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Apr. 21st, 2009 09:43 pmAndrew Lloyd Webber’s 60th Birthday Party
I went to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Birthday In The Park on the 15th of September. His actual birthday(as he mentioned when he came onstage at the end) was 6 months previously, but the BBC Proms had just finished the night before so they got the outdoor stage, fireworks and broadcasting equipment for a knock-down rate by leaving it up for an extra night rather than taking it down and putting it all back up again.
The concert was clearly not arranged by the Lord himself – aside from the fact that he has complained about not being involved artistically, there were two songs from Starlight Express(of which he has many times demonstrated that he is embarrassed), and a smattering of original drafts from the bottom drawer in there. John Barrowman’s links between songs often contained what sounded like deep, dark secrets that Lloyd Webber himself wouldn’t really like broadcast, so they were actually interesting.
The quality of the tech and attitude towards the audience was surprisingly poor. I was disappointed with the BBC. The seething mass of the crowd had to funnel down to something like 8 ticket-checking gates before being released into the main ground. The crush was really quite claustrophobic – once in the middle of it, there was no way you could have got out again until you were through the barriers.
The whole thing seemed very much geared towards the eventual radio broadcast and DVD release(though I hear that there may not be one), at the expense of the live audience’s experience. The sound check had been done, you could hear it from outside before they started letting people in, but what came out of the speakers when the concert started was atrocious. Levels were constantly being fiddled with(and I don’t mean tweaked – someone was turning those knobs all the way round to see what happened), channels didn’t come up on time, and for some unknown reason the sound kept panning from one side of the park to the other. No doubt each channel was recorded separately to be mixed properly later, but if they had been treating it as a live broadcast, it might not have been quite so obvious that the audience were there to provide ambiance and revenue. The slickness of a live performance just wasn’t there. When Barrowman fluffed a line in a link, it would have been possible for him to just repeat the sentence and have it edited out later. But because this was basically a giant TV studio, he’d go back and re-do the entire link and sod the live audience – it’s not for them, it’s for the microphones. He did apologise every time, though.
Since they had a captive audience, the beeb took the opportunity to show us half an hour of adverts before the concert started. You don’t realise how much you depend on the mute button until you don’t have it. We’d managed to find a spot and lay the picnic blanket down on it near a pretty sophisticated bunch, and not in close proximity to any squealy fangirls at all, which was lovely. It’s so much easier to relax and enjoy the show when you aren’t waiting for the moment when someone will scream in your ear.
The concert itself was of mixed quality. I won’t go into point-by-point detail(for once), but what became increasingly apparent was that those who were performing songs they had done onstage shone, and those who were semi-famous and singing a song because it was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber tended towards wobbly and dull. The researcher who wrote the links between the songs needs to have Words spoken to them though, as they got some basic details wrong. “Love Changes Everything” is not a title song, the title is “Aspects of Love”, and the original cast of “Starlight Express” did not wear rollerblades as in 1984 they hadn’t been invented yet.
In what turned out to be a contrast to the majority of the concert, it started as billed, with the Jesus Christ Superstar overture. I was surprised that it wasn’t Phantom, what with the way they always crash a few organ chords any time the Lord appears on television, looking patient. It’s real spine-tingling stuff, though perhaps it should have gone into Heaven on their Minds or at least have a bigger pause before Superstar, which follows the Lloyd Webber convention of the big concluding song of the show being more or less a reprise of the overture, just with words(see also Cats and Starlight, and Phantom…).
“Superstar” sounded a bit like they were starting the same piece again when Joss Stone bounded onto the stage to sing in Judas’ part, and realised that she probably should have had a look at the lyrics before trying to sing the song. But she is a soul singer, and there was an autocue, so she got through alright by repeating the lines she did know over and over again in varying pitches and degrees of intensity and jumping around a lot. She would have been less exposed if the sound crew had brought up the choirs(they had 2, Capital Voices and the Crouch End Chorus) when they were supposed to. The cameramen remembered to cut to them, so their faces were up on screen, singing their hearts out, but there wasn’t any evidence of them from the speakers.
In direct contrast, Steve Balsamo’s “Gethsemene” was really, really good. He looks like a classical wet European Jesus and he can seriously act. He never lost the tune, never over-acted and hit all those top notes beautifully. Shame his channel kept cutting out. I saw the ’97 Lyceum production, and I wish I could remember more of it – if this is anything to go by, plus the fact that everyone says so, it must have been fantastic.
