The Wild Blog in the West

After completing my review of Love Never Dies , despite finding the Australian production boring, I became curious about the original London cast recording.  So I wasted perfectly good money in order to have a listen, and came to develop a rather twisted fascination with the recording, and the musical as a whole.  Not fascination as in I suddenly found it good, but in that I wondered how it could have been made less bad. It turns out that the Australian version is, in many ways, a significant improvement over the original.  The original is a train wreck.  That being said, it contained some interesting nuggets, and provided for some interesting contrasts, which I've detailed below. 1.  In my last review, I complained that Christine was "so passive, it's insulting," but remarkably, the Love Never Dies Australian production actually gives her more spine than she had in the original London production.  In the original production, when Christine first sees...

For my articles about Les Miserables , I discussed the various positives and negatives of the different albums, at least five if you don't count the original French concept album and the movie soundtrack.  One reader asked me what album tracks I used to create my idea of the definitive Les Miz soundtrack.  I'll go through each track below, with an explanation as to why I chose it over the others.  Note that I created my "Ultra" version before the movie soundtrack was released, but I'll give some thoughts as to which of the movie tracks would be best suited for an "Ultra" version. Overture/Work Song: Broadway Cast.  I use this album for a lot of the early Valjean tracks because I feel as though Wilkinson is in the best of voice here, though I suppose London would work as well.  While John Own Jones sounds great on the Les Miserables Live! album, I consider Wilkinson to be the definitive Valjean. On Parole/The Bishop: Tenth Anniversary Cast.  This is...

This is a bit of a cheat, I admit.  Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Never Dies is not a proper movie musical.  Rather, the cinematic version of this sequel to The Phantom of the Opera  is merely a filmed performance of the stage musical.  However, having done such an in-depth review of Phantom , I can't pass this one by. Often, the stage musical is filmed after a botched attempt at adapting it to the screen, to demonstrate how the musical is supposed to be.  Such was the case with the Final Performance of Rent , and the 25th Anniversary performance of The Phantom of the Opera .  Other times, the stage musical is filmed so that those who likely will never be able to see it live can still see what it's about.  That's likely the case with Love Never Dies , which won't be arriving on Broadway any time soon. It almost feels cruel to kick a musical when it's down.  The critical shredding of  Love Never Dies has been universal.  Most of it is ...