As the most devoted fans of musicals will tell you, the best way to appreciate a musical is probably to listen to its cast album (click here to check out my BroadwayRadio colleague Michael Portantiere’s site “Cast Album Reviews”). It’s often easier to hear the lyrics and the melodic references on a recording than it is while watching a show live in the theater. Plus you can enjoy the score as many times as you want without having to pay a fortune.
The second best way may be to attend a concert version of a show. Stripping away the sets, costumes and choreography—and more recently, the video projections—can make it easier to engage with the music, particularly when it’s performed by brilliant singers.
Attending both the Encores! production of Titanic that is finishing up its two-week run at City Center this weekend and Follies in Concert, the one-night event at Carnegie Hall this past Thursday, reminded me of just how big a treat a concert version of a musical can be—and also suggested how they might provide a solution to some of the problems now plaguing the revivals of old shows.
Putting on a terrific concert, complete with the gratifying sound of a full 30-piece orchestra, was the original concept of the Encores! series, which is now in its 30th year of showcasing seldom-revived shows. Those productions have become more elaborate over the years but director Anne Kauffman’s current staging of Titanic reverts back to the series’ roots.
There are costumes in this Titanic and a hint of a set but Kauffman keeps the focus solidly on Maury Yeston’s glorious score. And that’s a good thing because book writer Peter Stone crowded so many storylines into his telling of the infamous 1912 ship sinking that it's hard to connect with most of the characters.
Yeston’s songs fill in what the dialog fails to get across. Solos offer glimpses into the lives that will eventually be lost. And the big choral anthems, whose stirring orchestrations won Jonathan Tunick a Tony back in 1997, convey the hubristic optimism everyone aboard felt about the maiden voyage of the ship they believed indestructible.
As usual, the playing by the Encores! orchestra, once again conducted by Rob Berman, is a pleasure unto itself. And also as usual, the cast is filled with major talents even in some of the smallest roles (yes, that’s Adam Chanler-Berat as one of the ship’s officers and Lilli Cooper as a third-class passenger) all of them singing the hell out of the material they’ve been given.
There was similar hell-raising at Carnegie Hall, where another star-studded cast performed the songs from Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s 1971 homage to the musical revues of the vaudeville era.
The event, which also served as a fundraiser for the Transport Group—the company’s artistic director Jack Cummings III directed the production—was a true concert, with the performers taking on songs instead of roles and appearing in their own clothes (part of the fun was seeing who wore what).
Ted Chapin, the author of “Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies,” and Kurt Peterson, one of the show’s original cast members, served as emcees, chiming in with behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the original production and setting the scene for each musical number.
The folks in the sold-out audience had clearly heard the stories before and needed no context for this cult favorite but cheered them anyway. And they went crazy for the performances, even when the orchestra, under the baton of Joey Chancey, sometimes threatened to overpower the singers.
Although not all of them. Norm Lewis and Nikki Renée Daniels were commandingly magnificent in the poignant duet “Too Many Mornings” and Jennifer Holliday’s rendition of “I’m Still Here" brought the crowd to its feet.
And that’s another benefit of these concerts: they provide an opportunity for performers who wouldn’t have had the chance to take on such roles back in the day to do them now without having to, say, justify why a black woman could have been a leading showgirl in the all-white chorus lines of the 1920s. Or, in the case of Titanic, how an African-American got to captain the ship as Chuck Cooper does in this current production.
Instead, they can just sing and we can just enjoy.
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