The most important ingredient for a successful musical, it has long been acknowledged, is a first-rate score, and this one is terrific.
(Brantley)20091119 ★ 'FINIAN'S RAINBOW' A glorious cast restores the luster of this oddball 1947 musical with a first-rate score by E. Y. Harburg and Burton Lane.
But I did see Betty Blue Eyes in the West End, which I thought improved on the Alan Bennett it sprang from, and which had a first-rate score and lyrics by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe.
The Washington Ballet Orchestra gave a first-rate account of the score; Scott Speck paced it to perfection.
But the theatrics don't compensate for the stretches of tepid melodrama in Saint-Saens's second-rate score.
He's not even as complicated as the second-rate score, which has more wah-wah pedal guitar effects than the "Shaft" marathon TNT ran a couple of nights ago.
When the movie plops into the grinding ordinariness of a porno film, complete with a second-rate score with chittering wah-wah guitars and bleating horns, all the horror that the film conjured up is lost.
There's much first-rate music in the score, but also moments when the invention flags and the dramatic pace falters, and even with the explosion of interest in Berlioz over the past half a century, fully staged productions have remained rarities; the last one in this country was at Covent Garden more than 40 years ago.
As one listen made clear, this was not a collection of leftovers or B-side material but a complete score of first-rate songs.
If the music is not at the inspired level of the operas that immediately followed it ("Rigoletto," "Il Trovatore" and "La Traviata"), the score offers first-rate Verdi.
while Kavasin praised the game for "excellent ambient effects, a perfectly suited musical score, and first-rate voice acting".
