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Some of the most rapturous melodies ever heard in Carnegie Hall poured out of that grand old barn last night. The occasion was the first English-language production of Kristina, a musical based on the four Emigrants novels by Wilhelm Moberg. Spanning two continents and the Atlantic in between, the three-hour epic has all the makings of a thrilling stage experience: noble peasants, dying children, powerful voices, the dream of a new land. Most of all, a superb score. No wonder that, at the end, cheers and a standing ovation greeted Kristina's creators: two spangled Swedes, Benny Andersson...
...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," the rollicking girl-group number "American Man," the anthemish "Summer Rose" and a whole sheaf of romantic duets, the most memorable of which is Kristina's and Karl-Oskar...
...Teaming with lyricist Tim Rice (who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita with Andrew Lloyd Webber), they produced Chess as a two-disc album in 1984. The stage version spawned three Top 10 hits - "One Night in Bangkok," "Nobody's Side" and "I Know Him So Well" - and impressed many listeners as having the richest score of the decade. Or, he added defiantly, any decade since. Andersson, who had shown a mastery of the pop idiom as composer of the music for the ABBA songs (Ulvaeus wrote the words), tapped a symphonic romanticism that wedded Richard Rodgers to the brassier...
...here it was, last night, at Carnegie Hall, played before the blondest, most Scandinavian audience likely to be assembled in New York City, except, perhaps, for a Prairie Home Companion performance. And what a 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...
...Maybe people in Hollywood think of him as just another tough guy, wise-ass and cocksure, and figure that star acting is something that lucky people are born with and get well paid for. But think of some signal films of the past decade or so: Pulp Fiction, M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, Robert Rodriguez's Sin City. The Die Hard series, for that matter. At the center, there's Willis, playing men wracked with more psychic pain than they could ever dish...