Rags - Hope Mill MCR / Park Theatre

Unfortunately that's what happens when you take a show whose biggest asset is the score and then start hacking away at that score in order to make it fit into a brand new book. The title song in this version of Rags, for example, doesn't quite work, because most of it is being sung by a character it wasn't written for - originally it was mostly sung by Bella, Rebecca wasn't in it at all, and the lines Bella sings were sung by her father. I understand the impetus to make it into the Act One finale, because it's a really good song, and I understand the impetus to rewrite the show so that it's Rebecca's story first and foremost, because the reviews of just about every single previous version (and there have been many) have complained that the script tries to focus on too many plot strands, but that song is way out of character for Rebecca: it's not that it's implausible that she should be frustrated at living in poverty in a Lower East Side tenement, but that level of outburst is outside what has been established about her character by that point in the show. The song was written to be (mostly) sung by a teenage girl, not a woman who has watched her husband get murdered during a pogrom and then somehow found the strength to get her and her young son out of Russia and into the US despite not having enough money for the entry visa. In a similar vein, I understand the impetus to make Children of the Wind into Rebecca's big statement at the very end of the show, but it doesn't make a great deal of musical sense to let us hear the verse of the song halfway through act one and hold the refrain back until almost the end of Act Two - all that achieves is to make both parts of the song sound like there's something missing. This rewrite, which I think is now the definitive licenced version of the show, solves one problem (unfocused script), but creates several new ones. I liked it more than you did, but there are too many places in this version of the script where it's obvious you're watching a cut-and-paste job, and the actors don't entirely manage to paper over the cracks.

The recording, which was made a few years after the Broadway production flopped, and which features most of the Broadway cast with Julia Migenes replacing Teresa Stratas as Rebecca, is absolutely glorious. It could well be that this is one of those shows that's always going to work better in concert.