From the Telegraph. Bizarre - are any of our UK posters planning on checking this out? What would an EC musical look/sound like?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jh ... iths21.xml
New Smiths Musical...
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Who Shot Sam?
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New Smiths Musical...
Last edited by Who Shot Sam? on Wed Jun 22, 2005 11:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
Mother, Moose-Hunter, Maverick
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Who Shot Sam?
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Just realized that this may require registration. Here is the full text:
The Smiths stripped bare
A new stage musical daringly brings a feminine slant - and a string quartet - to the magical, jangly songs of Morrissey and Johnny Marr. Dominic Cavendish meets the show's creators
'Don't forget the songs that made you cry / And the songs that saved your life," ran the plaintive refrain on the 1985 Smiths track Rubber Ring. The songs in question were, little doubt about it, the singer's - and, if the band's frontman and lyricist Morrissey takes comfort from anything as he contemplates the passing of time since then, it is that his extravagant plea has been faithfully answered.
Where they occupied a relatively marginal position in the UK pop scene during their 1982-87 lifespan, the Smiths' status has since grown to a point where they are now regularly cited as the decade's most influential act, and were voted the greatest pop stars of all time in a 2002 NME poll.
The appetite for Morrissey's brand of archly articulate melancholy, first fostered in such anthems to joyless youth as Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now, seems to grow by the year.
Morrissey himself, the scrawny, languid, leering misfit who used to appear on Top of the Pops in various states of camply eccentric disarray, gladioli dangling from his back pocket, is seen in almost saintly terms. A major academic symposium was convened in his native Manchester only this March for the eager appreciation of an oeuvre brimful of lonely, rain-sodden frustration and compensating Wildean wit.
Gone, then, but not forgotten. So the question is: what should remembering the Smiths' songs entail? Preserving them in aspic and singing their praises - or showing a rather more impertinent affection? Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others, a musical venture premièring this month at the Lyric, Hammersmith in London, just might save the "songs that saved your life" from the dead hand of reverence.
Taking its title from one of the most flippant ditties that Morrissey wrote, in which he made the observation that women come in different shapes and sizes, it marks a major theatrical coup. For the first time, the green light has been given to reinterpret a whole swathe of Smiths songs live; words closely identified with the keening Mancunian malcontent have been wrested away from him and put into the mouths of a company of actor-singers: four female and two male. And the jangly guitar work that earned Morrissey's creative partner, Johnny Marr, equal undying devotion from fans has been stripped away - to be replaced by a soundscape of sampled noises and a live score from a string quartet.
When the show, which uses 20 Smiths songs, was announced last November, the immediate concern among fans was that this would be another example of the bog-standard back-catalogue musical that has become such a money-raking feature of the West End since the success of the Abba-derived Mamma Mia!
Taking a peek at rehearsals, I swiftly realise that the fans' worst nightmare of, say, chorus lines of bequiffed Morrissey lookalikes tap-dancing their troubles away have been studiously avoided. On the other hand, the deeply experimental nature of what's on offer might require an even greater leap of faith.
A handful of the group's best-known songs are in the final selection - including How Soon is Now? and There is a Light That Never Goes Out - but there are plenty of lesser-known, early tracks too; and the use to which all of them are put is never less than radical, with an overriding feminine slant.
"It would have been terrible," says Andrew Wale, the show's director and co-deviser, "to take these songs from a man who is very brave and up-front, and do them in a half-hearted and kowtowing way. We have to be as brave and up-front as he was."
And to illustrate the point, I'm allowed to see a short section in which the women repeat fragments from the song Unloveable, bending and stretching the words, sometimes with comically growling emphasis, and allowing various influences - gospel, R & B, soul - to seep in.
"The theme of the evening," Wale says, "is about cycles, how things shift in families, how things are passed on from one person to another. I believe that happens more strongly through women than men."
That such gender-switching tactics have been countenanced, and such artistic licence granted, by Morrissey and Marr, who have remained estranged since the Smiths split, is no small wonder.
Trying to obtain the rights was difficult, Wale concedes, but chiefly because when he and his multi-talented American associate Perrin Manzer Allen, who is responsible for the new arrangements, first sought them back in 2000, "Morrissey had disappeared to LA. When he came back, the situation changed, and both his and Johnny Marr's management said 'yes' quite quickly.
"We were surprised that Morrissey agreed to it," he adds, "but he's an intelligent man. He must realise that this represents people's real appreciation of those songs and desire to keep them alive through re-examining them."
