The Wild Party (2000 Original Broadway Cast)
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CD Details
Composer: Michael John LaChiusaEdition: Music CD
Format: Cast Recording
CD Release Date: 2000-05-23
Music Label: Decca Broadway
Soundtracks:
- Queenie Was a Blonde
- Marie is Tricky
- Wild Party
- Dry
- Welcome to My Party
- Like Sally
- Breezin' Through Another Day
- Uptown
- Eddie & Mae
- Gold & Goldberg
- Moving Uptown
- Best Friend
- A Little Mmm
- Tabu/Taking Care of the Ladies
- Wouldn't It Be Nice?
- Lowdown-Down
- Gin/Wild
- Black Is A Moocher
- People Like Us
- After Midnight Dies
- Golden Boy
- The Movin' Uptown Blues
- The Lights of Broadway
- More
- Love Ain't Nothin'/Welcome to Her Party
- How Many Women in the World
- When It Ends
- This Is What It Is - Original Broadway Cast
- Finale - Original Broadway Cast
Music reviews of The Wild Party (2000 Original Broadway Cast)
Music Review: I like them both (warning: LONG review)
Rating: 4 Stars
I was sketchy about purchasing this recording because I am a huge fan of the Lippa musical and I didn't want to become part of the "Which One Is Better" debate that rages on theatre message boards everywhere. (The ardent hatred of fans for one or the other boarders on terrifying.) However I got it because I care very much about the characters involved and wanted to see a different spin on how they were presented. I got exactly that. The two musicals could not diverge more and I found that in hearing both I found in each one a few things that the other lacked. For example, in Lippa's version the characterization is put almost entirely to the four leads, Queenie/Burrs Black/Kate, and the other guests are reduced to caricatures and stereotypes. Eddie and Mae are merely Fae Ray and King Kong, big and dumb love small blond and dumb, and have an annoying lyrically vapid song about how much they love each other. The D'Armarno Brother/lovers are merely there to provide the effeminate homosexual characters that every modern show of the last six years needs and the dancer Jackie is merely an ensemble member whom, for some entirely unexplained reason entirely out of Lippa's imagination, had his tongue cut out. In this version both these couples have complex subplots full of jealousy, emptiness and reconciliation. (The song "Eddie & Mae" is my favorite on the disc and Marc Kudisch is glorious as a manic depressive Jackie.) However the lead couples are not as delved into as Lippa's lovers are. The Queenie/Burrs/Black triangle is very disjointed. One minute Black is a smooth player caring for nothing but money, the next he's madly in love with Queenie. During the song "Gin/Wild" Queenie tearfully defends Burrs against the other women at the party, three tracks later she screams that she wants to see him dead. Lippa's Queenie is torn between both men and her love for each even after the final number has ended as she weeps over Burrs' dead body while begging Black "if they find you, you'll get the chair." I was also disappointed by LaChuisa Burrs as far as characterization went. Burrs is my favorite character in the Lippa version because of the fine line he walks between his love for Queenie and his insane jealous rage. He is Lippa's shining star in terms of depth where all the other characters fall short. (You'll need to listen to the CD in order to truly understand this) LaChuisa's Burrs is just as delightful in his moments of fury but misses the side of the character that loves and needs his woman. You don't care much for his plight because there's no real sadness, just anger.
Musically I could never decide between the two because thee styles are so different. Lippa is a rock and roll musical a la RENT or Tick, Tick Boom complete with electric guitars. The songs are taken better on their own rather than in context and are great for auditions/shower singing. The story itself could be in any setting when told in this way. LaChuisa and Wolfe worked hard to make the time period very important to the storytelling. The score covers the many musical styles and the subtle entwining songs give a picture of the 1920's such as a song called "Uptown/Downtown" describing the racial crossover happening at the time. I enjoy it more for its immersion in history. This is more in the vein of older musicals a la Sondheim or Fosse. I found it fascinating to listen to but being newer to the theatre world than most I've missed the boat on that style and I'm not really familiar with it so I love the rock musical as something familiar. This is probably why bought Lippa first because of Indina Menzel and Taye Diggs and not as bowled over by Mandy Patinkin and Eartha Kitt. They were both good but I'm not familiar with them at all.
That being said I'd like to mention that I have no complaints where the actors are concerned. Toni Collette is a mind blowing singer and creates a tough as nails beauty in Queenie. Tonya Pinkins could raise the hairs on your neck in her solo "Black is a Moocher" and Yancy Arias as Black has fallen under the curse of a wonderful voice with not a lot to work with, though he and Collette kill in "People Like Us". He would have been wonderful in Lippa's show. While I adore Taye Diggs, he definitely gets crushed under the huge voices of Idina Menzel, Julia Murney and Brian D'arcy James who play alongside him. Arias has a stronger more 'broadway' voice and would have been right with them. Theatre great Eartha Kitt gives me shivers every time I hear her songs and Mandy Patinkin, though as I said unfamiliar, was evidently giving the roll all he had.
I'm sorry this review was so long but I'm really sick of the ones that say 'this is bad, don't buy it. buy the other one' or 'they both suck' I think both musicals are underrated gems but each one is for a different taste. My advice would be to try both and see what you think
Description of The Wild Party (2000 Original Broadway Cast)
All products are BRAND NEW and factory sealed. Fast shipping and 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed.With his controversial The Wild Party, prolific composer-lyricist Michael John LaChiusa continues to stretch the possibilities for contemporary musical theater. His racy musical is based on a 1928 poem about one night of escalating decadence, through which LaChiusa stages a brilliant, savage, polystylistic unmasking of the lies we live by. The original cast recording captures the manic energy of the top-rate cast, including Mandy Patinkin, Toni Collette, and Eartha Kitt all working together in electrifying ensemble. --Thomas May
Ever since he emerged in the 1990s as one of Broadway's brightest hopes, the young and prolific composer-lyricist Michael John LaChiusa has been charged with the undeniably Sisyphean task of revitalizing the moribund musical. Along with such Tony-nominated efforts as 1999's Marie Christine--his Americanized retelling of the Medea tragedy--LaChiusa has managed to galvanize the genre with The Wild Party. Curiously enough, Joseph Moncure March's once-banned narrative poem of Prohibition-era decadence is the basis for two vastly different musicals produced within the same season (the other being Andrew Lippa's off-Broadway show at Manhattan Theatre Club). LaChiusa's work, which was produced by the Public Theatre's visionary director George C. Wolfe (who also collaborated on the book), kick-starts the new century with a manic, many-leveled, viciously satirical portrait--both brilliantly period and postmodern--of jazz-era alienation, sketching its "sexually ambitious" and "ambi-sextrous" promenade of characters with bold, flinty strokes. In addition to the 1928 poem, it seems equally inspired by The Threepenny Opera, Stephen Sondheim's dark humors, even Ann Douglas's cultural history, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. LaChiusa depicts the party-turned-nightmare trajectory of the story through complex, polystylistic counterpoint, as well as such searingly straightforward numbers as "After Midnight Dies"; even the orchestrations (by Bruce Coughlin) are fantastically detailed and allusive. Mandy Patinkin is made to draw on his full repertory of shticks and gives a wildly over-the-top characterization of the vaudeville clown Burrs, while Toni Collette (an Oscar nominee for The Sixth Sense), playing his unhappy lover Queenie who throws this mother of all parties, plays against him with toxic, combustible energy. For all the star turns here (including some economical but superbly effective cameos by Eartha Kitt), it's the unflappable ensemble that keeps this party going till the bitter end. --Thomas May
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