Obscure Videos: Two from the U.K.
Two years earlier, an LP called Variations had been released. An orchestral work written by Andrew Lloyd Webber for his brother, cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, the music of Variations was based on themes from the A minor Caprice by Niccolo Paganini 1782-1840.
With Lloyd Webber's Cats and Evita playing as two of the biggest hits in West End history, a combination of Tell Me on a Sunday and Variations opened on March 26, 1982 at London's Palace Theatre under the title Song and Dance. The first act had Webb repeating her solo tour-de-force, while the second half featured nine strong ballet and West End dancers, performing to the Variations score. The star of the second half was Wayne Sleep, who had created the role of Mr. Mistoffeles in Cats in '81. John Caird Les Miz, Jane Eyre directed Webb's showcase, while Anthony van Laast choreographed Variations. For the stage production, Sunday got one major new song, "The Last Man in My Life," plus several other new pieces.
Variations had a vague plot thread about a young man seeking a relationship. But while an attempt was made in the finale to link Variations with Sunday by bringing back the female soloist of the first half to join the dancers of the second, Sunday and Variations weren't thematically related.
But that didn't prevent the crowd-pleasing show from being a hit, enjoying a two-year run. Webb was succeeded in the solo cycle by Gemma Craven, Lulu, and Liz Robertson. One month after the show closed at the Palace, Lloyd Webber moved cameras into the Palace and staged a special performance of the show for television, with his new wife, Sarah Brightman, in Sunday and Sleep again heading Variations. Lloyd Webber was clearly attempting to build the reputation of Brightman, who was, like Sleep, an original cast member of the London Cats. Taped live at the Palace on April 28, 1984, Song and Dance was televised in the U.K. on August 27, 1984, and the program was also released on VHS, in the European PAL system.
For Brightman, a new number, "Unexpected Song," based on the Paganini theme and a tune previously sung only in the finale, replaced "The Last Man in My Life." Brightman's version also dropped "I'm Very You, You're Very Me."
As seen on the telecast, Brightman is miscast in Tell Me on a Sunday. She's too young for the role, lacking the slightly used, bruised quality needed. She's too girlish, without much edge or depth, and comes off as alternately cutesy and brassy. Then too, the score, which features some of Lloyd Webber's most appealing melodies, comes across better with belters like Webb than with sopranos like Brightman. In her favor, Brightman is, unlike most of the divas who have sung the first half, able to actively join in the dancing in the finale sequence.
The dance section is lively but somewhat less impressive than it was live in the theatre. In general, this is a disappointing preservation of a show that was fairly rousing in the theatre. The television version of Song and Dance has never been aired or released in the U.S. The U.K. VHS tape has long been out of print; with Brightman's current international renown, it's surprising that this Song and Dance hasn't been reissued on DVD.
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Song and Dance has been substantially altered for several subsequent incarnations. For the Broadway production which featured belter Bernadette Peters in a superb star turn, Richard Maltby, Jr. joined the creative team as director-lyricist-adaptor, with choreography by Peter Martins. More recently, there was a West End revival of Tell Me on a Sunday alone as a full evening, with star Denise van Outen performing another radical revision of the work, this one by Black, featuring several new songs.
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When it was announced that the short-lived Broadway Television Network had preserved for pay-per-view telecast and home video the long-running revue Smokey Joe's Cafe during its final performances, I recall wishing that the company had instead preserved Ragtime, which closed on Broadway at the same time as the Lieber-Stoller revue.
But if the U.S. never got a complete telecast of Ragtime, the U.K. did. True, it was not of a full-scale, lavish production, like the Broadway original. Instead, the U.K. got a telecast of an elaborate concert version, presented in the fall of 2002 as part of the International Festival of Musical Theatre in Cardiff, Wales and starring in the role of Mother one of the West End's foremost musical performers, Maria Friedman.
This concert, the European premiere of the work, became the basis for the London production of Ragtime that opened in March 2003 at the Piccadilly Theatre. Both the concert and the London production were directed by Stafford Arima Altar Boyz. And both featured Friedman as Mother; Graham Bickley Metropolis, High Society as Tateh; Dave Willetts Les Miz, Phantom as Father; and Rebecca Thornhill The Witches of Eastwick as Evelyn Nesbit. Indeed, the London mounting, with skeletal scenery, resembled a concert production, and, like the Cardiff version, featured an on-stage orchestra and simple but effective staging. Arima's stripped-down version of Ragtime was later seen at Paper Mill Playhouse.
The BBC telecast of the Ragtime concert features the complete score and most of the dialogue, running perhaps twenty minutes shorter than the Broadway production. And the show definitely works in concert, indicating that Ragtime will someday find itself the basis for a potent Encores! staging. I was not among those who considered the Broadway production overblown, and don't believe that a scaled-down Ragtime necessarily illuminates the material in a way that Frank Galati's grandiose original production failed to do. Still, the material holds up in a concert that, without trappings like a Model T Ford, places the emphasis firmly on the work of lyricist Lynn Ahrens and composer Stephen Flaherty, and reaffirms their score as one of the finest of the last two decades.
In the concert, the principals are off book, seriously acting the piece. All of the principals satisfy, from Lawrence Hamilton's elegant Coalhouse and Kenita R. Miller's empassioned Sarah to Bickley's superb Tateh. At The Color Purple, Miller is standby for LaChanze, who also played Sarah. Conductor David Loud gets all of the grandeur of the score across.
Above all, though, the video gives one the chance to savor a leading musical performance by Maria Friedman, who recently made her Broadway debut in The Woman in White. Friedman won the 2004 Best Musical Actress Olivier Award for her performance in the West End Ragtime, and it's handsomely captured in the concert video. Culminating in an exciting "Back to Before," Friedman is at her best here.