Both men are aged 40, and have had wide experience in commercial musical theatre, as performers and directors. The Smiths idea was originally mooted, aptly enough, when they first met during the German première of Les Misérables 10 years ago. But it was in collaborating on a hugely successful avant-garde appraisal of Belgian chansonnier Jacques Brel in 1999 - the title of which, Anonymous Society, the duo adopted as their company name - that they hit on a way of fusing music and performance that made tackling the Smiths' repertoire possible.
"The songs tell many stories," Wale says. "If you talk to Smiths fans, they'd tell you that each song means something different, which is great for us.
"With this kind of theatre, what we're not doing is saying 'I love you' in a lyric, and saying it again in the movement, and the lighting, and the music, which is what happens in traditional music theatre. Here we can say, 'I love you' and mean something different by it, in five different ways, at the same time."
Allen likens his approach to excavating the core of the songs: "The hope is that, in opening up the palettes of possibilities, you get to the song's essence. Hopefully, our approach will shed new light on it. You'll be able to take a song as you first perceived it - or see it in a different way. The idea isn't to blast away what the original was, but to take the original and say, 'It could also mean this'."
Marr has indicated that he will attend the opening night; Morrissey's intended movements remain a mystery. Plenty of Smiths fans have booked; the door is wide open to everyone else. No one need get too distressed or outraged on their idols' behalf.
"Just because we're doing something that isn't traditional musical theatre, we're not decrying traditional music theatre," says Wale. "And to people who come and say, 'Oh you've ruined the songs of the Smiths', we say 'Go and listen to the CDs again', because we're not destroying the originals."
'Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others' is at the Lyric Hammersmith (08700 500511), July 1-23, then Brighton, Salford and Warwick.
The Smiths stripped bare
A new stage musical daringly brings a feminine slant - and a string quartet - to the magical, jangly songs of Morrissey and Johnny Marr. Dominic Cavendish meets the show's creators
'Don't forget the songs that made you cry / And the songs that saved your life," ran the plaintive refrain on the 1985 Smiths track Rubber Ring. The songs in question were, little doubt about it, the singer's - and, if the band's frontman and lyricist Morrissey takes comfort from anything as he contemplates the passing of time since then, it is that his extravagant plea has been faithfully answered.
Where they occupied a relatively marginal position in the UK pop scene during their 1982-87 lifespan, the Smiths' status has since grown to a point where they are now regularly cited as the decade's most influential act, and were voted the greatest pop stars of all time in a 2002 NME poll.
The appetite for Morrissey's brand of archly articulate melancholy, first fostered in such anthems to joyless youth as Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now, seems to grow by the year.
Morrissey himself, the scrawny, languid, leering misfit who used to appear on Top of the Pops in various states of camply eccentric disarray, gladioli dangling from his back pocket, is seen in almost saintly terms. A major academic symposium was convened in his native Manchester only this March for the eager appreciation of an oeuvre brimful of lonely, rain-sodden frustration and compensating Wildean wit.
Gone, then, but not forgotten. So the question is: what should remembering the Smiths' songs entail? Preserving them in aspic and singing their praises - or showing a rather more impertinent affection? Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others, a musical venture premièring this month at the Lyric, Hammersmith in London, just might save the "songs that saved your life" from the dead hand of reverence.
Taking its title from one of the most flippant ditties that Morrissey wrote, in which he made the observation that women come in different shapes and sizes, it marks a major theatrical coup. For the first time, the green light has been given to reinterpret a whole swathe of Smiths songs live; words closely identified with the keening Mancunian malcontent have been wrested away from him and put into the mouths of a company of actor-singers: four female and two male. And the jangly guitar work that earned Morrissey's creative partner, Johnny Marr, equal undying devotion from fans has been stripped away - to be replaced by a soundscape of sampled noises and a live score from a string quartet.
When the show, which uses 20 Smiths songs, was announced last November, the immediate concern among fans was that this would be another example of the bog-standard back-catalogue musical that has become such a money-raking feature of the West End since the success of the Abba-derived Mamma Mia!
Taking a peek at rehearsals, I swiftly realise that the fans' worst nightmare of, say, chorus lines of bequiffed Morrissey lookalikes tap-dancing their troubles away have been studiously avoided. On the other hand, the deeply experimental nature of what's on offer might require an even greater leap of faith.
