Her voice was gorgeous and the music drew me in completely. I didn't know a lot of the songs she sang, but was intrigued by the stories that they told. As a kid I really loved movie musicals, I remember listening to the soundtracks to Grease and Annie more than I remember seeing the actual movies. But Broadway was a complete unknown to me.
My favorite song from Back to Broadway was a duet with Michael Crawford, "The music of the night." I'm sure that I had heard of Andrew Lloyd Webber and The Phantom of the Opera, but this was the first song I had heard from it and I was quite mesmerized.
[Okay, so in writing this blog I'm adapting something I had written almost a decade ago. I tend to use the stuff I had originally written as a springboard and rewrite. So if something I wrote made me cringe, it usually stays in the past. But it must be noted that at the end of my bit about Back to Broadway and before the bit about Phantom I quoted the following lyrics:
close your eyes
start a journey through a strange new world
leave all thoughts of the world you knew before
close your eyes
let the music set you free...
Right. Cheesy. Let's never speak of it again.]
I soon bought a compilation of Andrew Lloyd Webber music called The Premiere Collection, which opened the floodgates to collecting all the Andrew Lloyd Webber stuff that I could. My very favorite was, of course, The Phantom of the Opera. It was just dark and spooky and wildly romantic enough to be perfect for me. I remember listening to the Sarah Brightman and Cliff Richard version of "All I ask of you" on repeat play. The fact that all of this started to happen during the summer of 1993 was perfect timing, because Phantom was on tour and coming to Miami. I got tickets for my mom and I to see it on November 11, 1993. I found out later that she was really worried that she'd hate it. She loved it. I loved it. It was the beginning of our fandom of musical theatre and over the next few years we would see any Lloyd Webber show that came to South Florida: Cats, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and even got Dave to go with us to see Sunset Boulevard. I don't care what anyone says, I love Sunset Boulevard. We also saw Miss Saigon and of course, eventually, Rent, both on Broadway and on tour. There's something so tremendously exciting about being in the audience for a musical, for any sort of live theatre, actually. It's one of those things that I wish I could have done, being a stage actor. There is an energy, a chemistry between audience and performers, that is unlike anything else I've ever experienced. Raúl Esparza, my future husband, says something that I thought was really profound in the documentary film ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway. He talks about this small chunk of Manhattan, the Theatre District, and about the fact that every night at 8:00 all of these amazing artists are taking the stage, putting on a show and how it's sort of magical.
When I moved to New York in 2005, I never thought I'd be able to afford to see a Broadway show. Luckily, I've gotten to see a few. Most of them were musicals. Some were just spectacles (Wicked). Some of them had bona-fide Broadway Legends (Patti LuPone in Sweeney Todd) or legends-in-the-making (Kristin Chenoweth in The Apple Tree and Audra McDonald in 110 in the Shade). I loved two so much that I saw them twice. (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Sunday in the Park with George) One became my favorite new musical and then disappeared (Grey Gardens). Then there were the plays, which I generally chose for the actor starring in them: Julianne Moore & Bill Nighy in The Vertical Hour, Jane Fonda in 33 Variations, Laura Linney in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Ralph Fiennes & Cherry Jones in Faith Healer, Bradley Whitford in Boeing Boeing, Lee Pace in Guardians and Raúl in Speed-The-Plow.
Regardless of what I'm seeing or the reason why, every time I get to be in the audience for a show, I feel incredibly lucky and completely happy. And all just because I picked up a random Streisand album. When my mom visited around Mother's Day one year, I surprised her with tickets to see Phantom on Broadway. It was such a different experience for me, having gone to these other shows in the city to suddenly be in the Majestic Theatre, which seemed so huge compared to the other theatres I'd been to. The audience was full of tourists wearing t-shirts and shorts and I was astounded to hear people talking through the performance. But even though I'm not the huge Lloyd Webber fan I used to be (I blame discovering Sondheim), I was still hypnotized by the show, the grandeur of the sets - the spectacle. More importantly, my mom was thrilled. I think it's the best gift I've ever given her.
Along with discovering musicals, I was also inspired by Back to Broadway to listen to more Streisand. When I go for something, I tend to go completely, so the next thing I bought was the box set, Just For The Record.... It was a fantastic way to introduce myself to her older music and it guided me towards her early career, when she sang standards and still had a sense of fun to her music. Not to mention leading me to finding one of my all-time favorite films, What's Up, Doc?, a screwball comedy she starred in with Ryan O'Neal and my beloved Madeline Kahn. I even ended up converting my dad into a Streisand lover and whenever we take road trips, her CDs are a must-hear. The studio recordings she's made since Back to Broadway has felt a bit stuffy, too serious. It's only in the live ones that her sense of humor tends to peek out. But let's not even mention Meet the Fockers.
No comments:
Post a Comment