Folks who like musicals will tell you that the best ones have songs you can hum or sing long after the show is over. Well, ever since I saw “Phantom of the Opera” in New York a few weeks ago, I’m humming tunes, all right. All the time.
If you’re familiar with the show, as well as other shows written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, most of the dialogue is sung using his special leitmotifs (in this case musically rendered with Andrew Hart’s lyrics) which permeate the production. By the end of the performance, some of the lines from the romantic song “All I Ask of You” have become interspersed with those from the incomparable “Music of the Night.” They’re easy to sing along with (and get confused about), because they do mesh so well.
Some of the action taking place between musical numbers include sung exchanges among the principles. If life could be sung, this is how it would sound. It’s enjoyable, and worth remembering. To a point. Now my head is filled with a mindworm soundtrack as hypnotic as the Phantom’s seductive methods.
The other day, somebody at work offered to go on a coffee run; a co-worker put in her request for hazelnut coffee. Suddenly my brain was turning the request into a rewrite of one of the main exchange music I had heard in the show:
Hazelnut!
She doesn’t want plain.
She wants hazelnut!
She’s being picky.
He’ll never go for coffee again.
Sure it’s fun to parody songs. It’s been done for ages. It’s strange, though, when “Music of the Night” suddenly becomes “Traffic on the Bridge:”
Flatbeds, semis
clogging up the freeway.
Fast cars speeding
Giving me no leeway.
Angry and forlorn
I’m afraid to honk my horn
People in a hurry won’t give in a smidge.
I’m stuck in here, the traffic on the bridge.
Maybe it’s because I was involved in November’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and my write brain got caught up in the musical and, as a result, I have temporary insanity. Doesn’t matter. At least I’m enjoying what I’m singing.
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