There is sometimes a problem with beautiful voices in musicals. So much effort is put into the technical skill that the character and emotion that a song is supposed to have, in order to move the story forward, is drained out.
Part of that is era. A more formal, trained style was considered comfortable when the movie came out in 1962, but less vibrato became the norm just after. We saw the abbreviated version of the show tonight, and the high school girl singing the lead would not get invited to sing a solo concert in a gown. But her job tonight was not to sing a solo concert in a gown, it was to be a young woman in first love. That she accomplished.
I browsed through a half-dozen versions and this came closest.
5 comments:
Another good version: Beatles: ‘Til There Was You.
According to Meredith Wilson's wife, the Beatles cover version made him (and his estate) more in royalties than all productions of The Music Man. The story I found is that they learned it from Peggy Lee's cover (knowing nothing about The Music Man), and it was part of their sets in the Hamburg days.
Dr. Red Guy, that was interesting information about the song. I wondered if some opera singers had recorded it. Eileen Farrell was an opera singer who did a good job of singing pop/jazz. Kiri Te Kanawa was an opera singer who didn't do such a good job of singing pop/jazz. I looked on YouTube for those singers recording 'Til There Was You, but found nothing.
Do all productions of the show agree that Marion (Madame Librarian) Paroo is a young woman in first love?
There would seem to me a case to be made that Marion was a bit more nearly the "older but wiser" girl Professor Hill was expecting of a piano teacher.
She moved to River City, with her mother and brother Winthrop, a few years back. She is fully adult while Winthrop is enough of a child that Marion might -- MIGHT -- be his mother rather than a much older sister. The move might have been part of the family fiction that spared Marion some of the shame of unmarried motherhood. Based on the gossip shared by the little old ladies in "Pick a Little" -- very shortly after Marion moved to town she won the "affections" of a lonely old man; who promptly died and bequeathed all his books to her.
What might change in the tale if Professor Hill is Marion's THIRD great love?
That is gloriously dark!
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