Word: bacharachs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Promises, Promises, which is based on the film The Apartment, is essentially the story a rather strange and depressing love triangle. It is about people who cannot cope with themselves or each other--and within this framework, Bacharach and David have written some songs that are gripping in a most unusual...
...Bacharach song, anything can happen. Listening to the original cast album (United Artists), one is consistently caught off guard by lyrics that defy normal rhyme schemes and music that is sensitive to the slightest lyrical change of heart...
Only when the score is called upon to express uninteresting sentiments does the score fall flat. For instance, a plot song ("Our Littlt Secret") which tells about a clandestine illicit arrangement between two characters, though done in the Bacharach-David manner, remains mundane because the subject matter is emotionally barren...
...orchestrations (credited to Harold Wheeler, but heavily influenced by Bacharach's own brand of arranging) in Promises, Promises are an essential part of the Bacharach score. And, in line with this, the composer has seen to it that his show is the first to use recording-studio electronics in a Broadway theatre. In the auditorium, one hears half sound straight from the stage and orchestra, and half sound that has been sent through an amplification-echo chamber system. There are also four female vocalists in the orchestra pit, who blend their harmonic flights of wordless sound into the instrumentation...
...rock tendencies and electronic shaping, it is the emotional realism--the soul--of the Bacharach-David songs that makes them important to the future of commercial music, Broadway and elsewhere...