Word: lyricists
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...real emotional connection with the people onstage, for one thing. The late composer-lyricist Jonathan Larson earns our tears even before we walk into the theater. He died, tragically, of an aortic aneurysm just weeks before his soon-to-be-a-hit Rent opened. Now one of his earlier works, Tick, Tick...Boom!, has been revived off-Broadway. It's a slight, autobiographical piece (with a script worked over by David Auburn, author of Proof) about the struggling composer's own angst at reaching his 30th birthday. Yet this Portrait of the Artist as a Young Neurotic makes...
...Last Five Years, having its premiere at Chicago's Northlight Theater, composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown manages something just as hard; he turns a modest, 80-minute, two-character musical into a richly satisfying emotional journey. It starts with a narrative gimmick. A man and woman tell the story, in alternating musical numbers, of their five-year relationship. She tells it backward in time; he tells it forward. She begins at the rueful end of a marriage and moves toward the love-struck beginning. He opens as a giddy guy going on a date and winds up the betrayer...
This Broadway tribute to the lyricist of A Chorus Line, who never had another hit and died of cancer in 1988, might seem a precious bit of Broadway navel gazing. Yet it is surprisingly fresh and engaging. Kleban's little-heard songs are witty and original--Sondheim without the thesaurus. And the creators (chiefly director and star Lonny Price) temper their affection with candor and insight into an artist more familiar with frustration than fame...
...Gene Lees, the lyricist who worked with Antonio Carlos Jobim on English-language adaptations of such bossa nova classics as "Desafinado" and "Corcovado" once commented that Brazilian songwriters tend to endlessly rhyme the words "song," "guitar" and "heart" - which actually do rhyme in Portuguese, cançao, violao and coraçao, respectively. Having attended the first week of Rock in Rio, having seen an endless procession of Brazilian bands, having heard an endless series of Brazilian songs, sweated under Brazilian sunlight, eaten Brazilian food, danced (or attempted to dance) Brazilian dances, I think I've gotten some idea...
...Forrest Gump), who spent nearly a year composing a screenplay in rhyme. Seussical, the $10 million musical pastiche of several Seuss stories narrated by Seuss's Cat, has also had its share of bumps on the way to Broadway. Key members of the creative team have been replaced, while lyricist Lynn Ahrens, who wrote Ragtime with her partner Stephen Flaherty, has faced the challenge of simulating Seuss's inimitable poetry--"trying to keep the gist of that," Ahrens says, "while trying to find different rhythms so there can be variety in the score...