A handful of the group's best-known songs are in the final selection - including How Soon is Now? and There is a Light That Never Goes Out - but there are plenty of lesser-known, early tracks too; and the use to which all of them are put is never less than radical, with an overriding feminine slant.
"It would have been terrible," says Andrew Wale, the show's director and co-deviser, "to take these songs from a man who is very brave and up-front, and do them in a half-hearted and kowtowing way. We have to be as brave and up-front as he was."
And to illustrate the point, I'm allowed to see a short section in which the women repeat fragments from the song Unloveable, bending and stretching the words, sometimes with comically growling emphasis, and allowing various influences - gospel, R & B, soul - to seep in.
"The theme of the evening," Wale says, "is about cycles, how things shift in families, how things are passed on from one person to another. I believe that happens more strongly through women than men."
That such gender-switching tactics have been countenanced, and such artistic licence granted, by Morrissey and Marr, who have remained estranged since the Smiths split, is no small wonder.
Trying to obtain the rights was difficult, Wale concedes, but chiefly because when he and his multi-talented American associate Perrin Manzer Allen, who is responsible for the new arrangements, first sought them back in 2000, "Morrissey had disappeared to LA. When he came back, the situation changed, and both his and Johnny Marr's management said 'yes' quite quickly.
"We were surprised that Morrissey agreed to it," he adds, "but he's an intelligent man. He must realise that this represents people's real appreciation of those songs and desire to keep them alive through re-examining them."
Both men are aged 40, and have had wide experience in commercial musical theatre, as performers and directors. The Smiths idea was originally mooted, aptly enough, when they first met during the German première of Les Misérables 10 years ago. But it was in collaborating on a hugely successful avant-garde appraisal of Belgian chansonnier Jacques Brel in 1999 - the title of which, Anonymous Society, the duo adopted as their company name - that they hit on a way of fusing music and performance that made tackling the Smiths' repertoire possible.
"The songs tell many stories," Wale says. "If you talk to Smiths fans, they'd tell you that each song means something different, which is great for us.
"With this kind of theatre, what we're not doing is saying 'I love you' in a lyric, and saying it again in the movement, and the lighting, and the music, which is what happens in traditional music theatre. Here we can say, 'I love you' and mean something different by it, in five different ways, at the same time."
Allen likens his approach to excavating the core of the songs: "The hope is that, in opening up the palettes of possibilities, you get to the song's essence. Hopefully, our approach will shed new light on it. You'll be able to take a song as you first perceived it - or see it in a different way. The idea isn't to blast away what the original was, but to take the original and say, 'It could also mean this'."
Marr has indicated that he will attend the opening night; Morrissey's intended movements remain a mystery. Plenty of Smiths fans have booked; the door is wide open to everyone else. No one need get too distressed or outraged on their idols' behalf.
"Just because we're doing something that isn't traditional musical theatre, we're not decrying traditional music theatre," says Wale. "And to people who come and say, 'Oh you've ruined the songs of the Smiths', we say 'Go and listen to the CDs again', because we're not destroying the originals."
'Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others' is at the Lyric Hammersmith (08700 500511), July 1-23, then Brighton, Salford and Warwick.
Mother, Moose-Hunter, Maverick
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Otis Westinghouse
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- Location: The theatre of dreams
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Masterpiece?
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- Location: NYC
At least they're starting to get better taste in revusical subjects. After Billy Joel, the Beach Boys and Abba, it's about time some artists I can stand were done up.
I've tried to imagine what an EC show would be like over the years, and it's never been easy. Between the wordplay, the Britishisms and the multiple-entendre imagery, it would be interesting to string a plot through a list of his songs (that is, a plot that was about more than a jilted man coming up with clever ways to diss his lover).
I've tried to imagine what an EC show would be like over the years, and it's never been easy. Between the wordplay, the Britishisms and the multiple-entendre imagery, it would be interesting to string a plot through a list of his songs (that is, a plot that was about more than a jilted man coming up with clever ways to diss his lover).
Everybody's hiding under covers... who's making Lover's Lane safe again for lovers?"
What Beach Boys records have you listened to? They are responsible for some of the greatest pop music ever produced!At least they're starting to get better taste in revusical subjects.After Billy Joel, the Beach Boys and Abba, it's about time some artists I can stand were done up.
echos myron like a siren
with endurance like the liberty bell
and he tells you of the dreamers
but he's cracked up like the road
and he'd like to lift us up, but we're a very heavy load
with endurance like the liberty bell
and he tells you of the dreamers
but he's cracked up like the road
and he'd like to lift us up, but we're a very heavy load
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Who Shot Sam?
