm hearing, but it's like there's more spatial depth and clarity on the album; the orchestra feels more present and the instrumentation more distinct; it has texture (as do the voices), where on YouTube it seems to recede and blend into a kind of silken goo.

I doubt I'll ever love the breakneck tempo of much of "The Letter" and, especially, "City on Fire," in this version.

But Groban does indeed sound great throughout.  And with enough repetition, who knows, eventually maybe I'll even simmer down enough to cut Ashford some slack; as I've said in previous posts, from a purely musical perspective, she's absolutely fine.  It's the accent, and her particular brand of clowning (somewhat less evident on the album, mercifully), that set my teeth on edge.

I wanted to love Ruthie Ann Miles, but found her only adequate onstage (she may have been managing a cold at one of the perfs I saw), so I'm happy to say she's quite wonderful on the album.  (Both times I saw her onstage, her accent kept sliding oddly between Cockney yowl -- fine -- and full-on Liam Neeson brogue -- huh?  I mean, I guess you could devise a backstory for the BW to defend that choice; and, to Miles's credit, both dialects at least sounded more believable to me than anything Ashford could ever dream of, admittedly a low bar to clear; but I found the brogue distracting, so I'm just as glad for it to have vanished in the recording studio).  I especially like the startling shift, in her last moments, from the pleading "...she's the devil's wife" into a manic, wholly unhinged (and spoken, not sung, which might bother some purists) "Beadle, dear Beadle" -- and just as abruptly back again for her final lines.  I don't specifically remember that whiplash moment from either of the performances I saw; maybe she wasn't doing it that way, at that point in the run, or maybe it just wasn't as memorable onstage (where the entire Final Sequence felt so limp and at-sea that I remember very few details even after two viewings) -- but on the recording it's kinda spine-tingling.  Shockingly unexpected, schizoid register shifts have been part of the BW's DNA since 1979; but execution is everything, and Miles's attack makes this particular moment both gasp-worthy and heartbreaking.

I've listened to the cast recording twice so far, and was prepared to hate it, but... I don't. I think Groban is excellent, and the rest of the cast sounds at least good, although the actress playing Johanna gets a little shrill at times. I wouldn't know AutoTune if it hit me over the head, so I don't recognize it. The thing that bothers me is that every instance of "tt" is guttural (is that the right word? Maybe it's glottal.), and I'm not used to hearing "a LI--le priest" and "Penny buys a BO--le". Maybe I'll get used to it.

It's just after 9pm, and Merrily's (that is to say, the Friedman revival's) first B'way preview performance should be intermitting pretty soon.

Last week Ben Brantley made one of his occasional NYT reappearances to bless the show with another puff piece (a very effective one, granted -- prepare to be charmed):

https://www.lct.org/shows/gardens-anuncia/

Tickets are now on sale, with previews beginning at the Newhouse in just over a month (Oct. 19), and opening a month after that (Nov. 20).
The show also has a lovely new McMullan poster:

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