CDs: Once Upon a Time
In Brooklyn, a quintet of homeless street people, referred to as the City Weeds, enact a "sidewalk fairy tale," guided by a narrator dubbed the Streetsinger. The story they tell begins in Paris, where a young dancer named Faith falls in love with Taylor, a young American singer and songwriter. It's 1969, and Taylor is sent to Vietnam. Faith gives birth to Taylor's daughter, whom she names after the father's birthplace, Brooklyn. But by the time Brooklyn is five, Faith has despaired of ever seeing Taylor again, and commits suicide.
Now twenty and a vocal superstar, Brooklyn journeys to New York to slay the crowd at Carnegie Hall and to search for her father, armed with the fragment of a lullaby that only Taylor can finish. Before long, Brooklyn runs afoul of local songstress Paradice, who challenges the upstart to a "battle of the divas" at Madison Square Garden.
This bizarre, fairly preposterous scenario is the set-up for the season's third new Broadway musical after The Frogs and Dracula, but the only one to open this fall. In another era, a musical that received as heavily negative a critical response as Brooklyn would probably have disappeared quickly. But thanks to its size a cast of five, with three offstage back-up singers, the show has survived, and since its October opening has at least been breaking even.
With the best of intentions, Brooklyn is a musical that practically begs its audiences to love it. But it's a cloying fable, maudlin and insufficiently involving when not actively ludicrous. To some extent, the backstory of Brooklyn is more intriguing than what's on stage: Having once recorded with songwriter Mark Schoenfeld, singer Barri McPherson ran into him years later in Brooklyn Heights. Schoenfeld was now a homeless street performer, so McPherson took him into her home, where they began collaborating on Brooklyn. Schoenfeld and McPherson both write music, lyrics, and book.
Directed by Jeff Calhoun, Brooklyn's principal attraction is probably its design. There's Ray Klausen's setting scaffolding, a fence, a crumbling tenement of a street underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. And there are Tobin Ost's "Salvation Armani" costumes, which make use of street objects like garbage bags, crime-scene tape, and bubble wrap.
The recording is live, although not in the sense of the live recordings of current London shows like Jerry Springer: The Opera and The Woman in White. Those were recorded in performance at their respective West End theaters. Brooklyn was made in a recording studio, but before an invited audience.
The Brooklyn score mixes pop, gospel, r&b, rock, funk, and soul, and is filled with power ballads, vocal pyrotechnics, and "American Idol"-style wailing. The most appealing musical material comes near the beginning, with heroine Brooklyn's "Once Upon a Time" and the unfinished lullaby theme. The Streetsinger's "Magic Man" is attractive, as is Brooklyn's "I Never Knew His Name," and the two characters share the fairly rousing "Streetsinger." But other major numbers i.e. Paradice's "Superlover" and "Raven," Taylor's "Sometimes" don't improve with repeat hearings. In general, Brooklyn possesses too many platitudinous lyrics that don't rhyme and too many soaring, cliche-filled anthems.
The score offers endless opportunities for high-powered performance, and its leading ladies take full advantage. In the title role, Eden Espinosa who spent last season standing by for Idina Menzel in Wicked is an impressive, almost reckless belter. Ramona Keller's Paradice is full of amusing attitude, and is likewise powerfully sung. Contributing strongly to the proceedings is the fine Streetsinger of Cleavant Derricks, a Tony winner for Dreamgirls. Kevin Anderson and Karen Olivo do well by the fairly thankless roles of Taylor and Faith.
Even if the Brooklyn score were stronger, it probably wouldn't be a favorite with this listener. For this is more a collection of pop songs than a theater score. But then the show clearly represents a new Broadway, aimed specifically at the youth market, even if it has been compared to street musicals of decades past, like Godspell and Hair.
I found Brooklyn pretty interminable in the theater. Shorn of a half-hour, it comes across slightly better on disc. The album has been very well produced by John McDaniel, the show's co-producer, arranger, and orchestrator. And recording it before an audience was a good choice, as the show is marked by extravagant vocal display, and the enthusiastic reaction of the audience often gives the illusion that something exciting is transpiring. But Brooklyn remains a would-be heart-tugger that's almost entirely resistible.
THE MAGIC OF DIAHANN CARROLL DRG To be released on January 25 is this fine combination of two Diahann Carroll albums from the United Artists catalogue, both released on LP in 1960, one a live recording of a cabaret performance, the other an intimate studio set. Carroll already had to her credit Broadway's House of Flowers and Hollywood's Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess when, just prior to her Broadway triumph in No Strings, she was busy establishing herself as a distinctive female vocalist.
Diahann Carroll: The Andre Previn Trio features arrangements and accompaniment by Previn at the piano, supported by bass and percussion. The program is mostly show tunes, plus two songs by Andre and Dory Previn. Carroll is alternately jazzy, torchy, bluesy, tender, sardonic, wistful, and swinging. The classy collection opens with "The Party's Over," and goes on to include "Spring Is Here," "Glad to Be Unhappy," "Nobody's Heart," "It's All Right with Me," and "Why Can't You Behave?"
Arranged and conducted by Peter Matz, who would go on to lead No Strings, the Persian Room program includes one show rarity, "Shopping Around" from Harold Rome's Wish You Were Here. As with most '60s club-act recordings, there are a couple of medleys. Outstanding are the renditions of "Goody, Goody," "All or Nothing at All," and "Taking a Chance on Love."
Because this is a live set, Carroll is more extroverted, and the singing is beltier than on the Previn tracks. For much of The Magic of Diahann Carroll, the star is presenting herself as a jazz singer, so the performances don't always have the concentrated intensity of her No Strings vocals. Still, Caroll's renditions are striking.