TheatreBoard Listening Party - 2. Anyone Can Whistle

I agree. As such I’m going to put forward a suggestion of either The Secret Garden or R&H Cinderella - sadly Secret Garden at The Palladium might not happen now and with ALW announcing his own Cinderella, it might be worth revisiting another version of it in musical form.

I might need an explanation of how Spotify works first!

Edit - the below only applies to smartphones.

Actually it appears you can only play music on shuffle on Spotify in the free version, so I was wrong on that. Not going to work on a musical (although that’s how I listened to Love Never Dies first and only realised at the end...) Still, most streaming services have cast albums and is still the easiest way to do this.

I listen to most of my cast recordings on YouTube. It won't have everything especially if it's very old or very new/popular because the former probably just won't be widespread enough to have someone upload it and the latter because it will probably get taken down for copyright reasons but it has a lot.

Great idea!
I’d love to suggest Beetlejuice as an option at some point. I purposely didn’t listen to it so I could go in blind and then the performance I was due to see got cancelled due to the shutdown.

To be clear, this restriction only applies to smartphones - you can listen to albums and playlists in the correct order (with ads) in the free version on tablets, in the desktop app, or at play.spotify.com in your desktop browser.

That's a lot of recordings. I already have several of them.

I think I'm already registered, as I had to do so to listen to some clips linked to on ENB's website a few months ago. I just don't know how to find music on it without a link. Oh well, I will shortly have plenty of time to try to find out!

So I say let’s just go for it and see where we land. Tomorrow is Monday and it’s as good a day as any to try something - so let’s start with Beetlejuice as suggested by Mark

TheatreBoard LP1: Beetlejuice







Wikipedia:



Conversation Points:

1. Favourite song
2. Favourite lyric
3. Pick a role and dream cast it
4. Pick 3 songs to be performed at ‘West End Live’
5. Nominate a cast album for consideration for the next ‘listening party’


Beetlejuice has never been performed in the UK so I’m assuming that most of us have never seen or heard it yet. So let’s just run with it and see where we end up over the next few days. 

Happy listening! 

Here's a youtube link, for any who don't want to use Spotify: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFz9HEJrpQx-29bqIXa8i4bt9nfjuds61

Alright I've done a first listen and it was just fine. None of the songs have really stuck with me and no lines stuck out as particularly clever or funny which is a shame but I imagine obviously that you're missing a lot with only vocals to carry the performances here. I've never seen the film Beetlejuice, however, so obviously I'm going to be missing a lot of the references but I did read the plot summary on Wikipedia as I listened and of course I knew bits and pieces just from pop culture references to the film. I don't know how I feel about Sophia Anne Caruso as Lydia if I'm honest. Her phrasing is quite off-putting. I assume it's a character choice or at least if it isn't it seems to work for that kind of edgy teenager character but it doesn't make for easy listening. But overall it wasn't bad, I just didn't find it particularly good either but maybe I need a few more listens to fully appreciate it.

Nothing really stood out to me to be honest though so I'm struggling to answer the questions. My favourite song is probably Ready Set, Not Yet because I liked the fast-paced parts which I thought were cleverly written and a cool change of pace to a normally safely written score (though there's flashes of interesting stuff like that throughout the show) but there are still some clunky lyrics in there. I couldn't really pick a favourite lyric though because like I said overall nothing really sticks out to me and no one I'm a big fan of would really fit in this show so I've not got any ideas on dream casting. If they were doing West End Live they would almost certainly do The Whole Being Dead Thing (I think that's been their go to whenever they do stuff like that for the Broadway show) and I imagine Dead Mom to give whoever plays Lydia a spotlight and then Day-O for the nostalgia factor.

My nomination for the next listening party is a show I've never seen that had a small run Off-Broadway a couple of years ago I think. It's called Fortress of Solitude. It's based on the book by Jonathan Lethem which I've also never read so the cast recording is all I have to go off of but I really like the musical style it embraces and the themes that echo throughout the show. I think it'd be nice to do since it's pretty obscure as far as I can tell so it would be a big jump from the massive hit that Beetlejuice was. If not, an older musical might be nice as well to contrast the recency of Beetlejuice, maybe something original too, just for some variety.

I really don't think this is a thread for me but I'll attempt to at least listen to some of the things that get posted. I don't really listen to music much so listening to something I know little about isn't easy. If it's a show I've seen and enjoyed it's easier. I used to listen to EP on Sunday so did get to hear songs from musicals that were new to me but recently if I'm going to listen to something (mainly only during long car journeys) it's going to be something I know and love.

However I did give this a go and got to track 14, I found it hard to get into and to be honest I'd need to sit there doing absolutely nothing else listening to all the words if I was to appreciate it properly and I wasn't. It ended up becoming background sound that I wasn't actually listening to, maybe I'll try again later but for now I can't answer the questions asked. The bit that did manage to get my attention though was Invisible (reprise)/On the Roof.

That was rather fun: some bright, bouncy songs to lift the day with a couple of lyrics that genuinely made me laugh out loud ("You should stick around and kill him. [What?] Nothing"). I particularly liked "Ready, Set, Not Yet", "No Reason", "Say My Name" and "Creepy Old Guy". (One of the YouTube comments for the last of those was "This is going to my 'musical songs I would get sued for singing' list".)

I never got around to watching the film so I had to follow along with a synopsis to work out what was going on. It helps a lot.

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How often should we do these? We ought to space them out enough that people have a chance to listen and comment without feeling that they're left behind and we don't want it to be a chore trying to keep up, but if they're too infrequent people will probably not bother.

I did listen to a few tracks some weeks ago but have forgotten them already.
Will download tonight and have a listen properly