| re: Jerome's Broadway vs OBC | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 04:31 am EDT 07/06/24 | |
| In reply to: re: Jerome's Broadway vs OBC - Broadwaywannabe 07:37 am EDT 07/04/24 | |
|
|
|
| The opening tempo of "Comedy Tonight" on the OBCR, which sets the pace for the whole number, is slower than the tempos heard on the cast recordings of the Lane-Zaks revival and Jerome Robbins' Broadway. I am pretty sure that tempo on the OBCR reflects, more or less, the stage tempo. In the video I find on youtube of “Comedy Tonight” in the Lane-Zaks revival (which I think is probably the same video to which you referred), the tempo is noticeably slower than it is on the cast recording of the production. On the recording, it takes 40 seconds to get from the first bar played by the orchestra in the song itself (not the opening fanfare) till Lane singing “Tragedy tomorrow / Comedy Tonight” (by which I mean till Lane finishes the word “tonight”) but the same section takes 46 seconds in the video. On the OBCR, the same section takes 45 seconds. But to just show how deceptive these things can be, I would have sworn that on the OLCR, it was faster than on the OBCR, but when I checked just now, that section was 45 seconds, exactly as on the OBCR. Jason Alexander is indeed the fastest at 38 seconds on the cast recording. It’s 39 seconds in the video on youtube that you mentioned. As for “Tumblers! Grumblers! Fumblers! Bumblers!,” one difference is that in the Lane-Zaks revival, the whole cast sings it, whereas in the original, Mostel sang it solo (and on the cast recording, he reversed the last two words). In the both the Lane-Zaks “Comedy Tonight” video and on the cast recording, the tempo slows down slightly there, but Mostel stays in tempo. Alexander, doing that part solo, also slows down slightly, both on the recording and in the video. And in doing that, they are following what Sondheim asks for in the published score, where he marked it poco rall. So if you don’t like the slight slowdown there, blame Sondheim. Btw, I just noticed that in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, they play the beginning of the Miles Gloriosus fanfare before Alexander says his first spoken line rather than the original fanfare heard there. As Chromolume noted, the score marking for the opening tempo is "Stately," which is a good description of the tempo on the OBCR but perhaps not so good a description for the tempos on the cast recordings of the Lane-Zaks revival and Jerome Robbins’ Broadway. But I think it is a good description of the tempo in the Lane-Zaks production video. I wonder if Sondheim insisted on the slower tempo in the Lane-Zaks revival, but then I would think he might have insisted on the slower tempo for the recording. But as Chromolume wrote, tempos are often (though not always) speeded up on cast recordings. I think it was in an issue of The Sondheim Review that Sondheim said that “A Little Priest” is often done too fast because of the tempo in the national-tour video, and that he was sorry he didn’t notice that it was too fast at the time of the filming. Of course, I would presume that he was at the recording session for the Lane-Zaks revival recording, and so he could have asked for the number to be recorded at the stage tempo, but perhaps, as with the Sweeney filming, he just didn’t notice. It’s also true that the tempos for several Sondheim songs are slower on the OBCRs than they have been on later recordings (and sometimes, though not always, later in the runs of the original productions). Re “Spread a Little Sunshine:” Putting aside the question of whether the song might have been performed a tad faster onstage, what happened with the recording of the song is that it was speeded up for the LP, and this has not been fixed for the CD releases. According to a friend who emailed me after he read your post, Leland Palmer was very unhappy about this — not about any slowing down, but the speeding up — because she thought she sounded like Minnie Mouse on the recording. I guess it was speeded up because even with that song speeded up, the complete recording is 52 minutes, and perhaps Motown was nervous that anything longer might negatively affect the sound quality, even though tons of earlier recordings had been longer without noticeable sound problems. There had even been plenty of recordings with total timings over an hour that sounded fine, but some companies still seem to have been getting nervous when recordings were over 50 minutes. |
|
| reply | |
|
|
|
| Previous: | re: Jerome's Broadway vs OBC - Broadwaywannabe 07:37 am EDT 07/04/24 |
| Next: | While thinking about this, I wish Charles Ludlam had lived to do a production - PlayWiz 07:04 pm EDT 07/02/24 |
| Thread: | |
Time to render: 0.010421 seconds.