Idina Menzel looked very nervous singing ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’. She was very experimental with the rhythm of the piece, to limited success. I know it’s fun to do, I do it a lot, but it doesn’t always work. I didn’t feel she got the character of Eva under her skin. When the crowd roared(in all the right places), she looked embarrassed and fiddled with the front of her dress – Eva needs to take the screaming adulation with a serene smile. She was moved from immediately after Julian Lloyd Webber to near the end of the bill to sing “The Unexpected Song”, and by the second word it became clear why. It was so that he wouldn’t skewer her with his spare bow and sing the song himself through his cello. She actually sounded(and bear in mind that there was an autocue, you could see it through the harp when the camera at the back of the stage was on screen) like she had forgotten which song beginning with the word ‘I’ she was singing, and like she’d never found out what the rhythm was supposed to be in the first place.
Julian Lloyd Webber and his Sextet played Variations 1-4, and since John Barrowman didn’t entirely go into the origins of the composition, it may have confused some that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s better-looking(though in this case that just means ‘a bit less like him, and a bit more like Boris Johnston’) younger brother was wearing a Leighton Orient football shirt. Though Barrowman went into Lloyd Webber’s desire to write an entirely instrumental album of music, he didn’t mention that it was because he’d lost a bet with Julian over the outcome of a football match.
Not even on the running order was Shona Daley, singing and dancing Buenes Aires. Breaking the cast/non cast standard, she hadn’t been in Evita and yet was wonderful. She understudied Idina Menzel in Wicked, and now keeps the stage nice and shiny with her. She had such a sense of joy that she was performing, going into a minor dance break with gusto, and a rather better voice.
Dean Collinson sang the new Joseph song “King of my Heart” with such conviction and finesse that he entirely justified being the only performer to be in costume. The song itself is a little too clever to pass for authentic Elvis, it has too many semitones. He has brilliant mic technique.
The star performance of the night, though, had to be the weather. Not only was it dry and warm, with a stunning sun-dog before dark, but when Elaine Paige was singing “Memory”, the full moon(which had perfectly Jellicle strands of cloud wisping across it) blacked out. I don’t know how they arranged that, but the effect was magical.
Overall it was a fun evening, and not so tedious with the studio-audience vibe that it was unbearable. The running order could have done with a little revision for the sake of cohesion and pace - having a finale song as the second to last number was a debatable choice when the last number was the distinctly down-beat Memory – but I’m happy I was there.
I went to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Birthday In The Park on the 15th of September. His actual birthday(as he mentioned when he came onstage at the end) was 6 months previously, but the BBC Proms had just finished the night before so they got the outdoor stage, fireworks and broadcasting equipment for a knock-down rate by leaving it up for an extra night rather than taking it down and putting it all back up again.
The concert was clearly not arranged by the Lord himself – aside from the fact that he has complained about not being involved artistically, there were two songs from Starlight Express(of which he has many times demonstrated that he is embarrassed), and a smattering of original drafts from the bottom drawer in there. John Barrowman’s links between songs often contained what sounded like deep, dark secrets that Lloyd Webber himself wouldn’t really like broadcast, so they were actually interesting.
The quality of the tech and attitude towards the audience was surprisingly poor. I was disappointed with the BBC. The seething mass of the crowd had to funnel down to something like 8 ticket-checking gates before being released into the main ground. The crush was really quite claustrophobic – once in the middle of it, there was no way you could have got out again until you were through the barriers.
The whole thing seemed very much geared towards the eventual radio broadcast and DVD release(though I hear that there may not be one), at the expense of the live audience’s experience. The sound check had been done, you could hear it from outside before they started letting people in, but what came out of the speakers when the concert started was atrocious. Levels were constantly being fiddled with(and I don’t mean tweaked – someone was turning those knobs all the way round to see what happened), channels didn’t come up on time, and for some unknown reason the sound kept panning from one side of the park to the other. No doubt each channel was recorded separately to be mixed properly later, but if they had been treating it as a live broadcast, it might not have been quite so obvious that the audience were there to provide ambiance and revenue. The slickness of a live performance just wasn’t there. When Barrowman fluffed a line in a link, it would have been possible for him to just repeat the sentence and have it edited out later. But because this was basically a giant TV studio, he’d go back and re-do the entire link and sod the live audience – it’s not for them, it’s for the microphones. He did apologise every time, though.
Since they had a captive audience, the beeb took the opportunity to show us half an hour of adverts before the concert started. You don’t realise how much you depend on the mute button until you don’t have it. We’d managed to find a spot and lay the picnic blanket down on it near a pretty sophisticated bunch, and not in close proximity to any squealy fangirls at all, which was lovely. It’s so much easier to relax and enjoy the show when you aren’t waiting for the moment when someone will scream in your ear.
