Good morning, all! I stayed up too late to watch the cast of ONCE on Letterman; the show ends at 12:37, and the ONCE number happened around 12:33! While I waited I leafed through BK's new memoir and had a huge nostalgia trip looking at all the photos! There I am, in my Alice In Wonderland t-shirt, and it brought back so many memories. I look forward to reading it. I will most likely begin it tonight.
Today, I have laundry first thing, and then I need to hear the 4th Disc master before I can get into my continued search for a young Brit to play Captain Harry Tryon, our juvenle.
PIPE DREAM vs ME AND JULIET: I loved M&J as a kid, but I think a lot of it was my curiosity on how the set moved from stage to light booth, to dressing rooms. The book's a complete mess with a musical at its core making absolutely no sense, and I now find Joan McCracken, as I do in everything she recorded, a horror to listen to. The score to PIPE DREAM has grown on me, but I think R&H were the wrong writers for gritty derelicts and skid row whores, no matter how whimsical Steinbeck's characters might be. Could a new book fix the problem? I think it would probably point out further the split between the songs and the reality of the characters. Loesser succeeds completely in GUYS & DOLLS, but it's a complete cartoon. PIPE DREAM isn't, and it's hard to tell from what's onstage at City Center if R&H were trying to write like G&D. I think the score is too moving at times for the silliness and flimsiness of the story, and, when the score gets silly, it doesn't always succeed: "We Are A Gang Of Witches" is a bad song, right up there with most of the bad songs in ME & JULIET. But, when the silliness is good - "A Lopsided Bus," the calypso of "The Bum's Opera" - I think Rodgers is writing better for the show than Hammerstein does. But, then, Rodgers had already done one great show about gritty characters and the seamier aside of show biz, PAL JOEY.
TOD:
DVD: three Netflix including "My Week With Marilyn"
CD: Herbert songs, PIPE DREAM, ONCE, Offenbach, Guy Haines
VCR: oy!