Month: July 2019

Mandy Patinken is in many ways the Michael Bolton of the Broadway Musical scene. In both cases, the singers are acknowledged even by most of their detractors to have fine voices, but their sometimes frighteningly hammy performance style causes them to get wildly polarized reactions: people either love them or run screaming from the room every time they are played.

For those who are novices to the subject and might be outraged at the comparison I just made, the similarities become a lot clearer on Patinken’s albums than they are in his actual Broadway work. Apart from the LaChiusa Wild Party and the Concert cast of Follies, Patinken usually tones down his trademark mannerisms in his actual Broadway shows…this is particularly true of his two most famous roles in Evita and Sunday in the Park with George. But on his own albums, he tends to let the crazy out, and perhaps no album epitomizes his sheer Mandy-ness as much as this one. The album alternates between slow, drawn-out, almost lugubrious legato singing, wildly hyperactive patter sections and flat-out insane screaming. So if that doesn’t sound like your idea of a good time, this album is probably not for you. If, however, you’re one of the faithful (like me), by all means read on, because I’ve got a treat for you.

This album is the perfect illustration of how to build a true Concept Album entirely out of pre-existing songs. This practice used to be quite common…indeed, when Frank Sinatra essentially invented the Concept Album, this was the approach he used…but it has fallen to the wayside in these singer-songwriter-dominated days. This album is far more than just a standard songwriter anthology…it’s a single unified whole, almost one continuous song, with most of the tracks flowing directly into the next without a break. To illustrate the extent of this, the album was recorded before a live audience, and there are a total of maybe five tracks with applause on them, simply because those are the only places where Patinken stopped singing long enough to allow for it.

I’d argue that of all the Sondheim anthologies I’ve ever heard (and this includes the famous ones that have actually played Broadway, like Side By Side By Sondheim or Putting It Together), this one encapsulates the scope of the man’s artistry better than any other. This is partly becausePatinken sings it like a manic-depressive lunatic, which is exactly the perspective Sondheim generally writes from, but there are certainly other factors.

For one thing, the album frames the entire catalogue with the one Sondheim show Patinken actually appeared in on Broadway, Sunday in the Park with George, beginning and ending with the opening and closing lines of that show. Beyond being something of an obvious choice for Patinken, this has significance because, while Sondheim has never admitted this, the 20^thCentury descendant of George Seurat who is the focus of Sunday’s second act is quite obviously an author avatar for Sondheim himself.

The album focuses primarily on the first eight of Sondheim’s ten peak-period shows. There are only three selections from his Sixties Broadway productions, one from each of the three (“Free” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, “Everybody Says Don’t” from Anyone Can Whistle, and “Take the Moment” from the Richard Rodgers collaboration Do I Hear a Waltz?, the only song here not written solely by Sondheim). Oddly enough, the obscure television musical Evening Primrose gets two selections here (“If You Can Find Me, I’m Here” and “When?”), although given that Patinken was the first to make that score available on recording back in 1990, that’s probably not too terribly surprising.

There is also one song from the Dick Tracy film included (interestingly, Patinken opted here for “Live Alone and Like It” rather than the song he himself had performed in the film, “What Can You Lose?”). For some reason, nothing from the last two shows of Sondheim’s peak era, Assassinsor Passion, was included. Granted, the songs in Assassins are probably too situation-specific for this album’s purposes, but it seems a shame to exclude Passion, as songs like “Happiness”, “I Wish I Could Forget You”, and “Loving You” would have been natural choices for this kind of project. Perhaps Patinken simply saw them as too obvious, given that Passion is already structured in much the same way as this album.

As the album’s neurotic torment gradually seems to grow quieter and more peaceful over the course of the second disc, culminating in an exquisitely gentle solo rendition of the central chorus number “Sunday” from Sunday in the Park with George, it feels like the climax to a hard-won journey toward inner peace. And the closing lines of the album…the same as the lines that close Sunday’s second act…have never sounded as much like Sondheim’s personal credo as they do here: “White—a blank page or canvas. His favorite. So many possibilities”. If you are looking for a way to get the full impact of the Sondheim experience without actually listening to his entire catalogue of cast albums, then, 1. Why? but 2. This album is probably your best bet. And even if you’re not looking for that kind of shortcut, or have already heard the catalogue of works in question, this album is well worth hearing just to further refine your understanding of both of the artists involved.

In 1999 and 2002, Liza Minnelli performed a pair of one-woman concert shows in Broadway and West End theaters. Both were recorded as live albums, and they form a fascinating pair of opposites…the low point and the high point in the autumn of a musical legend’s career.

In theory, 1999’s Minnelli On Minnelli sounded like a great idea for a show—Liza Minnelli performing a tribute to her father, the great Hollywood director Vincente Minnelli, made up entirely of songs from his many classic musical movies. But due to a combination of unfortunate factors, the end result turned out to be one of the biggest embarrassments of Liza’s career.

