#frank wildhorn
I’ve watched “Dracula, The Musical” and it’s the first (out of five!) Wildhorn’s musical that didn’t make me cry – so, what the hell? I came here specially, for crying. Every musical before had at least one and most of the time two songs which squeezed a tear out of me, but here – nothing. Probably you just can’t make a thrilling musical out of such a boring book. By the way, reading the book (the first half of it, but still) helped me dearly to understand the plot, because otherwise, I’d probably be still wondering: “What the hell, there was a guy eating flies?”. Okay, they tried to make it a little more interesting than in the book, I would even say they tried to make a little more “Tanz der Vampire”-ish (this vampire musical appeared a few years earlier, so…) – (Spoilers!) they made Mina fall in love with the Count and him fall in love with her too so that he, not wanting the life of a vampire for her, asks her to kill him and she does and mourns him at the end. I checked – in the book, Harper and Quincey kill Dracula, and Mina was being a vampire and controlled by the count for a short time. By the way, getting back to the music, “The Heart is Slow to Learn” sounds so much like “His Eyes” and “Someone like you” (from “Jekyll and Hyde”) and “If I Could Fly” also sounds so familiar, but I can’t name a particular piece it reminds me of… Probably, I should stop listening to Wildhorn’s musicals for some time…
2010′s Musical Thoughts #7- Bonnie & Clyde
Bonnie & Clyde opened on Broadway on December 1st, 2011. With music by Jekyll and Hyde’s Frank Wildhorn, this musical is based on the true story of the titular criminal couple as they go on their famous robbing spree in Depression-era West Texas. A side plot follows the home life of Clyde’s brother Buck (another criminal), as his religious wife Blanche tries to get him to turn himself in after he and Clyde escape from jail. I’m gonna start this off by saying this feels like the most complete Frank Wildhorn musical. Jekyll and Hyde had an incredibly rich score, but a bare-bones book that sometimes doesn’t make sense. Its universally hated 2013 revival replaced the wonderful score with new heavy metal orchestrations and screeches that really suck. Wonderland was an interesting concept for the first half of Act One then quickly became one of the worst musicals ever made. Death Note (which never went to Broadway) is, well, based on Death Note (I tend to stay away from musicals based on manga). Bonnie & Clyde just feels complete. The score is wonderful, the book does an incredible job of showing the humanity behind two of the most infamous criminals in American history, and Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan, two of the best actors working today, starred in the title roles. However, the show was slow at the box office and closed after only a four week run on Broadway. It still had an audience however, and wasn’t a complete bomb like most other Frank Wildhorn shows (it’s interesting to me that Jekyll and Hyde ran for four years and never recouped its 7 million dollar investment). What went wrong? It can be assumed audiences just saw Frank Wildhorn and immediately dismissed it. In his NYT review of the Jekyll and Hyde revival a couple of years later, Charles Isherwood referred to Frank Wildhorn as “the crabgrass of Broadway.” And after five critically panned box office bombs before Bonnie & Clyde’s debut, I would have agreed with him. However, this is different from his other works. Bonnie & Clyde is better than anything Wildhorn has done before or since, and it’s a damn shame it never got its due on Broadway.
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On the past weeks composer Frank Wildhorn released on his IG brief piano performances with some of his musical pieces. I really want to share with you friends to enjoy some minutes in good music at the comfy of our homes with musicals we love through gorgeous arrangements.
# from {Jekyll&Hyde}
#? from {The man who laughs}
# from the homonym work
#medley between / / ' from {Dracula}
# medley between / / from {Camille Claudel}
# medley between / / from {the Count of Monte Cristo}
# medley between / ' ? / from { The Scarlet Pimpernel }
# from {artus Excalibur}
jstage.dreamful .org/dracula-2011/
Or click the link under “source”.
*Subtitles only, the video is not included.
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Translator’s note:
This translation was done based on the Broadway script, and I have used the original lines whenever possible. The songs were translated aurally, and I have tried to keep the meaning and word choices as close to the original as possible.
Please do not re-upload the subtitles anywhere or put them up on video streaming sites! Link to my post if you want to share.
