Word: kristina
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Jumping from one crisis to another, Kristina may prove not only too epic but too episodic - and far too dour - for a Broadway audience. The age of the serious musicals, your Les Miz and Phantom of the Opera, ended abruptly when The Producers and Mamma Mia! showed that theatergoers preferred perky, gaudy, old-fashioned musical comedies. But Kristina should find a constituency among those who love hearing wonderful music sung by gifted voices. If any naughty folks last night recorded the show, they should immediately post some of its instant classics: Robert's devastating solo "Gold Can Turn to Sand...
...Instead, they went home, where Andersson had an even more ambitious idea: to compose Kristina fran Duvemala (Kristina from Duvemala) as a sung-through national epic, in a style that would span folk tunes, symphonies and musical theater. Ulvaeus, adapting the Moberg novels - which had served as the source for two popular Swedish films in the '70s, The Emigrants and The New Land - also had a radical notion: for the first time in his career, he'd write his lyrics in his native language...
...treat people got; there's nothing like the spectacle of nearly a hundred singers and musicians gathered on a famous stage to present a work that deserves to be renowned. Sung in English and trimmed by about an hour (losing a few favorite numbers in the process), this Kristina may not have the sweep and sonic magnificence of the album, but it's still likely to be the definitive reading of the new version...
...1840s and '50s, it focuses on the lives of Kristina (powerfully sung here, as on the original album and on the Stockholm stage, by Helen Sjoholm) and her husband Karl-Oskar (Russell Watson, the Salford factory worker known in England as "the people's tenor"). Nearly starved by crop failures in their native Smaland, Karl-Oskar and his brother Robert (Kevin Oderkirk, who earned vigorous shouts with each of his numbers) resolve to leave the land their ancestors have farmed for a thousand years and go to America. Despite Kristina's severe reservations, that's what they do, accompanied...
...About a decade ago, one promoter offered ABBA a billion dollars, easily turned down, for a reunion tour. But the group was nowhere near as notable for its onstage electricity, for the performing verve and preposterous costumes, as for its songs. Now that Kristina seems headed for a fuller life in the West End or on Broadway, ABBA fans - all lovers of irresistible tunes that lodge in your internal iTunes and never go away - may have one more chance to tell Benny and Bjorn, "Thank you for the music...