This is particularly odd because Minnelli is especially famous for her spectacularly great live albums. In fact, the best albums of her career other than her Broadway cast albums and the Cabaret soundtrack are all live albums…the London Palladium concert with her mother, the Winter Garden album, the Carnegie Hall recording, Liza With a Z…the list goes on and on. But this is easily the worst live album Minnelli ever made (trust me, I own all of them). The entire show and the recording it left behind is just a sad spectacle all around, and one of the few blemishes on a truly great performer’s otherwise illustrious career.

First of all, she’s in absolutely terrible voice here…she sounds like she has a severe sore throat and can’t seem to catch her breath. On top of that, she slurs her speech so much that she sounds like a stereotypical drunk in a bad comedy (her version of “Taking a Chance on Love” is particularly problematic in this regard; it’s become something of a running joke among those who know this album to refer to it as “Chakin’ a Shansh on Love”). For all I know, given the well-known problems she’s had with substance abuse, she may actually have been drunk on stage. To be honest, I actually hope she was, because frankly, I don’t want to live in a world where a legend like Liza Minnelli could give a performance this bad sober.

This wasn’t just an issue of one unluckily-timed bad performance on the night the recording was made, since album was recorded over two nights and she sounds pretty much the same throughout. And you can’t blame it purely on her advancing age, either…obviously her voice wasn’t going to be what it was in her prime by this point, but I’ve heard recordings by her made a decade later than this one that sound far better.

Compounding the problems with the performance itself are the poor choices made in structuring the material. Most of the songs are compressed into fragmentary medleys, so even if Liza had been in better form, very few of the songs last long enough to give her the opportunity to really stop the show.

She also relies much too heavily on her backup chorus here…there are times they seem to be carrying the songs more than she is. The only place where she seems to be having any fun is on an amusing rendition of “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore”, complete with a set of new lyrics written specifically for her (“I don’t even flinch each time I see/a seven-foot drag queen dressed like me”).

Apart from “Taking a Chance on Love”, the other low point comes at the climax, where Minnelli sings a desperate-sounding duet with a recording of her mother on “The Trolley Song”. Granted, she has a personal connection to the dead person she’s singing with, just like Natalie Cole did, so the result doesn’t come across as disrespectful like so many “duets” of this kind. Still, not only is the duet-with-a-preexisting-recording format severely unsuited to being done live, but putting Liza next to her famous mother at her professional peak only serves to highlight what spectacularly bad form she was in on this album.

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending…a hard-won one, but that just makes it all the more meaningful. Shortly after Minnelli On Minnelli was recorded, Liza was diagnosed with viral encephalitis, and was told she would probably never walk or speak again, let alone sing or dance. Liza refused to accept this, and after dedicating herself to a regimen of dance and vocal lessons, took the stage barely a year later with the greatest triumph of her later career, the one-woman show Liza’s Back, which was preserved on the album of the same name.

This production, which played first London and then New York, found her in vastly better form than Minnelli On Minnelli. Given the circumstances, her voice is absolutely phenomenal; it doesn’t equal the ecstatic belting of her heyday, but it’s the best she had sounded for quite a while, and she’d certainly never sound as good again. And the songs she sings here, such as “Never-Never Land” and “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?”, are perfectly chosen to compliment the weary-but-triumphant sound of her voice at this stage.

Liza’s Back offers vintage renditions of her trademark standards (“Cabaret”, “Theme from New York, New York”, “But the World Goes Round”) that could hold their own with the versions recorded in her prime. Particularly impressive are “Mein Herr”, which is preceded here by a superbly delivered dramatic monologue, performed in character as Sally Bowles, and “Maybe This Time”, which gets arguably its most touching performance ever here…it feels like she understands the song’s meaning here on a level she never quite had before.

Her rendition of “Some People” from Gypsy showcases a galvanizing, triumphant energy that seems to be exulting in her knowledge of her own resurgence. She does seem to be losing her breath a bit on her performance of “Rose’s Turn”, but this just makes the song sound more like the onstage nervous breakdown it was always meant to be…rather like Tyne Daly’s version, only significantly better sung.

She also offers a devastating trio of songs about the simple act of crying, and a deeply felt version of “Something Wonderful” supposedly dedicated to her difficult but rewarding relationship with then-husband David Gest. The album’s title-song, a newly-commissioned composition by longtime collaborators John Kander and Fred Ebb, is first-rate, a jubilant and defiant announcement of her return with lyrics that are surprisingly honest and forthcoming about her problems (‘I took my bottle of pills/and tossed them away/I emptied the booze/Went back to AA’).

