Good Songs in Otherwise Bad/Mediocre Musicals - Page 2

Biggest problem with SOM is that not much actually happens onstage: it's scene after scene of someone talking about what they have done or want to do, the conditions in the country, etc.

For all its over-familiarity, though, it is a great score.

You have 3 wishes; if I had, say, 10, #7 would be to go back and bang SoM-era Julie Andrews.

Some of the best parts of My Fair Lady are in the post-race scene part of the movie. "Show Me," "Get me to the Church on Time," and "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" are all after that scene.

The awesomeness of Stanley Holloway must not be denied.

I'm not sure what the status of the musical version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips is, but I can't get "You and I" and "Walk Through The World" out of my head.

"Defying Gravity" sounds like it should be the theme to a low-rent 80s inspirational sports movie.

This topic begins with "Seasons of Love" and ends with "I Won't Say I'm In Love" from Hercules.

While, empirically speaking, she's an attractive woman, somehow the terms "bang" and "Julie Andrews" just don't sit that well together.

Also, the correct answer is "Mary Poppins Julie Andrews."

While those are 3 great songs, Dickson is still right. I show My Fair Lady to my mythology class when we do Pygmalion, and after that horse race I keep checking my watch thinking, 'Surely this will end soon.' It never does though... and then when it ends, I am taken by surprise because the end comes together and cuts to title card so quickly.

I like the movie and love the songs, but it just keeps going after the horse race.

Yeah, those are good songs, but that part of the film still feels very slow and drawn out to me.

A better answer is "Americanization of Emily Julie Andrews".

With all the love that Helen Mirren gets, no one would make sweet love (soothing Tommy Five-tone's conscience) to modern day Julie Andrews? I mean she is making horrible movies with the Rock, but she seems to have aged well.

Schwartz's orchestrations are perpetually stuck around 1987. The use of synths in that song especially.

From the neck down, Mirren has a better body than most twenty-somethings and hasn't aged that much from the neck up. Julie Andrews, on the hand, looks good for her age but not to the point of defying the aging process.

If you legitimately want to fuck Jule Andrews circa 2010, I think you need to be barred from being within fifty feet of retirement facilities.

For me personally, this thread starts and ends with The Bells Of Notra Dame - that's the best musical number never sung on a stage ever.

The rest of the films passable, but that number is soul-swellingly brilliant.

The reprise at the end is pretty great too.

Speaking of Schwartz, the only worthwhile song in Godspell is Turn Back, O Man. Fuck Day By Day in the ear!

The dichotomy is why the wish is fan-fucking-tastic.

Not a huge fan of his in general, with one particular caveat:

If you've never seen or heard his Children of Eden, don't. Save it. If you watch it now (on stage-- it's never been filmed, to my knowledge), it'll come off as a ragged, choppy piece with little coherence to the musical numbers; a sort of Biblical Godspell / Joseph knockoff about parents and children.

Then, when you have a teenager ready to go out into the world, it will work on your heart like a vise.

I produced the show a few years ago; all I knew at the time was that I'd listened to it once, and pretty much filed and forgotten it.

But our production was mostly high school kids, lots of juniors and seniors making their decisions about college, or getting ready to head off (the show was produced in late summer), including my daughter (who was the stage manager).

And I could barely make it through rehearsals some nights. When we went into performance, audiences (including, of course, the parents of those kids) were weeping by the end of Act One, much less the show's finale.

Granted, we had some extraordinary kids in the cast (many of them are already working professionally), and the show's message about the need to let your kids go can feel trite and overdone when you read it from afar, but when you're approaching that time of letting go, it can be pretty devastating.

I don't particularly hate Godspell, but I've never seen a production of it that didn't have my mind wandering after about half an hour or so: I just don't think there's much there.

EDIT: Actually, I don't why this wasn't the first thing I thought of when this thread started: Pippin. "Magic To Do" is a great opening number, and the rest of the show is a massive snoozefest.

The German stage show kills Esmerelda, and there's no Quasimodo being embraced by everyone at the end, but it still uses the reprise from the film.

It also uses "Someday", the song that was cut from the film but which survived as scoring throughout. Esmerelda sings it as she's being tied to the stake for her execution, and it gets a big reprise towards the end of the show.

Oh, I agree, I was just mentioning how it was used with the sadder ending of the stage show.

I think the company that had no qualms about killing Bambi's mother and Simba's father should have had the guts to let Esmerelda die. Quasimodo doesn't need to step outside Notre Dame to have a victory in that story.

Here's the opening number. If you look at more from that user, she's got a bunch of other songs from the show uploaded.

Let's not forget, Schwartz gave us Savages, which is both the worst song in the modern Disney canon and also has the single worst line in the modern Disney canon (i.e., the "they should have known better" era):

"They're not like you and me, which means they must be evil!"

