I saw it 3 times in Toronto this past Spring and saw James Hume ( one of the fellows here, singing the part of Bride) as Etches. His voice is magnificent.
You also really need to hear the song with full orchestration,
Here's why this song leapt into my top 3 broadway songs of all time when I first heard it:
1 1.) It is an interesting
and unexpected duet: composer and lyricist
Maury Yeston said that he divided the story into groups of three ---2.) three love stories from across the classes b.) the builder, the owner and the
captain of the ship c.) three men who knew that something was amiss: Barrett the stoker knows that the speed they
are going is ridiculous, Fleet, the lookout, has no binoculars and no moon to
guide him, Bride cannot get ahold of anyone when he sends his SOS signal. Unlike other popular male duets in the
Broadway canon (think of Confrontation in Les Miserables), this doesn’t drive
the plot forward in a blatant way, rather serves as a portentous moment
threaded with melancholic music and positioned in a somewhat humorous moment.
2.)The tune is at once
wistful and whimsical( an almost impossible counterbalance) and excessively listenable: layering an interesting counterpart of foreshadow and
temporary bond. It uses its funny
onomatopoeia but its undercut by a severe melancholy: most apparent in the
orchestration which occasionally sits high and yearning octave above the musical line Bride
is singing. The telegram that Barrett sends to his love ( inspired by a real
one ) will be his last connection to her while the thousand voices that Bride
relies on to assuage his feelings of loneliness will be silent when he needs
them most and then transposed, at the end, to exemplify the football stadium of
wails as passengers drowned.
3.) It follows a song of major
exposition ( a dinner table sequence that posits information on the date and the speed of the ship )where most people might put a love duet: Any other composer would have used this
moment, I think, to focus on young Katie and Jim Farrell: a typical musical
theatre love story. Instead, Yeston gives the second class married couple a
duet ( in another interview he said that this is merely because the spoken
dialogue he had for them was not loud enough to cover the sound of a mechanical
elevator needed in the original stage production) and the Isidor and Ida
Strauss a duet. Neither is predictable. In this moment, he tells a different
love story: Bride loves his friggin telegraph and Barrett years for Darlene. Most of the romance duets are interspersed
into large, layered chorus numbers
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