Blog Filter By song spotlight

When I was twenty years old, one of my high school friends got drunk and fell through the open window of a college dorm room and died. Everyone was drunk that night because it was one of those school-condoned “first-day-of-spring” rituals that colleges love. Community bonding, right? I took the call in my boyfriend’s dorm room. He had a single that year. It was small, impersonal. I rubbed my feet against the cold linoleum while I listened to another friend sob through the information. The phone can ring and your life can change. Except it doesn’t change all that much because you’re still alive. 

The post Behind the Lyrics of "Go Tonight": Grief and Nothingness appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

Musical theatre, from an outsider’s perspective, tends to get flack for not being “serious” art. And certainly in the pre-Okalahoma! heyday, excepting the occasional Showboat, musical theatre was dramatically simplistic and rather style over substance. Similarly, comedy as an art form has also tended to suffer when paired against heavy drama, so a musical comedy […]

The post SONG SPOTLIGHT: Where Am I Now appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

I’ve spent a lot of time in this series talking about the Golden Age Musical’s influence on our NMT writers. I’ve also touched upon stand-alone songs before, but that particular song was still very much in the classical musical theatre mold. Drew Gasparini’s “Valley High,” on the other hand, is influenced by a different musical […]

The post SONG SPOTLIGHT: Valley High appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

Rewrites are essential in every storytelling medium, but theatre remains the one where the most can change for a product’s legacy. A film can only be edited so much; television is so immediate that it’s forever fixed. A play or a musical, on the other hand, is always changing just by the very nature of […]

The post SONG SPOTLIGHT: Twenty-Something appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

A few weeks ago, we discussed the disconnect between the actual state of contemporary musical theatre, and what “Golden Age” die-hards perceive it to be. Reality: a thriving group of creative people humming along and tapping away (mmhmmm). Perception: a cacophony of “blecch.” Cacophonous because contemporary musical theatre reflects rap, rock, and all the wacky […]

The post SONG SPOTLIGHT: Let Me Fall appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

Many (but not all) musicals are adaptations. Songwriting teams have found inspiration in plays, novels, film, television, comic strips and even paintings (obligatory Sondheim reference #1). The challenge that these teams face is to create original material around the existing material. It’s a necessary challenge, because those other forms don’t tell stories with song. Even […]

The post SONG SPOTLIGHT: Recuerdo appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

Welcome back to Song Spotlights! Before we dive in, I wanted to give a little background about the inspiration behind this series. Once upon a time, in a class on the American Musical, my professor declared his unofficial death date for the Golden Age as 1981 (Merrily We Roll Along and its original flop production—clearly […]

The post SONG SPOTLIGHT: Blue Hair appeared first on The NewMusicalTheatre.com Green Room.

Welcome to Song Spotlights, where I focus on one of the many great songs available for purchase at NewMusicalTheatre.com’s kick-ass store. This week, we’re looking at Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s song “Hometown Hero’s Ticker Tape Parade” from their musical Dogfight. Dogfight is based on a 1991 film starring River Phoenix and Lilli Taylor. It’s about the unexpected […]

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