DVDs: Madness in the West End
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DVD: OUR HOUSE Universal
In the field of jukebox shows, those musicals that create an original narrative around a pre-existing pop catalogue, London has had Mamma Mia!, We Will Rock You, and Tonight's the Night, while Broadway has had Mamma Mia! and is about to get Good Vibrations and All Shook Up.
A somewhat overlooked entry in the genre is London's Our House, built around the songs of the popular '80s British band Madness, whose hits included so I am told "It Must Be Love," "Baggy Trousers," "My Girl," "Nightboat to Cairo," and "Our House." Our House opened at the Cambridge Theater on October 28, 2002 and ran there until August 1, 2003. It was directed by Matthew Warchus, whose Broadway shows include Art, True West, and the Roundabout's Follies, with choreography by Peter Darling Billy Elliott, the Phantom of the Opera film.
Olivier Award nominations went to Darling, leading man Michael Jibson, and the show, which took the 2003 Best Musical Olivier, winning over three musicals exported to Broadway, Bombay Dreams, Taboo, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. There was no cast CD of Our House, but in December 2003, the complete show, taped live at the Cambridge, was televised on BBC-3. Now, Universal has released the two-hour video on DVD, in the European PAL format.
Set in Camden Town in northern London, Tim Firth's book for Our House may put one in mind of the film Sliding Doors, as it offers alternative versions of the same story. On his sixteenth birthday, hero Joe Casey breaks into a building site to impress his girlfriend. One version of the story demonstrates what would have happened had Joe remained to take the rap and surrender to police. The other version has him fleeing and prospering.
Our House possesses more than a touch of Blood Brothers, with its comparative study of the divergent fates of twin brothers. Like Blood Brothers, Our House features a narrator who flows in and out of the action, in this case Joe's deceased, ex-con father, played at one point during the run by the front man of Madness.
With Madness co-producing and contributing two new songs created specifically for the show, Our House appears to be the most ambitious and heavily plotted of the songbook shows thus far. It's also frenetic and a bit exhausting, the parallel plots requiring almost non-stop musical staging and costume changes. It's a wonder that Jibson, who looks something like Macaulay Culkin, holds up throughout the show, but he handles the enormous central role well.
As you might expect, the score of Our House was entirely new to my ears, and it was quite painless. On disc, Our House comes off as an intriguing if not entirely successful show. The TV version is admirably produced, and one can only wish that more well-received but not blockbusting musicals would wind up on DVD.
DVD: MASS AT THE VATICAN CITY Kultur
Mass was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. in 1971. With a score by Leonard Bernstein, Mass employed texts from the liturgy of the Roman Catholic mass, combined with new English texts by Stephen Schwartz and Bernstein. Gordon Davidson directed the elaborate production, and Alvin Ailey was the choreographer.
Mass featured more than 200 performers, with orchestras on stage and in the pit. Between the traditional portions of the mass, the new sections embraced the sounds of Broadway, classical, pop, jazz, rock, folk, and r&b. As a note in Columbia's original cast recording states, "The work came to exist because the composer believes that the crisis of faith is the principal crisis of our century, because he has long been intrigued with the idea of writing a comprehensive religious service, because of his fascination with Roman Catholicism, and because of his love for the man whose name the center celebrates."
Mass was very much a reflection of its time, a time of student protests and religious questioning, and also a time of such other religious musicals as Jesus Christ Superstar and Schwartz's own Godspell. Mass also reflected Bernstein's own midlife crisis.
As was the case with West Side Story, Bernstein began the score working solo, but eventually realized that he needed another lyricist. After premiering to mixed reviews in Washington, Mass played New York's Metropolitan Opera House in the summer of 1972, with the original Celebrant, opera baritone Alan Titus, alternating in the central role with Broadway's David Cryer. Mass moved on to Vienna, Milan, and Paris.
The first video version was telecast by PBS in 1981, a tenth-anniversary revival at the Kennedy Center, directed by Tom O'Horgan Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair and featuring Joseph Kolinski, Stephen Bogardus, and Ethan Freeman.
That video was never commercially released. But recently issued on a Kultur DVD is a two-hour Mass video taken from a staging at the Vatican as part of the Jubilee 2000 celebration of the Roman Catholic church. Directed by Enrico Castiglione, Douglas Webster sings the Celebrant, and the cast also includes 2004 Tony winner Anika Noni Rose, Tim Shew, and Kevin Anderson not the Kevin Anderson from Brooklyn and Sunset Boulevard, but the Kevin Anderson from New York City Opera's A Little Night Music and the Faye Dunaway national tour of Master Class.
Because Bernstein did not write a great many musicals and operas, Mass, billed as "a theatre piece for singers, players, and dancers," ranks as one of Bernstein's significant musical-theatre works. It contains a few stand-out beauties, like the gorgeous "Simple Song," which Barbara Cook performed on her second Carnegie Hall album. But the wildly eclectic score overflows with handsome music, even if the text has a distinctly '70s feel. Featuring sizable forces to rival the original production, the new video offers an effective if excessively abstract staging, and is worth a look.