(no subject)

[sophia_sol]

I've listened to the Concept Album and the Original Broadway Cast recordings of the Scarlet Pimpernel multiple times each and I am ready to have some preliminary opinions - keeping in mind, of course, that at this point I am not capable of hazarding which character is singing most songs.

And my opinions are mostly that there are some things I like better about the concept album and some things I like better about the OBC, and some things I rather strongly dislike about each, and does another cast recording exist please?

The OBC has much better ordering and pacing and choice of songs than the concept album, so listening to the album as a whole is a much better listening experience. I find myself skipping a bunch of the concept album when I listen to it, whereas the OBC I listen to straight through.

But on the other hand, I am REALLY UPSET about the change of words for the titular song "The Scarlet Pimpernel" between the two because the concept album's lyrics for that song are OBVIOUSLY SUPERIOR (in my not so humble opinion). That's the song where the changes are most marked, but even for, say, "The Creation of Man" the way it's done changes between the two and I like the concept album's version better. There are a few minor changes that I do like in the OBC bust mostly I prefer the concept album's versions of lyrics and spoken interjections.

So for most individual songs I'm happier with the concept album, but for the overall musical I'm happier with the OBC.

And in minor nitpicky opinions, there are a few lines in the OBC sung by bit parts where the choices of the voice actor REALLY BUG ME so it makes me frustrated to listen to the OBC. And is it just me or does Marguerite's french accent come and go? And Marguerite at least attempts a French accent, but Chauvelin doesn't even bother and is just half-American half-British? CONSISTENCY YOU GUYS.

Anyways no but seriously do other cast recordings exist? These were the only two I could find! And as far as I can tell neither of them accurately represents the musical as it is generally staged today?



Relatedly! I started watching the takarazuka production of The Scarlet Pimpernel! (Star troupe, 2008) and within the first ten minutes I was already like OKAY THIS IS THE PERCIEST PERCY TO EVER PERCY, EVERYONE ELSE CAN GO HOME NOW. I'm no longer 100% convinced of that (mostly because wowwwwww that is a really terrible disguise) but I still utterly adore this Percy. Also everything else about this production. Really all you need to know is in this picspam/reaction/summary by skygiants. So far I'm up to Percy in tiger-print.

What other versions of the Scarlet Pimpernel should I watch?

Comments

[skygiants]

SHE IS INDEED THE PERCIEST PERCY EVER. Such swagger. Such amazing boots! (I am sorry by the way to mislead you about the amount of actual Percy there is in the books; I have seen so much Pimpernel by now that all the different versions kind of meld together in my head.)

I have a deep fondness for the 1980s version with Anthony Andrews and Ian McKellen, but nobody I know loves it as much as I do. But Ian McKellen's tiny angry baby face!

[sophia_sol]

She is so very Percy and I love everything. (haha no worries I 100% understand!)

OKAY I shall add the 1982 version to my to-watch list! I don't guarantee I shall ever get to it because I am terrible at watching things BUT I WILL HAVE EVERY INTENTION.

[justice_turtle]

"And Marguerite at least attempts a French accent, but Chauvelin doesn't even bother and is just half-American half-British? CONSISTENCY YOU GUYS."

That is INTERESTING! Because Terrence Mann is generally very good at accents. I wonder if there was some directorial decision behind that? Or if he just hadn't gotten properly into the role yet, since Wiki seems to indicate (I was reading it to figure out which songs are whose) that the OBC recording was done super-early in the musical's run, during the pre-opening-night test phase, and by opening they'd rejiggered a lot of stuff (including putting Chauvelin into more songs!) that didn't get reflected in the soundtrack album. Maybe they were still sorting out other directorial stuff like who should have what accent at that point.