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And some awful crap later on (thanks Mike Love).Mike Boom wrote:What Beach Boys records have you listened to? They are responsible for some of the greatest pop music ever produced!At least they're starting to get better taste in revusical subjects.After Billy Joel, the Beach Boys and Abba, it's about time some artists I can stand were done up.
Mother, Moose-Hunter, Maverick
Well there are about 4 albums that I would say were crap MIU, 15 Big Ones, LA and Keeping the Summer Alive but that leaves about 13 or so albums worth of great stuff.
echos myron like a siren
with endurance like the liberty bell
and he tells you of the dreamers
but he's cracked up like the road
and he'd like to lift us up, but we're a very heavy load
with endurance like the liberty bell
and he tells you of the dreamers
but he's cracked up like the road
and he'd like to lift us up, but we're a very heavy load
-
Masterpiece?
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- Joined: Fri May 06, 2005 3:26 am
- Location: NYC
But Beach Boys songs sound like ass when anyone but them tries to perform it. "Good Vibrations" is a classic, but it doesn't lend itself to endless intepretation like Cole Porter, Gershwin or even the Beatles. You need the original recording to understand what's good about it.
Everybody's hiding under covers... who's making Lover's Lane safe again for lovers?"
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Who Shot Sam?
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There is a long review of this in today's New York Times, by Jon Pareles:
Mining the Drama in a Rock Catalog
By JON PARELES
LONDON - Rock's conquest of the West End here, and of Broadway, has arrived largely in the form of unchallenging oldies: familiar songs that mimic the recorded hits and are attached to revue vignettes or a cobbled-together storyline. Queen, Abba and Billy Joel are among those whose songs have found that kind of afterlife, and a John Lennon musical on Broadway is now in previews.
The Smiths - a band from Manchester, England, whose singer and lyricist, Morrissey, taught a generation-wide cult how to mope with melodramatic self-consciousness - are getting an entirely different treatment in "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others," a music-theater piece based on Smiths songs; the band lasted from 1982 to 1987.
The show is at the Lyric theater in the Hammersmith neighborhood (far from the West End) through July 23, and is booked for Ireland and Australia.
"Some Girls" seeks the spirit of the Smiths' songs by transforming them. The arrangements are not for rock band, but for string quartet with electronics. Morrissey's heartsick legato croon is reassigned to four women and two men, who deliver anything from keening, primal unaccompanied wails to swing-era harmonies. The Smiths' lyrics were proudly defenseless and unguarded: "I know I'm unlovable/ You don't have to tell me." Yet the staging doesn't wrap them in obvious scenarios. The show is an allusive, surreal, ever-mutating fantasia on love and sex, family and control, violence and death.
The women take on archetypal roles as a child, a young woman and a mother; there's also a red-headed diva. An older and younger man are like a father and grown son; and there's a young boy on video, at first isolated and frightened, but eventually smiling and stepping into the light. They interact in love and rage, but there is no simple story. The younger man, Garrie Harvey, sings, "I am human and I want to be loved" while dressed as a rabbit; the girlish Katie Brayben is at various times a cellist, a trapeze artist and a gunslinger.
"What I wanted to make was a world that was recognizable but somehow changed, very 'Alice Through the Looking Glass,' " said Andrew Wale, the director. "You go through this mirror, and it's somehow different, although you recognize all the elements. What I also wanted to do was to try and get a group of performers who would treat this very strange, dislocated and adjusted world as their normality, so that we could sit there and then go, 'Well, maybe we'll look at our own world and realize the abnormalities in that a little bit more strongly.' "
"Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" is the second major collaboration, under the name Anonymous Society, by Mr. Wale and the music director Perrin Manzer Allen. Both had been longtime Smiths fans. "I never even thought about why I loved them so much," Mr. Wale said. "It's a very teenage thing, that kind of teenage angst, that sense of not being taken seriously and being taken advantage off. There's definitely a kind of martyrdom complex in there."
"It's really effortful being young and trying to fit in with your peer group," he continued, "and this was an invitation to be completely outside that. Morrissey invited you to laugh at him, but the invitation implied that if you laughed there was always going to be something that proved you wrong. There were multiple inversions of sophistication in it."
