Dance a Little Closer (The Original Broadway Cast Recording)
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Canadian Music Store Free Music Notes for Dance a Little Closer (The Original Broadway Cast Recording)Free Music Review: Great late LernerPoor Alan Lerner. How dreadful it must have been to achieve the kind of success he did with "My Fair Lady" and spend the next 20 or more years having increasingly poor luck in creating a hit show. Part of his trouble, aside from his overwhelming neuroses, was his very bad habit of making himself the ultimate arbiter on whose shoulders the enterprise rose or fell. Someone needed to say "No" to him more often. That aside, and although "Dance a Little Closer" was a fast flop, ending its life the same night it opened (it was known as "Close a Little Faster" during previews) and while it was furthermore eputedly an UGLY show visually, the score is well worth preserving. The lyrics, as always with Lerner, are fresh, witty, bitter and celebratory all at once. As in his last collaboration with Burton Lane, the charming "Carmelina," "Dance a Little Closer" is full of terrific songs in search of a good show to which they could cling. "Another Life" is as moving as anything Lerner ever wrote, and the nightclub patter-songs are delicious. There's even an extended sequence involving a couple of male flight attendants trying to persuade a minister to marry them -- in the 1980s, people hooted at such a notion, and pilloried Lerner for musicalizing the urge. Guess that's called being ahead of your time. It's a score well worth seeking out, all tied up in Jonathan Tunick's pluperfect orchestrations. |
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