Earlier this year a musical based on Louisa May Alcott's novel opened at
Broadway's Virginia Theatre that was clearly pitched to the women who love
the book on which it is based, and those who would accompany such women to
theater. It turned out that there weren't enough of those to keep the show
running beyond 137 performances, and it closed despite a Tony Award
nomination for its star, Sutton Foster. It was a handsome, substantial and
highly enjoyable production (click here to
read our review of the Broadway production.) A national tour has been
mounted, and while Sutton Foster isn't making the trip, the marvelous
Maureen McGovern will reprise her role as the mother of the little women. It
has been booked for 2006 in Baltimore's Hippodrome for April and then the
Kennedy Center for June and July. |
Storyline: A musical based on Louisa May Alcott's novel of four sisters
in Civil War era New England. Told through the eyes of Jo, the sister who
wants to be a writer, are the stories of the sisters, their mother, their
neighbors and the people Jo meets when she moves to the big city to try to
make it as a writer.
This recording captures the full sound of the
score and the energetic performances of the original cast including Sutton Foster, who made her mark as the gutsy,
spunky girl from a small mid-western town trying to make it in the big city
in Thoroughly Modern Millie. Here she's Jo, the gutsy,
spunky girl from a medium sized New England town. The character traits she
demonstrated on stage come through the recording very well. Her big numbers
like "The Fire Within Me" are sit-up-and-take-notice moments, that if not
show-stoppers, are certainly show-makers. She's enough of a presence on which to build a show like this, and she pulls it off very
nicely. She gets a great assist, as well, from Maureen McGovern in the role
of her mother. John Hickock contributes a well developed performance as the
professor that Jo meets in the New York boarding house, and Danny Gurwin
comes across on the recording even better than he did on stage.
The score itself is a bit of a mixed bag. The
choices of moments to musicalize seem effective, but not all the songs are
strong enough for their slots. There is a clever show-within-a-show number
with its intriguing double voicing which opens the first act, but the same
concept is used - and, thus, overused - as the opening of the second act. "Our Finest Dreams" is a fine
relationship-establishing number, "Off to Massachusetts" a nice specialty
number and there is magic when McGovern sings "Here Alone" or
when Sutton stands and delivers "The Fire Within Me" as Act Two's high
point. But so many of the others are too obvious attempts to follow
predictable formulas: the Act I ending anthem "Astonishing" sounds very much
like a song from an animated movie, "I'd Be Delighted" seems like a Sound
of Music moment, and "Days of Plenty" gives McGovern a "You'll Never
Walk Alone" type big finish of her own.
Kim Sharnberg's orchestrations were played by
a pit orchestra of thirteen during the Broadway run. For the recording, more
strings have been added to increase the lush and full sound that gives a
feeling of substance. The booklet includes enough pictures to capture the
way Catherine Zuber's period costumes carried you back to an ideal of middle
class respectability in the 1860s. A few wider shots would have been nice so
you could see set designer Derek McLane's stage-flanking scaffold and his
forced-perspective backdrop of the roof over the attic to which Jo withdraws
to write.
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