The show even features a song from Liza’s disastrous first attempt to bring her nightclub act to a Broadway theater, the 1977 Kander and Ebb pseudo-musical The Act. The team’s score for that one was far from their best work, but the showstopping cakewalk “City Lights” is generally agreed to be the best thing in it, and this explosive performance easily outdoes the one on the earlier show’s cast album.

But the most special moment of all on this album is a brief but breathtaking fragment of her mother’s legendary classic “Over the Rainbow”, a song she had always refused to perform before: she capped it with a heartrending cry of “Thank you, Mama!” You can hear from the album alone that the audience at these performances was in absolute ecstasies, as well they should be—this was the Liza we all knew and loved, and the show and its accompanying album were easily the highlight of the later phase of her career.

A year or so before he would make his Broadway debut in Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, Josh Groban released this album, which consists entirely of covers of Musical Theater songs. I have to assume that he must have already been aware of what his future held, and that this album was meant to serve as a kind of dry run for his attempt to conquer Broadway.

Groban had had a very respectable career up to this point, his music falling somewhere between the ‘Crossover Classical’ acts like Andrea Bocelli and the higher grades of the Easy Listening genre. However, his album immediately prior to this one, 2013’s All That Echoes, had been poorly received due to a higher proportion of underwhelming original compositions and an awkward attempt at a more Pop-friendly sound than his earlier work. That said, it also contained a cover of the song “Falling Slowly” from the then-recent hit Broadway musical Once, which was widely considered the album’s highlight and which marked the first sign of Groban’s growing interest in Musical Theater.

This album, on the other hand, seems to be a reaction to the negative reception that All That Echoes received. The tracklist, obviously, is entirely composed of covers, and the arrangements represent a return to the florid, orchestra-heavy sounds of Groban’s earlier albums, which is much better suited to his voice and singing style. The album opens with a rendition of “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. He uses the same additional second verse that Michael Feinstein used on his album of the same name, and if Groban’s version lacks the subtlety and nuance of Gene Wilder’s original, it is nonetheless eloquently delivered and beautifully sung.

The same can be said for most of the album, in fact. Groban goes mostly for fairly obvious choices, but given that his last album had been poorly received for deviating too much from his usual sound, choosing songs that play to his strengths seems like a sound strategy here. He does stretch himself a bit with his rendition of the jazzy Finian’s Rainbow standard “Old Devil Moon”, and does an impressive job of capturing the sensuality the song requires. And his version of “Dulcinea” from Man of La Mancha, here sped up into a kind of giddy waltz, is a bit unusual, but he manages to make it work.

His renditions of “Bring Him Home” and “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” from Les Miserables are particularly impressive…indeed, these might the best versions ever recorded by anyone but Colm Wilkinson and Michael Ball themselves. “If I Loved You” from Carousel is another highlight, although that’s to be expected when your duet partner is the legendary Audra McDonald. And his version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is note-perfect…he actually sounds like he’s singing it to keep his spirits up while plowing through a storm.

Inevitably, there are a few less successful tracks. His version of “Finishing the Hat” from Sunday in the Park With George is beautifully sung, but he delivers the lyric as though he has no idea what it actually means. And while I dearly love Kelly Clarkson, she was just not meant to sing the part of Christine in Phantom of the Opera, and her unsuitable vocal style lets down her half of “All I Ask of You” on this album. And of course, as always, “What I Did For Love” from A Chorus Line loses most of its actual content when taken out of context, but that’s not really Groban’s fault, and he does sing it nicely.

There are also two song from foreign musicals not much known in the United States included here. “Le Temps Des Cathedrales”, from the French musical Notre Dame de Paris, based on the Victor Hugo novel commonly known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, sounds worthy to compete with the music from the Alan Menken musical drawn from the same source. And “Gold Can Turn To Sand”, from a Swedish musical by the songwriters from ABBA, is a heartbreaking narrative of grief with a ravishing melody. Both renditions make you want to seek out these works and hear the rest of their scores, which is presumably just what Groban intended. And speaking of the ABBA songwriters, Groban’s earth-shattering rendition of “Anthem” from their musical Chess makes for an appropriately epic way to close out this album.

We don’t get a lot of ‘Traditional Pop’ albums on this level of quality these days (maybe one a year, if that), so it’s best to appreciate them when they come along. Interpretational singing seems like a lost art in these singer-songwriter-dominated days, so an album like this is a rare treasure. Some have quibbled with the unadventurous song choices, but I think it says something positive about Groban that he knows what his real strengths are and is not too proud to play to them. And certainly the singing on this album, even on the few weaker selections, is nearly always gorgeous, and many of the interpretations are genuinely interesting and distinctive takes on these familiar songs. If you love Show Tunes, this album is well worth acquiring, and even if you’re relatively new to the Broadway scene, this could easily serve as a very useful and accessible introduction to some of Broadway’s greatest songs.