Yet Another Year In America May 27, 2010

[koganbot]

OK, now that I've admitted finally that Lea Michele is a talent, is there anything you guys want to tell TV-free me about her, or Rachel, or the show? What's she like as an actress? Does she need freeing from the theatah

Comments

[meserach]

On the show, Rachel is played up as having a "terrifying" personality, and she pretty much does, although we are encouraged to root for her. She's explicitly stated to be the best singer, and the one with all the theatre-school-type training. She takes everything VERY SERIOUSLY, and tries to monopolise attention, wanting all the solos and so forth. She's unpopular in the school, viewed as one of the geeks by most of the school and viewed as scary and pushy by her bandmates.

Her early plotlines essentially involved her mooning over the lead male teenage quaterback character, Finn, who was of course unavailable due to being in a relationship with head cheerleader Quinn. Things have progressed rather since then.

Lea Michele herself, of the younger cast, does seem to have the strongest musical theatre background, and has actually been in Broadway productions of Les Miserables, from which "I Dreamed a Dream" is taken.

[koganbot]

The thing is, I don't like much show singing from after the mid '40s or so, and I don't like much show music made after 1970. And the advent of rock 'n' roll in the mid '50s pretty much scuttled Broadway as a source for pop stars anyway. Well, the story is a bit more complex than that, but that's it in outline.

According to Wikip, almost all the cast, not just Michele, were recruited from Broadway. This maybe explains why so few of them sing pop music well, though they don't seem the sorts that would sing show music well, either. But what I don't like about latter-day show music is that it puts acting above singing. What I mean by that isn't so easy to explain, though I tried in my Jukebox blurb for Demi Lovato's "Don't Forget" - Demi being my exception to my general rule, in that she seems to take an actor's approach to singing, but she pulls off the singing spectacularly.

[meserach]

Actually, of principal cast that play students, only Lea and Jenna Ushkowitz (Tina) have Broadway backgrounds. The rest:

Kevin McHale (Artie) - was once in a boy band called NLT
Dianna Agron (Quinn) - television roles only
Cory Monteith (Finn) - television and film roles only
Chris Colfer (Kurt) - The actor is only 20 and relatively fresh out of high school himself - Glee is essentially his first role except for one short film. HE was very musical-theatre-y while IN school, though.
Amber Riley (Mercedes) - once auditioned for American Idol but was turned down.
Mark Selling (Puck) - a trained musician and singer songwriter, but no Broadway or other musical theatre roles.

Of the adult cast, the only one to sing anywhere near regularly is indeed a Broadway star, however.

[koganbot]

Ah, OK, that's what happens when I only do a quick skim through the Wikipedia article. I was also misled by the fact that the ones that went top forty (about 13 or so) included performances by Matthew Morrison, Jonathan Groff, and Idina Menzel. I'd incorrectly assumed Groff was a regular. I gather that he and Menzel could become semi-regulars.

By the way, what do you think of it (as a show, as music, whatever)? Most of the music doesn't work for me, but I'm getting it outside the context of the show. If I'd only heard the soundtrack to Robert Altman's Nashville I'd have thought the thing was lousy, but the music worked well in the movie.