Word: staging
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...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 and Bjorn Ulvaeus - once, and always, the guys from ABBA...
...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's "I'll Be Waiting There." Not to bring the show to the stage - or at least to a CD or a DVD of this concert - would deprive audiences of the most luscious score since ... well, Chess...
...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...
...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 to be the definitive reading...
...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...