CDs: I Believe My Heart
After the Broadway failures of Jane Eyre and Dance of the Vampires and the harsh critical reception for Dracula, one might have assumed that the Gothic/melodramatic/romantic pop opera had gone permanently out of style. But trust Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose Phantom of the Opera was largely responsible for creating the genre, to resurrect it. And the composer has chosen an eminently suitable work for the occasion of his return to a favorite style, Wilkie Collins' 1860 thriller The Woman in White, a landmark in the history of suspense literature.
Lloyd Webber's two most recent musicals, Whistle Down the Wind and The Beautiful Game, failed to make it to Broadway, and the last Lloyd Webber that did, By Jeeves, was a quick failure. But The Woman in White, which opened on September 15, 2004 at London's Palace Theatre, will be making the trip here. It appears to be set for a November 10, 2005 Broadway opening, with the Minskoff home of Dance of the Vampires mentioned as the likely venue.
This is despite New York Times critic Ben Brantley, who filed a negative review on the London opening and is unlikely to change his mind when the show arrives on Broadway. The reviews in London were mixed, ranging from "a big, big triumph, a very palpable hit, no question" Sunday Times to "a terrible disappointment" Telegraph. The director is Trevor Nunn, who staged such previous Lloyd Webber musicals as Cats, Starlight Express, Aspects of Love, and Sunset Boulevard.
One aspect of the show that has proven controversial is William Dudley's physical production, which boasts the elaborate use of video projections that move across curved screens, pieces of which can detach and rotate separately on a revolving platform. Some observers found this a brilliant solution to the story's many shifts of location, while others found the projections literally dizzying.
Three-time Olivier Award winner Maria Friedman has spent much of her musical-theatre career toiling in the London productions of less commercial ventures like Sunday in the Park with George, Passion, Ragtime, and Lady in the Dark. Her most overtly commercial show to date, The Witches of Eastwick, was a box-office disappointment. In The Woman in White, co-produced by her sister, Sonia Friedman, it appears she's found her solidest commercial success to date. It also appears that The Woman in White will be the occasion of Friedman's American stage debut next fall. She has already made a couple of New York cabaret appearances.
The show's other West End leading ladies, Jill Paice and Angela Christian, are both American and thus likely to repeat their roles in New York. Also seeming likely to repeat on Broadway is Michael Crawford, who as the slippery Count Fosco is making his first London appearance in a musical since The Phantom of the Opera, and whose name, combined with that of Lloyd Webber, is probably responsible for at least some of the show's West End box-office success.
In the musical, Fosco is more a comic villain, and much less scary than Sydney Greenstreet's Fosco in the 1948 film of The Woman in White. As we've seen in Phantom and Vampires, Crawford seems to enjoy transforming his appearance, and the role of Fosco has him all but unrecognizable in a fat suit, curly wig, heavy make-up, and Italian accent.
The role gives Crawford one bona fide showstopper, a catchy, comic-opera aria called "You Can Get Away with Anything," in which a live rat dances across the star's shoulders and neck. Crawford previously appeared with a rodent in the short-lived West End musical Flowers for Algernon, retitled Charlie and Algernon for Broadway. Because the role of Count Fosco is juicy but not huge, Crawford receives the penultimate bow, the final one going to Friedman. But I suspect that Crawford may wish to play the part on Broadway, if only to erase the bad taste he left with Vampires.
The action of Charlotte Jones's book for The Woman in White takes place over a year that begins in 1870, as drawing master Walter Hartright Martin Crewes journeys to Limmeridge to take up a position as art instructor to half-sisters Marian Halcombe Friedman and Laura Fairlie Paice. But before he arrives there, Walter encounters at a railway cutting a mysterious creature in white, Anne Catherick Christian, who bears a strong resemblance to Laura.
Both Laura and Marian are romantically drawn to Walter, but Laura is engaged to the villainous Sir Percival Glyde Oliver Darley, who is in cahoots with the Italian physician Count Fosco. The secret of The Woman in White centers on the connection between Glyde and Catherick, with the solution of the mystery differing from that of Collins' novel.
