Skip to content

Musicals

Lately I keep finding myself with songs in my head from Sunset Boulevard. It’s a musical that won Tony awards in the early to mid 1990s. The sound track is from 1994 and features Glenn Close.

I listened to many, many broadway musical soundtracks when I was in high school. I generally liked the stories and and the music. They usually included lyrics in the liner notes and I could follow along and it was engaging, like with books on tape. I still love the subtle humor found in most shows (or not so subtle sometimes).

Seeing a show on stage was something I didn’t experience very often. But for me seeing a musical was amazing because I’d know the words by heart from reading along for months or years at home. It’s hard to describe as each show had different aspects that amazed me. When I first saw Phantom it was the pyrotechnics that I remember. I could feel the heat on my face from my seat in the balcony. With RENT the first time we had second row seats and I experienced the energy and emotions of the cast. We all cried for almost the entire second act. With Les Mis it was the amazing staging and set scenery and Colm Wilkinson as Jean Val Jean and being one row back from the orchestra pit. And for Lion King the amazing puppets, costumes and acrobatics stand out.

There’s a lot to a musical beyond the music, but listening to the soundtrack at home and reading along and learning to love the characters and their stories makes it all come together. It makes it very enjoyable even if you normally would not be able to understand the lyrics or follow the story at a show.

Sunset sounds great tonight even if I sometimes lose the thread of lyrics when I don’t focus on listening.

Tags

Comments

Leave a Reply

If you have any questions about the post write a comment. We'll be happy to answer.

Your email address will not be published.

CommentLuv badge

2 replies on “Musicals”

  1. Share

    I think we’ve talked about CIs and music before — the impression I had is that the technology is not advanced to the point where music can be heard as well as speech. Is that the case, or has it significantly improved? If it hasn’t, do you think that they will make software advances (that work with the current hardware) or are you planning to use your residual hearing to listen to music?

  2. Share

    Sara says:

    I’m going to write a post about this…..
    The software and sound processing is getting a lot better, they are working at developing harder tests. I think that now that speech recognition has gotten so good they are focusing more on other things like music and speech in noise.

    For me, my feeling is, worst case scenario, I still have the other ear… but I’m definitely nervous about that too – band rehearsal feels very hard with just one ear. I’ve been trying it off and on and I’m definitely not used to it.

Related posts

Scroll to top Related Posts Widget for Blogs by LinkWithin