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Post by partytentdown on Feb 4, 2019 5:52:00 GMT
I was interested to read about this in the Theatre Museum thread and, having done some googling, it seems to have been quite a prolific series until it tapers out around 2010. This seems strange as the person running it seems to have been so passionate, even being interviewed in the New York Times and the Guardian.
Does anyone remember it, or know why it stopped?
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Post by frankubelik on Feb 4, 2019 9:00:37 GMT
Yes, very fondly remembered. From FANNY at the old Theatre Museum to a sublime DO I HEAR A WALTZ, A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN and JUBILEE at the Barbican Cinema. I will never forget Kathryn Evans atop the piano singing SWEET ADELINE's songs. They were largely very well cast (Ms Evans, Susannah Fellowes, Louise Gold, Daniel Massey, Sam Kelly, Vivienne Martin) and apart from Ian Marshall Fisher's somewhat verbose introductions, they provided a welcome treat on Sunday afternoons.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2019 12:18:34 GMT
I discovered several great musicals through this series but after a while it became a bit expensive. In the earlier days it was a low-cost low-budget affair where you paid fringe-theatre prices and saw performers sitting on chairs with script in hand while a small group of musicians accompanied them for the musical numbers. By the end it was West End prices for a full orchestra, and it didn't feel like value for money any more. It lost the cosy atmosphere of discovery and became like watching a rehearsal.
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Post by tonyloco on Feb 4, 2019 14:51:41 GMT
I discovered several great musicals through this series but after a while it became a bit expensive. In the earlier days it was a low-cost low-budget affair where you paid fringe-theatre prices and saw performers sitting on chairs with script in hand while a small group of musicians accompanied them for the musical numbers. By the end it was West End prices for a full orchestra, and it didn't feel like value for money any more. It lost the cosy atmosphere of discovery and became like watching a rehearsal. |
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Post by Someone in a tree on Feb 4, 2019 15:12:35 GMT
I saw a good Knickerbocker Holiday and a fabulous Evening Primrose.
Gutted to have missed Love Life, such a great score. I have very fond memories of Opera North's over designed production years ago.
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Post by tonyloco on Feb 5, 2019 0:11:38 GMT
Forgive a loquacious old man but I looked up my diary note on Around the World and I feel the need to share it with the rest of the Board to emphasise just how much pleasure I got out of most of the 'Lost Musicals':
AROUND THE WORLD (Lilian Baylis) --’Around the World’, the unsuccessful and somewhat bizarre musical that Cole Porter wrote with Orson Wells in 1946 based on ‘Around the World in 80 Days’, was sheer heaven this afternoon at the Lilian Baylis Theatre in the Lost Musicals series. But much of the fun came from the fact that although the show was devised for some 50 performers, including Wells himself, and was lavishly staged with loads of elaborate stage effects as well as silent film interludes, it was done today by six men and two women in evening dress on a bare stage and proved to be absolutely hilarious, but that was partly because the six men between them played some 25 different characters, differentiated only by facial expressions, body postures and funny accents.
And the script is outrageously politically incorrect, with stereotype Indians (of the Asian kind), Chinese, Japanese, American Rednecks and American Red Indians all portrayed as caricatures that would today have got Wells put in jail! Two of the cameo female roles were played cleverly by men, and I invite you to imagine a middle-aged actor with a somewhat gruff manner -- and voice to match -- dressed in a black dinner suit, portraying Lola, the proprietress of a waterfront hostelry somewhere on the coast of California, singing a song called ‘If you look at me’ in the husky manner of Marlene Dietrich. Sounds frightful? No, it was brilliant! And as to Liang, a devious Chinese Madame who ran an opium den in Hong Kong...she was so funny that even now words fail me...and the scene was much more realistic than the one done with an elaborate set and full costumes in the recent stage production of The Letter. Such is the magic of theatre…when it is done right!
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