Word: broadway
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...deepest pockets are finding it hard to sign Rahman. Last year, he composed the martial score for Chinese director He Ping's Warriors of Heaven and Earth. This week, Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Bombay Dreams, for which Rahman wrote the music, transfers from London's West End to Broadway. And Rahman is currently writing songs for another big-budget West End production, a musical version of The Lord of the Rings. These projects are forcing Rahman out of his usual milieu. He says he knew nothing about Western musicals until he wrote Bombay Dreams and initially didn't even...
...billboard on the theater in New York City reads: A R RAHMAN'S BOMBAY DREAMS. The locals may scoff. A R Who? He's a Broadway composer? He is now, and musical theater has rarely been so lucky. The most geriatric genre of American culture is getting a transfusion of world music. And when Rahman makes that music, it's truly world-class...
...which first are grounded in recitative, then soar into celestial melody. The soundtrack parades the composer's gift for alchemizing outside influences until they are totally Tamil, totally Rahman. He plays with reggae and jungle rhythms, runs cool variations on Ennio Morricone's scores for Italian westerns, fiddles with Broadway-style orchestrations. An astonishing debut...
...transfer from the West End to Broadway, the show has lost a lot of its Bollywood sass?American audiences don't know enough about Indian musicals to get the jokes?and, crucially, a half-dozen solid Rahman tunes. To compensate, there's a wet-sari dream embodied by sultry Ayesha Dharker...
Sondheim, the guru for a generation of musical-theater composers, won't comment on the state of the Broadway musical (he doesn't want to hurt any feelings) and says he doesn't see many musicals anyway. He prefers going to straight plays, watches movies at home on video (recent favorites: The Barbarian Invasions and Elephant) and listens mostly to symphonic music--"nonvocal, because the words are so distracting." With Assassins coming together, he is buckling down to finish three final songs for The Frogs ("I'm a slow writer, and I only have a month to do them...