Four and a Half Times Love

An interesting article from Mr. Steyn who is indeed online. Whilst pondering the Leonard Cohen song, "Dance Me to the End of Love", he discusses the old lyric-writing problem of finding a decent rhyme for "love". Basically there are only four and a half: "above" and "of" (pronounced "uv", that's the half) are the most convenient; "shove" and "dove" are the most problematic. The most curious one, however, is "glove".

Here's how Cohen makes use of it:

Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove

Dance Me to the End of Love

It's all about finding a fresh angle. Steyn finds a couple of more examples but misses a big one. Here's Oscar Hammerstein's "People Will Say We're in Love" from Oklahoma:

Don't start collecting things

(Give me my rose and my glove)

Sweetheart they're suspecting things

People Will Say We're in Love

I always liked that one, especially if the interruption is done with a touch of indignation. It's also a good example of Hammerstein's deflected love songs like "If I Loved You" or "Make-Believe". By having two people singing about love rather than openly declaring their love, you get to use all the old romantic lingo (dancing, holding hands, stars above) but in a fresh and interesting way. It's also more human.

Anglo-lyricists sometimes look jealously at their French counterparts and the dozens of useful rhymes for "amour". But limitations can be good for the imagination. They should be grateful for their four-and-a half.

REVIEW: Billy Elliot, Original Cast Recording

Here's a review of the original cast recording of Billy Elliot, currently available from the good folks at Spotify. Book/lyrics by Lee Hall and music by Elton John.

Solidarity, solidarity
Solidarity forever
We’re proud to be working class
Solidarity forever

Whoever knew that Arthur Scargill would make it to Broadway? Obviously the comrades on the Tony awards panel had no such doubts about the appeal of arguments surrounding nationalised industries in Thatcher’s Britain. Or maybe they just liked seeing a bunch of talented kids in a follow-your-dreams kind of plot. Who knows? What does seem certain is that the story of the little dancer that could looks set to become the latest West End megamusical.

Like all the best musicals, Billy Elliot is deeply weird. Set against the background of the 1980s miners’ strikes in North East England, it’s about a young lad who discovers an unlikely love of ballet. As Billy’s talent, literally, takes flight, the miners and their traditions, literally, sink into the ground. Lee Hall wrote the original film and has done the musical adaptation, writing both the book and the lyrics. As you might expect, he’s at his best in the world that he grew up in, that of the mining community. From its earthy socialism (“Once we built visions on ground we hued/We dreamt of justice and men renewed”) to its nastiest vitriol (“Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher...one year nearer death”), this provides the real heart of the show.

As for Billy, although much of the time his character is naturally expressed in dance, there is one big number. It comes at Billy’s final audition for the Royal Ballet when, with his entire future hanging in the balance, a member of the audition panel asks him to explain what it feels like when he dances. If that isn’t a cue for a song, then I’m Ethel Merman. But it also requires the right song and “Electricity” fits the bill. The music starts hesitantly as Billy tries to find the words (“It’s a bit like being angry/It’s a bit like being scared”). Like a lot of things young kids say, there’s a kind of articulacy to the inarticulate mumblings. Then the chorus jumps up a gear:

And then suddenly I’m flying
Flying like a bird
Like electricity, electricity
Sparks inside of me
And I’m free, I’m free

The ideas are simple and sentimental but there’s no doubt that it works. It’s a genuine musical theatre moment.

The grown-up characters seem less well drawn. There’s a personal and political ambivalence here that is never quite spelled out. The key scene is the confrontation between the older son, standing alongside the striking miners, and the father, who breaks the picket line in the hope of funding Billy’s future. Politics has suddenly become deeply personal and the father explains his actions:

He could be a star for all we know
We don’t know how far he can go

The neatness of the internal rhyme (“far/star”) is fine but the character is all wrong. This is not some pushy parent shoving their kids on stage in the hope that they’ll be the next Wayne Sleep. This is a man dropping everything he knows and believes in. He does it, not in the hope that Billy will become a star but because, as a father, it’s imply what he has to do. The father’s personal struggle is a distillation of the political conflict between “society” (the miners) and the “individual and the family” (Billy and his Dad). The problem is that we’re supposed to celebrate the “individual” winning out whilst, at the same time, mourn the loss of “society”. The father’s change of heart is an empathetic one; we understand his choice and we’re on his side. But to spell it out more clearly would require that empathy to be mirrored in the political story. That never really happens and leaves a strange hole in the drama. Presumably, to do so, would be to admit the unconscionable, that perhaps Maggie had a point after all.

