Word: lyricist
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...night that Les Miserables opened in London in October 1985, lyricist Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schonberg asked their producer, Cameron Mackintosh, if they now had an assured career in the theater. When he said yes, the two French creators told the impresario they had a new project: they wanted to update the Madama Butterfly story. This time their inspiration was not a 1,000-page Victor Hugo novel but a single news photograph of a Vietnamese mother and daughter parting at an airport. The mother had raised her child with one goal: to locate the girl's father...
...WORLD GOES ROUND. This cocktail of an off Broadway review tastes cynical, then sweetly sentimental, in classic Tin Pan Alley style. It honors a stellar team: composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb (Cabaret, Chicago, The Rink, Kiss of the Spider Woman...
...stupid, men are vain/Love's disgusting, love's insane/A humiliating business." This is hardly the typical love-song sentiment. But Stephen Sondheim is not a typical lyricist, and an evening of his persistent cynicism can be quite wearing. Fortunately, the creators of Love is in the Air have coated the bitterness of Sondheim's songs with enough comic relief to make for a delightful experience...
Falsettoland The conclusion of composer-lyricist William Finn's brilliant minimalist trilogy about a man's struggle for sexual identity blends the same style of daffy Manhattan humor (about nouvelle kosher cuisine, opulent bar mitzvah parties and "the lesbians from next door") with the newfound and baffling pain of AIDS...
Meanwhile, producer Clavell and his team -- director-choreographer Michael Smuin, adapter-lyricist John Driver and composer Paul Chihara -- hacked away an hour of running time, primarily pageantry. A funeral procession was eliminated. A 3 1/2-minute ballad about the hero's adulterous love was compressed to 30 seconds. A formalized yet rousing 12-minute battle scene was fought and won in five. Musical exchanges between a Portuguese trader and a Jesuit missionary became clearer and quicker as dialogue. Almost every show in tryout undergoes revision, but few weather change of this magnitude...