And for that, he cannot be forgiven. But Pocahontas is probably the worst of the recent Disneys. I don't mean to get all hyperbolic about a kid's film here, but it's a pretty reprehensible movie in my eyes. The movie basically tells its young viewers that -- rather than being systemic and far-reaching -- racism and prejudice and genocide often boil down to the fault of one greedy guy, and removing said greedy guy from the equasion means that all is well. I'm not saying that Pocahontas should have been grim 'n' gritty, but it should have been a little more honest. (See also: Ferngully) The earlier live-action "Squanto: A Warrior's Tale" does a good job of that, if I remember right.

Prince of Egypt's pretty amazing, though. I'd love for that crew to reunite for an adaptation of the first part of Christopher Moore's Lamb.

I hate to say it, but I don't really think it's that company anymore.

...and Simbas dad came back as a ghost.

Schwartz and the soundtrack from Pocahontas get amount of goodwill from me just on the basis of how much that movie infuriates American Indian Studies grad students who take themselves way, way too seriously. My friend has this roommate who turns every fucking thing imaginable into a discussion about Western hegemonic discourses and nothing gave me more joy than belting out "Colors of the Wind" halfway through her latest diatribe, which made her extremely angry and got a good laugh out of everyone else.

I've only seen Pocahontas once, which tells you what kind of impression it left on me. I do like "Colors of the Wind" though (the film version, not the Vanessa Williams version).

Prince of Egypt isn't bad -- the Angel of Death sequence is particularly well done.

The American Indian Studies grad students have a point, though.

The parting of the Red Seas is great in Prince of Egypt, too, and there's some great voice work. Fiennes, Kilmer, Stewart, Pfeiffer, all solid. And it's one of the few animated movies I can think of that has Jeff Goldblum in it, which automatically makes it awesome. ("God? When did, ah, God start caring about any us? In fact...when did YOU, Moses, start caring about slaves? Was it, ah, when you realized you were one of us?")

I'll go so far as to say it should never have been given the Disney animated musical treatment in the first place Rath. A fucking appalling and offensive film. Well said too by the way.

I would love to live in a parallel universe where Prince Of Egypt did good enough box office that it was given the stage musical Lion King treatment.

...but I love the shit out of Prince Of Egypt.

I wouldn't say I love the shit out of it, but PoE does get credit for not shying away from the religious aspect of the story.

More than that, Richard, it gets much credit for placing that religious aspect firmly in Judaism than Christianity.

Is there much of a difference between how Jews present the Pentateuch and how Christians do?

Correct - AND the voice work is awesome - AND the songs are fantastic - AND the animation is beautiful.

It's a triple win for me - I rate it alongside the best of animated musicals easily.

That song isn't helped by it being Steve Martin and Martin Short singing it. It needed to be more sinister, and it's a little too Disney-cute for my tastes.

I honestly think that Playing With The Big Boys is the weakest of the films songs personally - because as Rich so rightly puts it, it's the most cutesie 'Disneyesque' of the films numbers.

Now Deliver Us, All I Ever Wanted , Through Heavens Eyes and The Plagues on the other hand, are simply some of my favorite musical numbers of all time - and to me have the feel of the best stage musicals about them.

Not necessarily, but Pesach (Passover), represented by the Exodus in the film, is arguably the most important holiday in Judaism. It's been a while since I saw the film, but I would argue that Prince of Egypt presents the story in a more Judeo-centric way than other depictions of the Exodus, from the presentation of the Jewish characters with Semitic (though not sterotypical) features, to the use of Hebrew in the songs and speech, and the fact that the film's climax is the parting of the red sea and the Exodus, rather than the giving of the ten commandments (though that's touched upon at the end).

The use of Israeli vocalists as well as hebrew is a beautiful touch that gives wonderful sonic depth to some of the numbers. Some of the soaring Israeli vocals in many of the songs (Ofra Haza's work in Deliver Us in particular) make the hair on the back of my neck stand up every time as well.

I think we can all agree tho the commercial single version of When You Believe is utterly fucking excerable.

All the vocal work is pretty fantastic - yep even Bullock.

Again, I reckon it deserved the Broadway/West End treatment myself and I'd love to see it get re-assessed and appreciated now that some time has passed. It's only crime was that it came at the end of a very long glut of animated musicals and people were basically over them by that stage.

The feature on the DVD that shows the many different versions of When You Believe being sung in different languages is goose-bump inducing, though. Really wish they'd released that as a single.

The song itself is utterly beautiful (the sense of joy in the herbrew bridge in the middle leading up to the full cast singing the chorus puts a lump in my throat), it's just hair-tearing that Dreamworks felt the need to ruin the single by having Mariah and Whitney murder it. Such a crime.

Wait! What? There's at least eight...no...wait...nine things wrong with that.

There are, however, a couple of collections of J-pop bands doing Disney covers that are kind of awesome. There's one of "Part of Your World" by this guy Susuki and the Sunesmith (sp) that makes that song sound like Ben Folds and the Cheers Theme together...as sung by a Japanese guy. It's pretty great.

Also, "Stay Awake."

Craig Ferguson had a great moment in a monologue a year or so ago: I don't remember exactly where he started (probably something to do with music), but by the end, he's yelling into the camera "Kids of America-- wake up! The Jonas Brothers suck!!! Jonas Brothers--- YOU SUCK!!!"