The music is provided by Elton John who has a unique place in musical theatre. He’s one of the only bestselling chart acts to have had a crack at new musicals. Instead of re-packaging his back catalogue into some Yellow Brick Road Extravaganza, he’s actually trying to make a go of original material and, for this, we should be exceedingly grateful. So far the results have been a little mixed. He’s had two successes (The Lion King and Billy Elliot) but these have been off the back of smash hit films. His two straight-to-theatre musicals have fared less well (Aida and That Weird Vampire Musical) which is a bit of a worry.

Similarly, the music for Billy Elliot is a mixed bag. The more “Broadway” the music tries to sound the less successful it is. So “Shine” and “Expressing Yourself” feel like fillers; generic showbiz numbers shoved in just because they’re the sort of songs you get in a musical show. The sound jars with the British sensibility of the piece, although the singers do have a rum go at keeping up the Geordie accent (“Give ‘um the auld razzul dazzul, like”). The flip side is that the less “Broadway” the music sounds, the better it gets. In fact half of the score is basically male voice choirs and brass bands and hymns. Unlike most pop composers, Elton John writes his songs on piano, rather than guitar, which tends to make the harmonies more interesting. But the really interesting part is the harmonic rhythm. The harmonic rhythm is the rate at which the harmony changes in relation to the beat. In most pop songs the harmony changes every 4 beats (or every bar). In a lot of the Billy Elliot songs,
however, the harmony changes every 2 beats. This doesn’t make them hymns exactly (in a hymn the harmony changes every single beat) but it does make them more hymn-like. It’s what gives the ballads that feeling of earnest reverence. It’s not for no reason that the most famous moment in Elton John’s career came whilst he was sitting at a piano in a church, singing about a secular saint, the late Princess Diana.

It’s this aspect of the music, along with Lee Hall’s more heartfelt lyrics, that give Billy Elliot a British feel. That’s a rare achievement and should be celebrated as such. More than any other Billy Elliot points to a possible way forward for British musicals. In the meantime the show seems destined for world domination. Those posters of leaping little Billies are becoming as familiar as the cat’s eyes and French urchins of the other global brands of the West End megamusical. It seems as though you can sell anything these days, even 1980s socialism. Sing out, Arthur:

Solidarity forever!

A Little Cavilling

"So finally, an arts council grant that surely nobody can cavil...

Oh, I don't know. When it comes to arts funding, I'm always game.

"...an award given to develop new musical writing"

This is news from the Guardian that Perfect Pitch Musicals is to receive a £188,860 from the Arts Council.

"So why is help needed? Mainly because the musicals seen in our theatres today are usually not original works - and rarely British in origin."

Agreed. Although it may be more interesting to ask might be why the old, foreign stuff is more popular. Just a thought.

"If I use just West End shows to illustrate this point, we see they are either revivals of American classics – Carousel, The King and I – or, if they were written more recently, based on films, such as The Lion King, Sister Act and Billy Elliot."

Well now, hold up there. Granted, the songs for The Lion King were susbstantially transplanted from the film, but Sister Act has an entirely original score. And Billy Elliot had no singing at all in the film. If you're not counting that as "original" then you're setting the bar very high. Almost all successful musicals are adaptations of something or other - a book, a play, a film - but they're still original musicals.

Now, about being "British in origin"? That's a tougher cookie, sorry, biscuit. Billy Elliot certainly is. We Will Rock You is (although not an original score). Mamma Mia? Sort of - the production is but the songs are Swedish. It quickly gets complicated.

Even more complicated is the question of what a British musical sounds like. What makes a song distinctively British? Most new British musicals sound American. They're either a bit Sondheim-ish or Broadway-ish or American pop parody-ish. The simple reason is that musical theatre's vernacular and, more broadly, popular song's vernacular is still and always has been essentially American. Finding a genuinely original British voice may take a lot more than a bit of arts funding.

End of cavil.

Chicago 2?

Over on Big Hollywood, mystery man Stage Right is looking at the trailer for the new film version of the Broadway show Nine. Can't say I'm quite as enthusiastic. Looks a bit like an expensive perfume ad to me. Still, nice lingere.

It's being brought to us by director-choreographer Rob Marshall who also did the oscar-winning film version of Chicago.

Here's a review I wrote when that film first came out. We've had a few more Hollywood musicals since then - Hairspray, Mamma Mia, Sweeney Todd - but I think that my main points still hold up: the stars should be musical stars, not just stars who do musicals and the films themselves should be conceived as musical films, not just souped-up stage shows with a lot of machine-gun edits.

