ceelove

Move along, folks, nothing to see here.
I apparently have gone on a musical bender lately. I mean, the year leading up to suddenly conceiving Never After, I was always going through my own collection of musicals - probably about 70 at the time? - hungry for something to sing with. And while writing the script, and while the production has come together, I've been obsessing (not quietly) over my favorites, which my household has patiently tolerated. (The biggest unexpected side benefit of my very weird therapy? an improved singing voice, which I feel delighted and almost compelled to play with.)

But for the last month or two, musicals have been the mainstay of my listening. (And I listen to a LOT of music, peeps. I'd guess I've got upwards of 1600 CDs, but who knows?) And now I've finally tuckered out my poor old collection, and am abruptly scrounging for anything new that catches my attention. swapacd, lala, and used Amazon can hardly contain my interest.

In the last few weeks, I've acquired
- William Finn's A New Brain, which is by turns gorgeous, hilarious, brilliant, and heart-wrenching on a first listen. The man almost almost died of a brain tumor, and came back to life with a musical about the experience. One song, "Heart and Music," made me yearn to be writing another, right now.
- Bat Boy, which is the only thing I've ever heard that is clearly influenced by Little Shop of Horrors. It is the most fucked-up thing I've heard in years, and as you might imagine, I loves me some Ashman-and-Menken-influenced fuckupedness.
- Titanic, which I'd avoided for years because I thought it had something to do with That Movie, but which, surprise! is more like Ragtime in its scope and themes.
- Will Rogers Follies, a piece of fluff I liked in college, when I was probably the only person ever to investigate the library's collection of musicals. (The librarian loved me for it. I liked her so much, I wrote her as a lesbian librarian who incidentally saves the world in Infinite Monkeys.)
- Groovelily's Sleeping Beauty Wakes. To my joy, it has a song by the bad fairy in the tale. In another eight days, people will be hearing my bad fairy song.
- Wearing Someone Else's Clothes, a compilation by The New Hot Thing on Broadway, Jason Robert Brown.
- The soundtrack to Across the Universe, the movie using Beatles songs as a musical to tell a story wound up in events of the time.
- Mandy Patinkin Sings Sondheim, which is really pretty much all I could ask it to be.

I know, about seven of you like musicals, and only two of you are reading anymore. Ah well. I get that to most people, "musical" means Sound of Music or Lion King or something. To me, it means a unique way of telling a story, with its own rules and its own brilliant ways of breaking them. I love it as many people do photography - for its means of finding connection, communicating on many levels. Plus I get to sing with it!