Honorable mentions: “There Are Worse Things I Could Do,” “Mooning” Grease is, for a musical with only three important characters, maybe a little crowded with looks to Frenchie or Kenickie or Doody. What matters most in Grease are the presumed tough guy who ain’t really so tough, the nice girl who lives to preserve his… Read More Songs from Musicals: #30, “Those Magic Changes,” from Grease
Honorable mentions: “Il Mondo Era Vuoto,” “The Light in the Piazza” If I were a braver man, I would have picked one of the several songs in Italian from this show, but that might have been almost prohibitively difficult to work with. There will not be a sequel to this series about opera, that’s for… Read More Songs from Musicals: #31, “Say It Somehow,” from The Light in the Piazza
Honorable mentions: “Something Good,” “Edelweiss” The Sound of Music, your mother’s and my mother’s favorite musical. I think as soon as a woman with kids turns forty – maybe even thirty-five – she gravitates inexorably towards the Julie Andrews film, which won Best Picture a year after #33, four years after #43, and seven years… Read More Songs from Musicals: #32, “The Sound of Music,” from “The Sound of Music”
Honorable mentions: “The Rain in Spain,” “With a Little Bit of Luck” Times have changed, as we mentioned a few posts back, and one of the changes that I find most curious in our expectations for films is that everyone should be able to do everything for the parts they play. Remember when it came out that… Read More Songs from Musicals: #33, “On the Street Where You Live,” from My Fair Lady
Honorable mentions: “The Ballad of Czolgosz,” “Unworthy of Your Love” My history teachers from my junior and senior year of high school liked to take the last ten minutes or so of Friday’s class and give a “GIQ,” or “General Information Quiz.” The ten questions were mostly current events, although some involved vague pop culture,… Read More Songs from Musicals: #34, “Another National Anthem,” from Assassins
Honorable mentions: “New Ways to Dream,” “This Time Next Year” Like Jeremy Jordan, Sunset Blvd (as I’m going to call it to avoid confusion) has gotten thorough treatment on this blog in the recent past. And while Sunset Blvd and Sunset Boulevard aren’t the same thing at all, they are devilish close. One occasionally wonders how Don Black and Christopher… Read More Songs from Musicals: #35 “The Greatest Star of All,” from Sunset Boulevard
Honorable mentions: “Mama, I’m a Big Girl Now,” “Good Morning, Baltimore” If I went to middle school with you, and you happen to be reading this, it is probably your fault that it took me until high school to form a genuine interest in musicals. There were, in those days, two musicals that everyone between… Read More Songs from Musicals: #36, “Run and Tell That,” from Hairspray
Honorable mentions: “Roxie,” “Mr. Cellophane” Did somebody say “period comedy involving murder?” Chicago and Sweeney Todd are not exactly the same musical, but golly, they are close. The difference is Foucault: while the harsh sexual standards elide any real sex from Sweeney Todd, there’s also significantly more sexual freedom for characters like Todd and Mrs. Lovett to… Read More Songs from Musicals: #37, “We Both Reached for the Gun,” from Chicago
Honorable mentions: “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir,” “A Little Priest” This is an admittedly weird song to pick, one of the first to get cut from the average production. Sweeney Todd is more than strange, though: it’s a class-conscious comedy about a serial killer and his lover, who takes the bodies and puts them into her all-the-rage meat… Read More Songs from Musicals: #38, “Parlor Songs,” from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Honorable mentions: meh The premise of Love Never Dies is, at best, distasteful: a decade after the events of The Phantom of the Opera, we find out that the Phantom has escaped to Coney Island, where Raoul and Christine show up, and we are treated to a sermon about which man Christine should have chosen. I don’t believe… Read More Songs from Musicals: #39, “Til I Hear You Sing,” from Love Never Dies
Seeing Things Secondhand 