Gil Hates Everything

OK, things Gil didn’t know about this show:

• It has music by Leonard Bernstein. Well that’s like a minimum 7/10 for starters…
• It has lyrics by Comden and Green, BUT they aren’t rubbish (which is the impression I’d kinda gotten of them after seeing Applause present an evening of their songs a few years ago)…
• It is, in fact, quite excellent…

The plot is essentially that Warren G and his homie Nate Dogg are cruising for skirts in the 213, and… wait, what? Well, c’mon, this does sound a bit like “Regulate” only set in the 1940s. Anyway. OK, this is the tale of three sailors on twenty-four hours’ furlough in New York. They chase women, they fall in love with the city, and there is, I’m guessing from the stretches of instrumental music, quite a lot of dancing, which is probably okay because at least it’s got good music, and the choreographer was Jerome Robbins.

Bernstein’s music is as awesome as ever; those symphonic explosions from “West Side Story” are already present in relatively full force here, over a decade earlier. And the songs are funny, in fact frankly they’re a bit surreal in places, but there’s some subtle depths to them: “Come Up To My Place” is nominally about a taxi driver who wants to jump the sailor’s bones, but it also shows New York’s rate of change; all the landmarks he wants to see have been superseded, all the shows have been replaced, all the old buildings torn down. The lyrics for “New York, New York” are totally quotable, and now I’ve heard it, I can hear where the Fun Lovin’ Criminals (arguably the American version of Carter USM) got half their ideas. And “I Can Cook Too” sounds like a song about sex disguised as a paean to being a modern Superwoman, but I think it’s actually the other way around, which is much more fun.

The plot, insofar as you need one for this kind of show, seems pretty basic, but whatever; this is clearly a show designed to show off virtuoso performances (it was inspired by a Bernstein / Robbins dance show, “Fancy Free”) and to capture a particular contemporary American mood and vibe. It doesn’t surprise me that the two revivals, in 1971 and 1998, disappeared within a couple of months. This show belongs exactly where and when it happened, but it seems like an important historical musical, and succeeds rather than fails on its own terms, which is nice. And since the movie apparently has different songs by someone else (which seems a bit daft, frankly) I’m pleased it got the Applause treatment. This soundtrack might as well be the soundtrack to a dream, with dream logic and with large chunks missing, but it was a very nice dream, and a lot of people used to like it. (It was the American Dream, DO YOU SEE? That’s right, I can do metaphors too.)

Random Panda gives this soundtrack eight out of ten pieces of bamboo.

(originally posted May 17, 2009)