December 16, 2018

"all musicals sound like this to me."

19 comments:

mezzrow said...

grunge version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD9Cf39mUE

rehajm said...

Heh. Apparently it's not just sitcoms that have a formula.

I might pay to see that one.

Amadeus 48 said...

This Is The Song That Sounds Like This.

Rogers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Lowe never put out junk like this, nor did Frank Loesser or Kander and Ebb or Rogers and Hart, or, hell, even Brecht and Weill.

Sondheim sort of does, but really we are looking at what happened when the Disney Machine took over stage musicals.

Temujin said...

He's spot on. It started a number of years ago. Didn't used to be like this. See Amadeus 48's comments above.

Temujin said...

This guy is pretty funny. Summary of It's a Wonderful Life

Yancey Ward said...

I have never been a fan of musicals of any kind- not even classical opera- but there is no question that modern ones really do suck for the most part, both musically and lyrically.

Wince said...

"all musicals sound like this to me."

Curb the homophobia, pal.

tcrosse said...

William Goldman wrote 'The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway' about the 1967-68 Broadway season. Current reviews on Amazon call it an anti-gay hate-crime of a book Plus ça change.

Wince said...

I wonder if you could do this with a David Brooke's editorial. It would certainly portend the early introduction of AI into opinion writing.

1.) Establish your own superiority of intellect, clarity and morality amidst the squalor of conservative circles.

2.) Harshly judge a conservative from afar and impute their thoughts if not actions to impure motives.

3.) Identify a victim or class of victims.

4.) Frame it as a morality tale.

rcocean said...

The new Disney movies of the 1990s had these kind of broadway show tunes junk.

And 90% of the songs sound like that.

Carol said...

Hahaha. Yes, the postmodern musical...melodic stuff is so patriarchal! Ablest! Elitist!

Not to mention good lyrics.

chuck said...

> Sondheim sort of does

Sort of? Sort of? How about "invented this crap".

tim in vermont said...

The thing about Hamilton was not that it was great, but that it was minimally good. The material was America affirming, the production good. George III gets spoofed. It wasn't about gays.

whitney said...

He has a nice voice

bwebster said...

This Is The Song That Sounds [Goes] Like This

Amadeus 48 beat me to it. Saw "Spamalot" on Broadway twice, and that song always cracked me up.

https://youtu.be/Js-6Lx-SZso

CWJ said...

'Sort of? Sort of? How about "invented this crap".'

Unless you mean everyone after him tried to (unsucsessfully) copy him, you really don't get Sondheim. But to each his own.

Douglas B. Levene said...

Let's face it, Andrew Lloyd Weber murdered the musical as a form of entertainment. Original music, catchy tunes that you might sing to yourself? Fuggetaboutit.

Joe said...

"Rogers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Lowe never put out junk like this,"

Perhaps not like that, but they did writer plenty of stinkers.

stevew said...

Nailed it.