As with all Lloyd Webber musicals, The Woman in White has produced a first-class cast album. Because the show is mostly sung, it had to be released on two CDs, which preserve what appears to be the complete performance. The surprise of EMI Classics' set is that it's a live recording, like the cast recording of another current West End musical, Jerry Springer: The Opera, or RCA's Bring in 'Da Noise/Bring in 'Da Funk, the 1980 London Oklahoma!, the 1999 Australian The Sound of Music, and the London cast recording of the Lloyd Webber novelty entertainment Song and Dance.
Recording The Woman in White live was facilitated by the fact that the Palace Theatre has a built-in recording studio. The recording was made on opening night, with sections where applause covered the beginning or end of songs or where stage noise was intrusive subsequently re-recorded. The 140-minute set features no applause or laughter, so it's actually hard to tell that one is listening to a live recording. But it must be at least partly responsible for the vividness of the performances.
Because Fosco's "You Can Get Away With Anything" provokes a delighted audience response, Crawford had to re-record the entire song for the cast album. The laughter and applause of the live, opening-night performance of the song has been included as a bonus track at the end of the second disc.
The recording, which comes with the complete libretto in a separate booklet, also features a slightly different ending from the one in the theatre, one that Lloyd Webber favors but which apparently didn't come across in the sizable Palace.
Because the recording is comprehensive, it poses a problem rarely encountered in musical-theatre cast albums; this is a mystery, and the denouement is revealed on the recording. So those who haven't yet seen the show may wish to avoid the final encounter between Glyde and a disguised Laura.
Perhaps stylistically closest to Aspects of Love in the Lloyd Webber canon, The Woman in White is, as indicated, mostly sung, a technique that Lloyd Webber tends to deploy better than just about anyone else around, even if it's also a style currently out of favor with many critics. The Woman in White has fewer extractable songs than most of the composer's earlier pop operas; the big romantic anthem, a soaring duet for Walter and Laura called "I Believe My Heart," got a pre-cast-album release as a pop single.
And there are other stirring pieces in the score, notably "Trying Not to Notice," for the romantic triangle of Walter, Laura, and Marian; "You See I Am No Ghost," one of several statements of Anne's haunting theme; Fosco's arioso "A Gift for Living Well"; "All for Laura," when Marian realizes her culpability in Laura's unhappy fate; "If Not for Me, For Her," when Marian locates Walter in London; and Walter's "Evermore Without You."
But more interesting than these are the unfortunately few passages that flirt with dissonance. There's a touch of Benjamin Britten in the eerie opening music, at the railway cutting. There's the deliberately unsettling version of the carol "The Holly and the Ivy" at the Christmas wedding of Laura and Glyde. And there's the "Lost Souls" sequence, in which Marian searches for Walter in the pubs of London.
As usual, there's a good deal of sung recitative and numerous recurring themes. Lloyd Webber is a theatrical composer, so, just as his Sunset Boulevard score conveyed the feel of film noir, this one has just the right sound for a Victorian ghost story. David Zippel City of Angels, The Goodbye Girl's lyrics are certainly above average in the Lloyd Webber canon. It's not easy to fit words to the composer's tightly-knit scenes that feature blocks of melody that repeat, but Zippel copes with considerable professionalism.
As with other Lloyd Webber scores, there's too much repetition of themes. And for a thriller, The Woman in White is on the languid side, at times lacking energy, the solution of the mystery plausible but less than overwhelming.
Friedman hurls herself into a role that takes her to the very limits of her range and only rarely rewards her with anything like a big solo. She offers a highly convincing performance, and it's fun to hear a pair of pros like Friedman and Crawford in the scene in which Marian attempts to seduce Fosco so as to gain vital information. A gifted ham, Crawford makes a major contribution to the proceedings. Paice and Crewes handle their large roles with aplomb, while Christian and Darley offer fine work. And there's an especially gratifying turn by another pro, Edward Petherbridge Nicholas Nickleby, as the sisters' hypochondriac uncle.
Even with its more ambitious passages, The Woman in White is very much in the trademark Lloyd Webber style, so those who don't admire the composer's post-Cats works aren't likely to be won over by the latest. But if The Woman in White is not always as gripping as one would like it to be, it's filled with handsomely atmospheric melody. A major new composition from Lloyd Webber, it's a work that sounds better with each hearing.