"Some Girls" arrives as Morrissey himself has recharged his solo career. Last year he released "You Are the Quarry" (Sanctuary), his first album of new songs since 1997, and went on tour; he was also curator of the prestigious Meltdown Festival in London. But the theater piece was already in the works.
Mr. Wale, who is English, and Mr. Allen, who is American, met a decade ago while singing in a German production of "Les Misérables." (Both are now 40.) Soon afterward, Mr. Allen suggested that Smiths songs offered possibilities for "a singing actor." He explained, "It just occurred to me that there was something theatrical in the songs, but what that was didn't really exist yet."
He suggested the Smiths to Mr. Wale, whose immediate response was, "It's the worst idea I've ever heard in my life." Between various jobs - among other things, Mr. Wale is an associate director for several international productions of the Abba pop musical, "Mamma Mia!" - the two collaborated instead on projects that included "Jacques Brel's Anonymous Society" in 1999, which won awards for its dark, splintered staging of Brel songs.
"Music theater far too often underestimates that as people we have two or three emotional responses at the same time that are conflicting," Mr. Allen said. "It's rather rare that we have one pure emotional response. So something can be campy and tragic at the same time, something can make you laugh and also really frighten you."
"Watch an MTV video, or watch a film now, and the same thing happens," he continued. "So why shouldn't we be doing that on the stage as well?"
Through three versions of the Brel adaptation, Mr. Allen said: "This idea was always stuck in the back of my head. I would whisper it in Andrew's ear on occasion hoping that he had weakened, and one day he had." In 2000, they began seeking rights to adapt the Smiths catalog.
They sifted through the Smiths' songs and planned their format; at first, they considered using an all-woman cast. Among the reasons they decided to arrange the music for a string quartet, Mr. Allen said, was that those "were the instruments that frightened me the most."
"When we start to work on a project idea, we always deliberately set limits, just to see where it will take us," he said. "I could have written a whole symphonic score, I could have gotten a rock band together. But this seemed the furthest away from the original sound of the music."
Mr. Wale drew scenarios from the songs' lyrics and from his own childhood, when he watched his parents' power struggles. There are also glimmers of religious imagery and perhaps geopolitics, as when Sean Kingsley, wearing a Union Jack shirt (as Morrissey once did), starts out belting like a rock idol and ends up with the other cast members piled on top of him: this could be Britain buried under competition.
The team hopes to take the production to New York. Many English reviews for "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" have been mixed or hostile. The Independent praised the music but called the staging "bewildering and frequently toe-curling." But the production has one thing in common with more conventional pop musicals: it can draw on the band's fans. More than 90 percent of the ticket sales have been online, rather than the usual 50 percent, suggesting a rock audience, said the show's producer, Glynis Henderson. Obvious Smiths fans began showing up during previews at the end of June.
"I had put all that to the back of my mind," Mr. Wale said. "But when I saw them, I realized: 'This is scary. What on earth will they think?' "
Mining the Drama in a Rock Catalog
By JON PARELES
LONDON - Rock's conquest of the West End here, and of Broadway, has arrived largely in the form of unchallenging oldies: familiar songs that mimic the recorded hits and are attached to revue vignettes or a cobbled-together storyline. Queen, Abba and Billy Joel are among those whose songs have found that kind of afterlife, and a John Lennon musical on Broadway is now in previews.
The Smiths - a band from Manchester, England, whose singer and lyricist, Morrissey, taught a generation-wide cult how to mope with melodramatic self-consciousness - are getting an entirely different treatment in "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others," a music-theater piece based on Smiths songs; the band lasted from 1982 to 1987.
The show is at the Lyric theater in the Hammersmith neighborhood (far from the West End) through July 23, and is booked for Ireland and Australia.
"Some Girls" seeks the spirit of the Smiths' songs by transforming them. The arrangements are not for rock band, but for string quartet with electronics. Morrissey's heartsick legato croon is reassigned to four women and two men, who deliver anything from keening, primal unaccompanied wails to swing-era harmonies. The Smiths' lyrics were proudly defenseless and unguarded: "I know I'm unlovable/ You don't have to tell me." Yet the staging doesn't wrap them in obvious scenarios. The show is an allusive, surreal, ever-mutating fantasia on love and sex, family and control, violence and death.
