Merrily We Roll Along
Jun. 23rd, 2024 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shrimpchipsssaAnother Sondheim! Another late musical; this was supposed to be for May.
I was going to watch a slime tutorial bootleg for this but I'm gonna be real with you I cannot be bothered. I know this is a beloved and lauded musical but it just isn't really sticking with me, the musical motifs are employed very nicely but they're just not to my taste I think.
The premise is about three friends who grow apart as fame and success take the place of genuine connection. Told in backwards order which I should be a sucker for seeing how obsessed I am with The Last Five Years. Maybe Sonheim's musicals are just a bit hit or miss for my taste in melodies? Because I do prize melody above all else.
Jason Robert Brown (The Last Five Years, Parade) is I think a musician who is particularly good at melodies. Mitski and PUP are also standouts. I thought my love for PUP meant that I loved pop punk as a genre but really it's just that their melodies are so clear and a cut above the rest (and also that I enjoy pop punk). It's just that Mitski sees melody clear in her mind, as an old YouTube comment put it.
It isn't that Sondheim is bad at melodies, I actually think he does really unusual ones. There's this thing where if you've listened to music for long enough you can kinda guess the note (or the options of notes) that's going to come next in a song if it was going to resolve the phrase in a typical way. Sondheim though tends to surprise. Here is an interesting YouTube video about some of the music theory behind why Sonheim's melodies are so interesting. It's something that when it's to my taste (Company) fills me with total delight, but when it isn't, or the motifs are almost overused (Into the Woods), I tire of it.
Merrily We Roll is on Broadway and has won a bunch of Tonys. A week before the Tonys I looked up ticket prices just to see and the cheapest seats available were $350. Post-Tonys I've heard the cheapest seats available are in the $400s. HP markup plus the Tonys markup.
I was going to watch a slime tutorial bootleg for this but I'm gonna be real with you I cannot be bothered. I know this is a beloved and lauded musical but it just isn't really sticking with me, the musical motifs are employed very nicely but they're just not to my taste I think.
The premise is about three friends who grow apart as fame and success take the place of genuine connection. Told in backwards order which I should be a sucker for seeing how obsessed I am with The Last Five Years. Maybe Sonheim's musicals are just a bit hit or miss for my taste in melodies? Because I do prize melody above all else.
Jason Robert Brown (The Last Five Years, Parade) is I think a musician who is particularly good at melodies. Mitski and PUP are also standouts. I thought my love for PUP meant that I loved pop punk as a genre but really it's just that their melodies are so clear and a cut above the rest (and also that I enjoy pop punk). It's just that Mitski sees melody clear in her mind, as an old YouTube comment put it.
It isn't that Sondheim is bad at melodies, I actually think he does really unusual ones. There's this thing where if you've listened to music for long enough you can kinda guess the note (or the options of notes) that's going to come next in a song if it was going to resolve the phrase in a typical way. Sondheim though tends to surprise. Here is an interesting YouTube video about some of the music theory behind why Sonheim's melodies are so interesting. It's something that when it's to my taste (Company) fills me with total delight, but when it isn't, or the motifs are almost overused (Into the Woods), I tire of it.
Merrily We Roll is on Broadway and has won a bunch of Tonys. A week before the Tonys I looked up ticket prices just to see and the cheapest seats available were $350. Post-Tonys I've heard the cheapest seats available are in the $400s. HP markup plus the Tonys markup.
