Word: evitas
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...LONG TIME AGO, when even the brightest among us were cruising in our Big Wheels, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote a musical that was fun. They had not yet developed the bombastic politics accompanied by loud orchestration of an Evita, or the overproduced, overscored musical juggernaut style of a Cats. Instead, they wrote Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a play designed to be performed at junior high schools, and be enjoyed by all. Despite its biblical story, Joseph bears little resemblence to his big brother Jesus Christ, Superstar, except for the scene in Superstar when the wacky...
...unfolds with clarity and urgent speed, although at times it seems overeager to please with romantic or comic distractions. Claude-Michel Schonberg's score is almost operatic in its emotional intensity and its use of themes and variations, yet it provides hummable pop tunes. Like Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, Les Miserables originated as a double-record album. That version, by French authors, was staged at the 4,500-seat Palais des Sports in Paris in 1980. For the R.S.C., Nunn, Lyricist Herbert Kretzmer and other writers radically refashioned the text. The result is less French than English in tone...
Colm Wilkinson and Roger Allam carry the show as Jean Valjean, the released convict seeking to escape his past, and Javert, the righteous police inspector who hounds him across France for nearly two decades. Patti LuPone, an American who won a 1980 Tony Award for her starring role in Evita, has powerful scenes as an unwed mother who in desperation becomes a prostitute. The real star, however, is Nunn's staging. He sometimes spoils one effect with the hasty arrival of the next, but his conceptions are clear and simple. Almost every manifestation of evil, from Valjean's skulking emergence...
...most rewarding thing in show business is to become a brand name, presold to audiences, like Agatha Christie or Neil Simon. Andrew Lloyd Webber may be headed toward that status as composer of such glossy, high-energy musicals as Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats and Starlight Express. Lloyd Webber has mastered the trick of seeming to juggle big ideas while actually asking little of his audience beyond a pleasant passing of time...
Thus he can shape a whole evening about Evita Peron that ducks the moral dimensions of fascism and can adapt poems by T.S. Eliot without tackling any metaphysical notion more complicated than an escalator ride into the clouds. No celestial choirs appear to sing in Lloyd Webber's ears, no muse or demon seems to haunt him, and his concoctions cannot bear close logical inspection. But he can beguile even sophisticated viewers into believing for the moment that they are witnessing highflying...