[justice_turtle]

Okay, having listened overnight to some bits of Les Mis, some of the Scarlet Pimpernel, and an interview where Terrence Mann spoke in his natural Kentucky accent, I think I can say for sure that they recorded the Scarlet Pimpernel OBC album way too early in the run. Terrence Mann for sure -- probably like some of the other actors -- was still just focusing on diction in the more complicated bits of the songs, because his natural accent is this slightly mumbly... I have no idea how much you know about accents or linguistics! And I don't know a hell of a lot myself, only what I learned from reading the Lord of the Rings appendices. But he has a lot of th-fronting and dentalized r's -- like, if he says the word "through", the th-sound hints at a lisped "sth" and the r-sound is barely present at all. So when he's still learning the words of a song he's going to sound, as you say, half-American half-British (as indeed he does, I listened to "Where's the Girl" and was like TERRENCE MANN WHAT IS THIS YOU ARE A WAY BETTER SINGER THAN THIS. I seriously thought it was a John Barrowman song gotten into my shuffle for a minute because it had that kind of lightly dispassionate show-tunes tenor feeling).

Anyway. As I was saying, the other thing I found out from this interview is that he gets his tongue tangled quite easily when he hasn't practiced what he's going to say. Got superb diction in Actor Mode, but in Relaxed Chatting Interview Mode he talks really super-fast and, not exactly mumbly, but he fronts/dentalizes all these letters and doesn't actually pronounce them; he'll say, oh, "gene'is" for "genesis", "ectoskeleton" for "exoskeleton", "th'ew" for "through", and get completely tangled up on words like "organizational" and have to go back and say them in Actor Learns The Words Mode to get them understandable.

(Oh, I say. I saw that Canadian Raising post on your Tumblr a bit back. Do "threw" and "through" even sound identical to you? They do in my accent, which is almost exactly the same as Terrence Mann's except I have a more uvular "r" -- I can go 'Murrican pretty easily, he goes a little more Britishy as you've heard -- although like him I spend a lot of time vocally in Actor Mode which is more Standard American-accented.)

Anyway. Yeah. This has basically been me thinking out loud and deciding that I judge the Scarlet Pimpernel OBC album powers-that-were pretty hard, for recording the album before opening night while their actors were still learning the roles. Don't do that, people; you won't get the advantage of hiring good actors if you haven't let them put a polish on their performances before you record them.

(Possibly they were afraid it'd be a flop, so they wanted to get the recording done before opening night in case there wasn't a second night. I still judge them. Lots of shows don't do an OBC in that case; no harm in being one of them, or planning to record the album after being cancelled so that you get the benefit of what practice the actors did manage to get in. :P Can you tell I have feelings about this? ^_^)

[sophia_sol]

OH MY GOD THIS COMMENT IS SO FASCINATING TO ME. And wow I am also now super judgy of tptb for their choice of when to record the Scarlet Pimpernel cast album. I feel a lot more comfortable being unhappy with some of the acting choices on it now. (for the record, I think Terrence Mann is better on the song "Falcon in the Dive" than he is on "Where's the Girl", though that might just be me liking the one song better than the other and not actually a reflection of how they are sung :P)

Unfortunately I don't currently know enough proper linguistics to really understand everything that you're talking about, but it's stuff I would be happy to know more about so maybe I should go research. (a slight bit of research under my belt: okay, th-fronting makes sense to me now, but I can't find much of anything on dentalized-r - would you happen to have a convenient link or be able to explain it to me?)

Also, re: threw vs through, I actually genuinely can't tell if I pronounce them the same or not? Part of my problem is that my mental conceptualization of words is very strongly associated with their spelling - a word can't exist in any proper wordlike way if I don't know its spelling, and the spelling informs the...idk, the shape of how the word is for me. So although I can detect a difference in how "threw" and "through" feel for me when I say them, it's hard for me to tell if that's simply because of the spellings or whether there is an actual difference in pronunciation. The more I say the words aloud to myself in sentence-contexts the more I think there is a small difference in how I pronounce them, but then again there is a strong chance I'm overthinking how I say things and not actually saying them the way I ordinarily would. *throws up arms* idk!

And the stuff about one's Actor Voice versus Normal Talking Voice! I have that too, actually? Though I'd never thought about it like that before. But I speak differently (enunciate more, stuff like that) when I am reciting a poem or doing a reading or recording podfic or what-have-you. And sometimes it does infect my daily speech as well because I just like the way something sounds when it is enunciated fully in a way my standard accent doesn't usually - the one I've noticed myself doing the most often is when I say "it is" I actually pronounce the t as a t.