Anway, here's the review:

Chicago is the brilliant new film that single-handedly brings back the movie musical to our silver screens. Oops, that was the Moulin Rouge review. Or was it Evita? Ho hum, never mind. Musicals on the big screen are still a rare enough thing to elicit a lot of wishful thinking. But Chicago, like the other recent attempts, still hasn’t managed to re-discover the magic touch of the Golden Age.

One of the big differences between now and then, of course, is the stars. Then, there were musical stars; now, we have stars who do musicals. Take Renee Zellweger, for example: brilliant, brilliant comedy actress (Jerry Maguire, Bridget Jones Diary). But, as you listen to her warbling through the Chicago song list, all you think is: “Oh, she can sing too”. The last Kander and Ebb show that was put to celluloid was Cabaret with Liza Minnelli. But I’ll bet nobody ever saw Liza and thought: “Oh, she can sing too”.

If Zellweger was the newcomer, then Catherine Zeta Jones was supposed to be the old West End trooper. In the interviews we were told how hard she worked, grinding her way through gruelling days, nights, weeks, months of preparation. But that’s just the problem: it still looks like hard work. Her dancing lacks that easy, flowing grace that marks a great performance and she gets found out in the best routine in the film, the Cell Block Tango, where the chorus of murderesses steal the scene from under her nose. To make matters worse, with those long legs and jet black bobby-cut, she bears a striking resemblance to Cyd Charisse in Singing in the Rain. And it only reminds you of what you’re missing.

Its not that the leading ladies are bad, its just that they’re not great and all this has a disastrous knock-on effect. The film crosscuts so relentlessly between the dance sequences and the story you begin to suspect that the performances are deliberately being hidden under a blizzard of machine-gun edits. At one point, when the showbiz lawyer, Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), presents his case for the defence in Roxie’s trial, the “fantasy” Billy Flynn starts a little shoe-shuffling tap routine on a stage somewhere. The camera cuts frantically between the two scenes – the court and the stage – as the taps get quicker and the lawyer dramatically winds up the
case. But all the momentum is built up by the editing, rather than the dancing. Gere may be the best tapper in the world, the Gene Kelly of Gigolos, but how could you tell? The camera never stays on him long enough for us to find out. Fred Astaire used to rehearse his routines for weeks, then stroll on to the film set and nail it in one long, continuous take. Imagine the director deciding to break up his dance into a few, snatched cuts here and there. With Astaire you don’t need any fancy editing, all the drama’s in the way he moves.

All this heavy-handed editing comes across as an attempt not to appear too stagey. But that’s missing the point: it’s the routines themselves that need to be more filmic, routines you could only do on film, like dancing on a ceiling or singing in a downpour.

One of the unique things about the show Chicago is that there aren’t really any likeable characters in it: a slick lawyer, a corrupt gaoler, a wussy loser of a husband and a bunch of sensation-seeking murderesses. Who are you supposed to root for amongst that lot? Maybe that explains the reason for all those TV celebs currently traipsing through the London cast. We already like these people from their television roles so they don’t need to earn our applause as characters. But, on film, it’s a different story. The only way we can like these people is if they entertain us, if they really razzle dazzle. Then, and only then, will we like them enough to make them stars.

Chicago, like Moulin Rouge, has bagged itself a clutch of awards but hasn’t really shattered any box office records and I doubt it will open the flood gates for reviving the genre. The movie musical won’t really get going again unless there are great singers and dancers who can fill our screens with all the joy and brilliance of a Liza, Cyd, Gene or Fred. Meanwhile, the biggest stars of film musicals over the last couple of decades have all come from animated films. So forget Chicago; go and rent South Park – the Movie.

Did Beethoven Write Any Disco?

So asks the composer of Sister Act, Alan Menken, at the end of an interview with Jasper Rees in the Telegraph. And an excellent question it is, too. It puts me in mind of this post by Stephen Fry and the following musical truth:

"You can't dance to Beethoven"

The point being that pop music is meant to be danced to and classical music listened to, give or take. Musical theatre has always existed in a bit of a twilight zone between the two, borrowing happily from both; it is determinedly middlebrow. I'm sure that, had Beethoven ever written any disco, it most certainly have ended up in a musical.

Asking the Important Questions

Charles Spencer gets to the heart of the Andrew Lloyd Webber issue in the Telegraph:

"Could it be he harbours dark erotic fantasies about nuns?"

Which raises other important questions, such as:

"Is Charles Spencer insane?"