Music Entry: Lonely Town
Sep. 19th, 2006 05:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talktoolooseThis is the first of my music entries. It's going to be a pretty eclectic ride as I jump genres week to week.
The first selection comes from my love of classic Broadway. Leonard Bernstein is one of my favourite composers, although I really like him for earlier works like Wonderful Town and On the Town from which this selection is drawn rather than for West Side Story.
He was abrasive, edgy, lyrical and dreamed big like New York City where his best shows are set. On the Town actually started as a ballet called Fancy Free about three sailors loose in the city for the night. In 1944, with Betty Camden and Adolph Green writing lyrics, book and also acting, Berstein transformed it into a musical with lots of balletic interludes.
The musical is notable for it's brassy war-time attitude. The women are all tough, smart cookies, especially Hildy the taxi driver (a role Lea Delaria played in a revival in 1998). Furthermore, the main love interest was interracial — one of the important points they demolished in the horrible 1949 film version. Curse you, Gene Kelley.
Maybe I'll give you Hildy's "I Can Cook, Too" song another day, but for now I've chosen a lyrical number: Lonely Town. It's a beautiful evocation of the sadness you can feel when you're lost in the crowd and the romance you imagined turns out to be elusive.
The lyric is merely serviceable and doesn't really follow the rise and fall of the big musical phrases, but it's the shifts between major and minor tonality that make the song happen. You learn so much about Gaby here: that he is a man who can feel totally isolated, but one who never gives up hope or his belief that he will find love.
Note on the recording quality: it took 10 years to gather the cast again for a proper cast album, so it benefits from 1950s studio technology.
Lonely Town
The first selection comes from my love of classic Broadway. Leonard Bernstein is one of my favourite composers, although I really like him for earlier works like Wonderful Town and On the Town from which this selection is drawn rather than for West Side Story.
He was abrasive, edgy, lyrical and dreamed big like New York City where his best shows are set. On the Town actually started as a ballet called Fancy Free about three sailors loose in the city for the night. In 1944, with Betty Camden and Adolph Green writing lyrics, book and also acting, Berstein transformed it into a musical with lots of balletic interludes.
The musical is notable for it's brassy war-time attitude. The women are all tough, smart cookies, especially Hildy the taxi driver (a role Lea Delaria played in a revival in 1998). Furthermore, the main love interest was interracial — one of the important points they demolished in the horrible 1949 film version. Curse you, Gene Kelley.
Maybe I'll give you Hildy's "I Can Cook, Too" song another day, but for now I've chosen a lyrical number: Lonely Town. It's a beautiful evocation of the sadness you can feel when you're lost in the crowd and the romance you imagined turns out to be elusive.
The lyric is merely serviceable and doesn't really follow the rise and fall of the big musical phrases, but it's the shifts between major and minor tonality that make the song happen. You learn so much about Gaby here: that he is a man who can feel totally isolated, but one who never gives up hope or his belief that he will find love.
Note on the recording quality: it took 10 years to gather the cast again for a proper cast album, so it benefits from 1950s studio technology.
Lonely Town
