Standing At The Sky’s Edge - Crucible/NT/Gillian Lynne

Thoughts are with you on your recovery alece10…always enjoy your posts 👍

That's easy.
It's the Imelda Staunton recording of Gypsy.
And ideally singing along loudly as you are doing the ironing, which is a task I dislike.

Yeah, this is a good show which is hampered by poor music. Almost every song stops it in it's tracks, and doesn't move the story along nor shine light on a characters thoughts nor entertain in some other way. It's such a good story that it over-shines the mediocre soundtrack, with a better songwriter behind this it could've been a spectacular piece of work. I love a play that weaves different timelines together, I loved the scope of this, I loved the subject matter, I just completely meh'd out on 80% of the songs which for a musical is unacceptable. 

This was great! Really enjoyed the songs and the acting. Moving in places

Which record are you on? Do you have any solo bits?

Out of today's matinee and I was beyond impressed with this one. I've only skimmed this thread because I didn't want to know too much before going in so didn't know anything about the score. Reading some comments here about how it stops the show dead and doesn't move the plot forward, I will agree with to a point. It's absolutely not a conventional musical theatre score and the songs, while maybe not moving characters along in words, does it in tone. It's almost like a film score with words (if that makes any sense at all) and it's something I'd never seen done before and man, was I a fan. That last scene was like a heavy punch to my gut and I was still crying a bit walking outside.
The entire production from set design to cast to orchestrations is one of the best I've seen in a while. "Guys & Dolls" last night and this today (with "Shirley Valentine" in an hour), I feel very lucky this weekend.

Yup and I tried for the Friday Rush and there were 1500+ people ahead of me and it took me over an hour to get through (needless to say, there were no rush tickets left by then). I haven't tried the rush very often at the NT but I've never experienced numbers like those, unless I was just a lot more lucky those other few times than I realised?

I am absolutely floored. Watching the ending ‘dawn breaks’, I felt like I was watching Sunday in the Park with George, RENT or next to normal for the first time. If there was a UK Pulitzer Prize for drama this show would win. The show is not really a musical in the traditional NYC/UK sense of the word. It’s a play with music - the music is used much more to create atmosphere and emotion than to forward a story or even explore a character. And the novelty of the songs and composer is it is meant to authentically convey what the ‘world’ of Sheffield feels like.

Some of those performances my god - the ‘Joy’ actor has such a rich, deep instrument she sounds like a rising star. And the person who sings ‘open up your door’ sounds like a modern day Judy garland.

I am rooting for best musical Olivier and some other wins - and it’s the kind of thing I would love to see packaged up and taken to NYC for a limited short run with the entire cast and marketed as an prestigious innovative British new show…kind of the way August: Osage County toured with some of the original principles overseas.

Now, two years from now you might be able to quote me and call me an idiot but I don’t think there’s any reality this could be successful in NYC. The financials of a show this massive would mean they would need Lady Gaga and Beyoncé to star in it to make money and interest people. As a New Yorker who spends a significant amount of time in the UK, I think this is such a uniquely British show (again, from my American perspective) that I just don’t see it translating to enough of an audience in America that would make a run worth it, financially. Plus to keep the show this large, there’s only a few theatres that could handle it and they’d need to sell out every show to at least 500+ more people than the Olivier can handle.
So there’s no reality where a “short run” would ever work for this. Sadly.

This Show Already has Active Plans for a future London Run next year and they are very optimistic considering how Well received the current run has been with a strong Word of mouth.

I don't think Scalling down the show would be to much of a problem. They could cut down the number of Supernumerarys and the Set in The Olivier Has Large spaces to the sides that are not really needed.

Depends on who you ask. 

A West End transfer of a show this size will need broad appeal (and more than a handful of tourists) to see a profit. I can't see that happening but if they try, good luck to them. 

Am at the National and because of technical issues across all 3 theatres, none of the theatres have yet to let people in. Everyone still in the bars/foyer areas. I wonder if they'll cancel the performance??