The concert itself was of mixed quality. I won’t go into point-by-point detail(for once), but what became increasingly apparent was that those who were performing songs they had done onstage shone, and those who were semi-famous and singing a song because it was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber tended towards wobbly and dull. The researcher who wrote the links between the songs needs to have Words spoken to them though, as they got some basic details wrong. “Love Changes Everything” is not a title song, the title is “Aspects of Love”, and the original cast of “Starlight Express” did not wear rollerblades as in 1984 they hadn’t been invented yet.
In what turned out to be a contrast to the majority of the concert, it started as billed, with the Jesus Christ Superstar overture. I was surprised that it wasn’t Phantom, what with the way they always crash a few organ chords any time the Lord appears on television, looking patient. It’s real spine-tingling stuff, though perhaps it should have gone into Heaven on their Minds or at least have a bigger pause before Superstar, which follows the Lloyd Webber convention of the big concluding song of the show being more or less a reprise of the overture, just with words(see also Cats and Starlight, and Phantom…).
“Superstar” sounded a bit like they were starting the same piece again when Joss Stone bounded onto the stage to sing in Judas’ part, and realised that she probably should have had a look at the lyrics before trying to sing the song. But she is a soul singer, and there was an autocue, so she got through alright by repeating the lines she did know over and over again in varying pitches and degrees of intensity and jumping around a lot. She would have been less exposed if the sound crew had brought up the choirs(they had 2, Capital Voices and the Crouch End Chorus) when they were supposed to. The cameramen remembered to cut to them, so their faces were up on screen, singing their hearts out, but there wasn’t any evidence of them from the speakers.
In direct contrast, Steve Balsamo’s “Gethsemene” was really, really good. He looks like a classical wet European Jesus and he can seriously act. He never lost the tune, never over-acted and hit all those top notes beautifully. Shame his channel kept cutting out. I saw the ’97 Lyceum production, and I wish I could remember more of it – if this is anything to go by, plus the fact that everyone says so, it must have been fantastic.
Idina Menzel looked very nervous singing ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’. She was very experimental with the rhythm of the piece, to limited success. I know it’s fun to do, I do it a lot, but it doesn’t always work. I didn’t feel she got the character of Eva under her skin. When the crowd roared(in all the right places), she looked embarrassed and fiddled with the front of her dress – Eva needs to take the screaming adulation with a serene smile. She was moved from immediately after Julian Lloyd Webber to near the end of the bill to sing “The Unexpected Song”, and by the second word it became clear why. It was so that he wouldn’t skewer her with his spare bow and sing the song himself through his cello. She actually sounded(and bear in mind that there was an autocue, you could see it through the harp when the camera at the back of the stage was on screen) like she had forgotten which song beginning with the word ‘I’ she was singing, and like she’d never found out what the rhythm was supposed to be in the first place.
Julian Lloyd Webber and his Sextet played Variations 1-4, and since John Barrowman didn’t entirely go into the origins of the composition, it may have confused some that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s better-looking(though in this case that just means ‘a bit less like him, and a bit more like Boris Johnston’) younger brother was wearing a Leighton Orient football shirt. Though Barrowman went into Lloyd Webber’s desire to write an entirely instrumental album of music, he didn’t mention that it was because he’d lost a bet with Julian over the outcome of a football match.
Not even on the running order was Shona Daley, singing and dancing Buenes Aires. Breaking the cast/non cast standard, she hadn’t been in Evita and yet was wonderful. She understudied Idina Menzel in Wicked, and now keeps the stage nice and shiny with her. She had such a sense of joy that she was performing, going into a minor dance break with gusto, and a rather better voice.
Dean Collinson sang the new Joseph song “King of my Heart” with such conviction and finesse that he entirely justified being the only performer to be in costume. The song itself is a little too clever to pass for authentic Elvis, it has too many semitones. He has brilliant mic technique.
The star performance of the night, though, had to be the weather. Not only was it dry and warm, with a stunning sun-dog before dark, but when Elaine Paige was singing “Memory”, the full moon(which had perfectly Jellicle strands of cloud wisping across it) blacked out. I don’t know how they arranged that, but the effect was magical.
Overall it was a fun evening, and not so tedious with the studio-audience vibe that it was unbearable. The running order could have done with a little revision for the sake of cohesion and pace - having a finale song as the second to last number was a debatable choice when the last number was the distinctly down-beat Memory – but I’m happy I was there.
