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.