| Monday, July 09, 2007 |
| Assassination vacation |
A few years ago, after seeing the animated movie musical "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut," I walked out of the theater humming one of the score's catchiest songs. I won't mention the title here, because it is incredibly obscene. If you saw it, though, you undoubtedly know the one I mean. As melodic as that song was, it would be incredibly embarrassing to be caught singing those lyrics in public.
Stephen Sondheim's musical "Assassins" also has some catchy tunes in its score, and if you sang them aloud, you might just find a Secret Service man on your doorstep one of these days: " If you can shoot a president, you can get the prize. C'mere and kill a president!"
"Assassins" is kind of a strange play -- not a lot of sympathetic characters, after all. The idea of all the presidential assassins past & present converging on stage to talk and sing is what you might call an unlikely subject for musical theater. Not surprisingly, it wasn't a huge success; its 2004 Broadway version won five Tonys, but closed after just 101 performances.
The Custom Made Theater Company is currently presenting what it refers to on its web site as "Assassins'" "San Francisco professional premiere," which makes me wonder if, say, a local high school drama class beat them to the punch (what 15-year-old doesn't dream of someday portraying Charles Guiteau?). Custom Made does have a couple Equity actors in the "Assassins" company, but as is often the case with tiny theaters like this one (its Off-Market Theater has just 70 seats), the quality of the acting was rather inconsistent. One of the performers in particular was a weak link in the show; I'm not going to name names, since you have to admire the gung-ho spirit of any company putting on an ambitious show like "Assassins" on a shoestring budget and I don't want to be churlish. Joe and I both agreed that the scarily charismatic Molly Coogan, who played would-be Ford assailant Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, was the standout in the cast. Not only was she a dynamite singer, she really had that glazed, insane look of love in her eyes when she talked about her darling "Charlie" (Manson).
On to music that's not about killing presidents: one of the interesting things about iTunes is that it keeps track of exactly how many times you listen to every song in your playlist, which can be informative (why do I never make it all the way through that Neutral Milk Hotel album?) and/or embarrassing (I've listened to Morningwood's "Nth Degree" how many times?). Most of the iTunes stuff has been downloaded from eMusic; sometimes I rip my CDs, other times I just listen to them on my stereo. So it's hard to get an exact count of what my most-played music is. I would venture to guess that I've given the most spins so far this year to Fujiya & Miyagi's Transparent Things CD, which isn't the sort of thing I normally listen to (dance music!), but I really, really love it. It's very Krautrock-y -- despite the name, F&M are an English band, not Japanese. Their new single "Uh" is posted on this MP3 blog, and it sounds, well, pretty much exactly like Transparent Things, down to the "taka-taka-boom-chik"s. If you like "Uh," you'll probably want to pick up the CD (not available on eMusic, unfortunately); if not, well, F&M probably aren't for you.
My most-played album on iTunes, as proven by the hard numerical evidence, is Spoon's A Series of Sneaks -- I know it's almost 10 years old, but I just bought it on eMusic this year, so I was late to the party. It's a brief (just over 30 minutes) album and rather fragmented; a lot of the songs are under the two-minute mark, and you kind of wonder if the band just got bored and didn't feel like finishing them. It took me a few plays to warm up to the album, but now it seems perfect just the way it is. Plus, since I still never stop mourning the break-up of Pavement, "Advance Cassette" sounds so much like that band that hearing it for the first time was like discovering a great lost Pavement track. Since the bands were active at the same time, I wonder if it's a purposeful homage. Apparently Sneaks was originally released by major label Elektra, sold miserably, and the band was given the boot shortly thereafter. It really says something about the 90s and the aftermath of Nirvana's success that such an aggressively low-fi, uncommercial album was put out by a major at all. At this point I feel so attached to Sneaks that I haven't downloaded any of their other stuff for fear that it would disappoint, but if any Spoon partisans want to suggest a worthy follow-up, go for it. |
posted by 125records @ 5:13 PM  |
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| 7 Comments: |
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Hi Sue! Glad to see you made it back from Jamaica in one piece! It was great meeting you in NYC, if only briefly ...
Anyway, I want to slightly hijack your post, since you talk about being compelled to sing lyrics from Assassins that will get you put into Gitmo, to ask: why don't contemporary musicals have particularly memorable songs anymore? I feel like most musicals made after, say, 1985 sound pretty much alike. All the songs are like "I am SINGing my DIaLOG" but they don't stick with you.
Not that I see tons of contemporary musical theater, but I recently saw Wicked and was disappointed on a number of levels -- I loved how dark and political the book was, but a lot of that got washed out in the play. But its worst sin was having unmemorable songs. Even the number I liked best, the one where the Wizard sings about how if enough people tell you you're wonderful, you start to believe it, I literally was not able to reproduce as we were walking back to our car from the theater. Say what you will about Andrew Lloyd Weber (and I usualy don't have anything nice to say about him) but right now off the top of my head I could hum a few bars of tunes from Jesus Christ Superstar (which I saw years ago) or Cats )which I've never seen).
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Three great musicals with memorable soundtracks we've seen in recent years: HEDWIG & THE ANGRY INCH, URINETOWN, and AVENUE Q. Even GREY GARDENS has "The Revolutionary Costume For Today" (shame it's closing!)
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Josh: For sure, you must go see "Avenue Q." I'll bet you a Hands Across America T-shirt that you'll go around the house for at least a week afterwards singing "The Internet Is For Porn."
"The internet is really really great... FOR PORN! Why you think the net was born? Porn porn porn!"
Damn, I'm so tempted to shell out $90/ticket so I can see it again when it opens in San Francisco next month...
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Oh, man, I totally forgot about Hedwig; it is great. It's so its own thing that I don't really think of it as a musical, though that's of course what it is.
I definitely want to see Avenue Q and Urinetown. I think touring productions of both came and went here in Baltimore and I missed them...
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The new Spoon album, Ga(5x) was added to emusic yesterday. I think Girls Can Tell (their first post-Sneaks album) is their best one.
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I saw Assassins on Broadway with Doogie Howser in it. It was very good. I'm impressed I talked my wife into seeing a Sondheim musical about killing presidents. I'm may never pull that off again.
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Hey Sue! I just checked out F & M. They sound a little like Roxy Music. "Uh" sounds kind of like "Love is Drug." Fun!
I wish Bryan Ferry's new record wasn't Dylan covers. I have heard those songs really a lot...
shalini
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Hi Sue! Glad to see you made it back from Jamaica in one piece! It was great meeting you in NYC, if only briefly ...
Anyway, I want to slightly hijack your post, since you talk about being compelled to sing lyrics from Assassins that will get you put into Gitmo, to ask: why don't contemporary musicals have particularly memorable songs anymore? I feel like most musicals made after, say, 1985 sound pretty much alike. All the songs are like "I am SINGing my DIaLOG" but they don't stick with you.
Not that I see tons of contemporary musical theater, but I recently saw Wicked and was disappointed on a number of levels -- I loved how dark and political the book was, but a lot of that got washed out in the play. But its worst sin was having unmemorable songs. Even the number I liked best, the one where the Wizard sings about how if enough people tell you you're wonderful, you start to believe it, I literally was not able to reproduce as we were walking back to our car from the theater. Say what you will about Andrew Lloyd Weber (and I usualy don't have anything nice to say about him) but right now off the top of my head I could hum a few bars of tunes from Jesus Christ Superstar (which I saw years ago) or Cats )which I've never seen).