Song Of The Day: March 12, 2018

Filed in Arts and Entertainment by on March 12, 2018

Hey, it’s my Birthday Week, and I’m gonna celebrate it with some Stephen Sondheim.  He’s on my Musical Mount Rushmore.  I’ve perhaps spent more time listening to Sondheim than any other artist.  And I still hear new stuff whenever I listen. In this gorgeous song from a made-for-British-TV production, ‘Evening Primrose’, a store mannequin briefly comes to life, and discovers the world outside the dress shop.  Here, she (or, in this case, Dianne Reeves) tries to recapture every detail of that experience:

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  1. Alby says:

    One thing you won’t hear, no matter how much you listen, is a melody.

  2. nathan arizona says:

    Don’t listen to Alby on this. He just doesn’t understand.

  3. bamboozer says:

    Sorry, I hear a melody, the piano player nails the “hang in the air” sparseness that I love and the vocals are on the money. Don’t know all that much about Sondheim but I like this.

  4. Alby says:

    Sure, technically there’s a melody. Just try humming it.

    I understand perfectly. Sondheim — taking musical theater where it shouldn’t have bothered to go, and doing it in meandering, tuneless style.

    He’s a highbrow version of Rod McKuen.

  5. Mike Dinsmore says:

    Feliz cumpleanos, El Somnambulo! Don’t forget Hurray for the Riff Raff on April 16th.

  6. Ben says:

    SOMEBODY has to write musicals for musicians 😉 Alby, i feel like you’d at least get a kick out of Assassins. He even throws in a few catchy ear-worm melodies just to show he can if he wants to.

  7. Alby says:

    Having never seen a Sondheim musical in the theater, I can’t really give him a fair shake. I don’t really mind him, but most of his music leaves no impression on me. Just dense, I suppose, or more likely too insensitive to get it. If I only had a heart…

  8. Something tells me we’ll be hearing from Assassins before the week is out.

    I was listening to the book writer John Weidman talking about what the assassins had in common, that sense of entitlement/failure and that their failure was always somebody else’s fault. And I thought, he’s talking about Trump, even though he wasn’t.

    I think Alby might like Assassins as well. IMHO, it’s a brilliant work of art. At the least, he’d enjoy the part where the eternally-optimistic Balladeer (Neil Patrick Harris) gets kicked off stage as the assassins sing ‘Another National Anthem’. “The mailman won the lottery” indeed.

  9. Peter Briccotto says:

    Great choice! American’s Musical Theatre Genius. Maybe not the most enjoyable, but the most brilliant.

  10. nathan arizona says:

    “Assassins” is based on the idea behind a musical by Wilmington’s Charlie Gilbert, who gets a credit.