Musical Mondays: Oscar-baiting

were these really necessary?

Cabaret won the Oscar for ‘Best Adaptation and Original Song Score,’ a category that no longer exists because nobody is writing original song scores (not many were writing them in 1972). I thought this would excuse the otherwise baffling omission from Best Song of ‘Mein Herr’ and ‘Maybe This Time,’ written for the film and not the original Broadway production; but, the previous year, Bedknobs and Broomsticks was nominated in both categories (whilst Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was nominated for Song Score but not ‘Pure Imagination’). All very strange.

The new songs were so seamless that they now tend to appear in stage productions of Cabaret. The film dispensed with the ‘traditional’ musical numbers and retained only those within the cabaret itself, which serve as a sort of meta commentary (apparently ‘diegetic’ is the fancy term). The cabaret songs are songs that would be sung in the Kit-Kat Club and also references to the characters. To be really meta, they are also about the characters without necessarily requiring the self-awareness of those characters. For example, when Sally Bowles sings

“Maybe this time
For the first time
Love won't hurry away

He will hold me fast
I'll be home at last
Not a loser anymore
Like the last time
And the time before”

We recognise that this is what a character might sing in her situation, but it doesn’t sound very like Sally herself. It’s a quasi-torch song sung by a character to whom it applies but who can’t or won’t allow herself to be that character in real life. The whole point of Cabaret is that the cabaret is real life for many people, perhaps understandable given the situation on the streets of Berlin but is nevertheless a flight from reality.

(It would be rather like an actor playing Hamlet for whom ‘to be or not to be’ is applicable to his situation in real life, but who doesn’t recognise it. If you had an unaware actor playing a character who was self-delusional, the hall of mirrors could extend even unto the crack of doom).

‘Mein Herr,’ on the other hand:

“Bye-Bye, Mein Lieber Herr.
Farewell, mein Lieber Herr.
It was a fine affair,
But now it's over.
And though I used to care,
I need the open air.
You're better off without me,
Mein Herr”

The skill of John Kander and Fred Ebb is all the more obvious when I emphasise the very strong stresses:

“Bye-Bye, mein Lieber Herr.
Farewell, mein Lieber Herr.
It was a fine affair,
But now it's over.
And though I used to care,
I need the open air.
You're better off without me,
Mein Herr”

The rhyme is almost casually thrown away, the beats falling like a series of slaps in the face. Here is Vestibule favourite Aaron Tveit performing the song in aid of charity:

On the same lines, The Sound of Music won the Oscar for Best Scoring - Adaptation or Treatment, but there was no nomination for two new songs, ‘Something Good’ (fair enough) and ‘I Have Confidence,’ music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers as Oscar Hammerstein had died in 1960. Surely ‘I Have Confidence’ was more deserving than ‘The Ballad of Cat Ballou’?

Last week I slightly mocked ‘Hopelessly Devoted To You,’ the addition to Grease in its transition from stage to screen, but it’s not that bad even if it’s slightly overwrought:

“My head is saying, "Fool, forget him"
My heart is saying, "Don't let go;
Hold on 'til the end"
And that's what I intend to do
I'm hopelessly devoted to you”

It’s one of the few songs that successfully incorporates third-person speech into a lyric, no easy task, and hopelessly is a nice choice of adverb.

Next nominee in the stage-to-screen category is a song so unnecessary that it’s difficult to believe it wasn’t written specifically to be nominated: ‘Surprise, Surprise’ from A Chorus Line, the original score of which is one of the finest of post-1970 Broadway. The following year saw a much worthier contender, ‘Mean Green Mother from Outer Space’ from Little Shop of Horrors. It was sung at the ceremony by the voice of ‘Audrey II,’ the sentient carnivorous plant, who was none other than Levi Stubbs, lead singer of The Four Tops. What a wonderful world this is.

I’ve written before about ‘You Must Love Me,’ which actually added something to Evita. Kander and Ebb wrote ‘I Move On’ for the film version of Chicago, which is also fairly unnecessary but does at least reflect the characters:

“I run so fast
A shot gun blast
Can't hurt me not one bit
I'm on my toes
’Cuz heaven knows
A moving target's hard to hit”

The film version of Phantom of the Opera was nominated for ‘Learn to be Lonely’:

“So laugh in your loneliness
Child of the wilderness
Learn to be lonely
Learn how to love life that is lived alone”

Yes, well. It’s a good idea for a song, but the lyrics are so flat and dismissive that loneliness seems preferable to having this Job’s comforter sing to you. For 2012, ‘Suddenly’ from Les Miserables was another that seems written for the sake of a nomination; it doesn’t seem likely that it’ll be incorporated into the stage version any time soon. And please note that nobody felt it necessary to ask Sondheim for a new song for West Side Story.

The one stand-out exception was the film version of Dreamgirls, from which three new songs were nominated; ‘Listen,’ ‘Love You I Do’ and ‘Patience’, all of which lost to the political winner, ‘I Need To Wake Up’ from the increasingly-misnamed An Inconvenient Truth. There have been very few R&B Oscar nominees; it’s not a genre known for its lyrical brilliance, but (for once) I acknowledge that isn’t the point. Dreamgirls is about an R&B group after all and the new songs were more-than-respectable additions. Well-judged both for genre and for character, at least one deserved the award.