The women take on archetypal roles as a child, a young woman and a mother; there's also a red-headed diva. An older and younger man are like a father and grown son; and there's a young boy on video, at first isolated and frightened, but eventually smiling and stepping into the light. They interact in love and rage, but there is no simple story. The younger man, Garrie Harvey, sings, "I am human and I want to be loved" while dressed as a rabbit; the girlish Katie Brayben is at various times a cellist, a trapeze artist and a gunslinger.
"What I wanted to make was a world that was recognizable but somehow changed, very 'Alice Through the Looking Glass,' " said Andrew Wale, the director. "You go through this mirror, and it's somehow different, although you recognize all the elements. What I also wanted to do was to try and get a group of performers who would treat this very strange, dislocated and adjusted world as their normality, so that we could sit there and then go, 'Well, maybe we'll look at our own world and realize the abnormalities in that a little bit more strongly.' "
"Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" is the second major collaboration, under the name Anonymous Society, by Mr. Wale and the music director Perrin Manzer Allen. Both had been longtime Smiths fans. "I never even thought about why I loved them so much," Mr. Wale said. "It's a very teenage thing, that kind of teenage angst, that sense of not being taken seriously and being taken advantage off. There's definitely a kind of martyrdom complex in there."
"It's really effortful being young and trying to fit in with your peer group," he continued, "and this was an invitation to be completely outside that. Morrissey invited you to laugh at him, but the invitation implied that if you laughed there was always going to be something that proved you wrong. There were multiple inversions of sophistication in it."
"Some Girls" arrives as Morrissey himself has recharged his solo career. Last year he released "You Are the Quarry" (Sanctuary), his first album of new songs since 1997, and went on tour; he was also curator of the prestigious Meltdown Festival in London. But the theater piece was already in the works.
Mr. Wale, who is English, and Mr. Allen, who is American, met a decade ago while singing in a German production of "Les Misérables." (Both are now 40.) Soon afterward, Mr. Allen suggested that Smiths songs offered possibilities for "a singing actor." He explained, "It just occurred to me that there was something theatrical in the songs, but what that was didn't really exist yet."
He suggested the Smiths to Mr. Wale, whose immediate response was, "It's the worst idea I've ever heard in my life." Between various jobs - among other things, Mr. Wale is an associate director for several international productions of the Abba pop musical, "Mamma Mia!" - the two collaborated instead on projects that included "Jacques Brel's Anonymous Society" in 1999, which won awards for its dark, splintered staging of Brel songs.
"Music theater far too often underestimates that as people we have two or three emotional responses at the same time that are conflicting," Mr. Allen said. "It's rather rare that we have one pure emotional response. So something can be campy and tragic at the same time, something can make you laugh and also really frighten you."
"Watch an MTV video, or watch a film now, and the same thing happens," he continued. "So why shouldn't we be doing that on the stage as well?"
Through three versions of the Brel adaptation, Mr. Allen said: "This idea was always stuck in the back of my head. I would whisper it in Andrew's ear on occasion hoping that he had weakened, and one day he had." In 2000, they began seeking rights to adapt the Smiths catalog.
They sifted through the Smiths' songs and planned their format; at first, they considered using an all-woman cast. Among the reasons they decided to arrange the music for a string quartet, Mr. Allen said, was that those "were the instruments that frightened me the most."
"When we start to work on a project idea, we always deliberately set limits, just to see where it will take us," he said. "I could have written a whole symphonic score, I could have gotten a rock band together. But this seemed the furthest away from the original sound of the music."
Mr. Wale drew scenarios from the songs' lyrics and from his own childhood, when he watched his parents' power struggles. There are also glimmers of religious imagery and perhaps geopolitics, as when Sean Kingsley, wearing a Union Jack shirt (as Morrissey once did), starts out belting like a rock idol and ends up with the other cast members piled on top of him: this could be Britain buried under competition.
The team hopes to take the production to New York. Many English reviews for "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" have been mixed or hostile. The Independent praised the music but called the staging "bewildering and frequently toe-curling." But the production has one thing in common with more conventional pop musicals: it can draw on the band's fans. More than 90 percent of the ticket sales have been online, rather than the usual 50 percent, suggesting a rock audience, said the show's producer, Glynis Henderson. Obvious Smiths fans began showing up during previews at the end of June.
"I had put all that to the back of my mind," Mr. Wale said. "But when I saw them, I realized: 'This is scary. What on earth will they think?' "
Mother, Moose-Hunter, Maverick