[justice_turtle]

OH MY GOD I GET YOU ABOUT THE SHAPE OF THE WORDS. THAT IS A THING THAT I ALSO DO! :D Makes me awesome in spelling bees but deeply terrible at "immersion" language study where you're supposed to pick up the language just from hearing it.

Ahem. I was talking about linguistics. XD

Sadly I do not have a handy link about dentalized r's, because it is a term I just made up to describe this thing Terrence Mann's accent shares with my own! It's... okay, the two kinds of r's that I know linguists talk about are trilled r's (as in "arrrround the rrrrugged rrrrocks" etc) and uvular r's (back in the throat, as in 'Murrican). JRR Tolkien also mentions voiceless r's, because he's a Brit and that is a thing that happens with them! Like, you know, "Heah, portah, put this bag on the caht".

And the nearest I can come to explaining what I mean about dentalized r's is... it started out as a trilled r and lost all its sound without actually losing its presence? It's just that very slight tap of the tongue against the roof of the mouth right behind the teeth (which is why I called it dentalized). Like, it sounds more like a blend between "thlew" and "thtew" than anything else -- not as in lisped "stew", but as in if you slowed it down it'd come out "thuh-tew". Because the trilled r is just so elided that only the trill is left, the distinct "r" sound itself has gone.

And I don't know if linguists even have a word for that! I've never gotten round to taking Linguistics 101 -- it's always one of my next-semester electives. ;P And it isn't very common, afaik; I've literally only noticed it from this relatively small area of the border-South. Get much further north than where I grew up, people don't have Southern accents at all and their r's are straight-up uvular. Get much further south than where Terrence Mann was born, and people speak straight-up Southern, indistinguishable from the British voiceless r. This barely-trilled r verging on a lisp isn't something I've ever heard of as a thing; now I'm curious. :D

SO MUCH JUDGINESS YESSS.

"(for the record, I think Terrence Mann is better on the song "Falcon in the Dive" than he is on "Where's the Girl", though that might just be me liking the one song better than the other and not actually a reflection of how they are sung :P)"

I've listened to both songs close together now and compared them -- and honestly the first thing I have to say is OH MY GOD FALCON IN THE DIVE THAT LAST NOOOOOTE! I thought I'd heard some good breath control in my life, but oh my god, I take off my hat. That was fucking amazing, I just. Oh my god. That kind of sustained power, I thought I was pretty good on my best days and I could maybe pull off half of that length at that volume. And he's not even running out of air by the end. I am amazed. O_O

Other than that, let's see... I think you're right, he is better on Falcon in the Dive than on Where's the Girl. But I also think Where's the Girl is honestly a badly written song. The lyrics aren't very singable -- a lot of closed-mouth line-endings, "but it seems / She's gone" just to pull one from near the beginning -- and the music is way too fast and repetitive, almost yodely, for the sort of reflective intimate song it's trying to be. (I'm comparing it mentally to the Beauty and the Beast OBC, in which Terrence Mann sings the Beast; you might want to download that and listen to his song "If I Can't Love Her", because I think that's what "Where's the Girl" is TRYING to be -- super emotional, powerful, with a tune you can't get out of your head -- the same kind of lightning-strikes-twice for "If I Can't Love Her" as "Falcon in the Dive", even at that early stage, honestly is for "Stars". But it fails, because it's badly written in both lyrics and music. He could have pulled it off with two or three more weeks' hard work on it, because he's JUST THAT FUCKING GOOD - you can already, if you know his style, hear him starting to work out the pacing and the spots where he's going to drop a note and break your heart - but it'd be purely a case of a good singer saving a bad song, and they didn't give him the time to save it before recording the album. :P)

And the Actor Voice, yes! I think most people who do any sort of vocal performance have that to a degree. I did poetry-reciting and spelling bees from when I was pretty young, and also I had a hard-of-hearing neighbor for a long time, so I've gotten in the habit of using my Actor Voice as my default. But I still have a Normal Talking Voice, it just comes out at different times, like in therapy or on a long roadtrip, anytime I'm talking really casually and comfortably to just one or two people. :D