And there are leaping antelope, who move on a kind of rickshaw device propelled by an actor. There's an elephant that's actually a huge, fabric-covered armature, worn by four puppeteers, one in each leg. There are elegant giraffes, whose back legs are the legs of the puppeteer, whose front legs are tall canes held in the puppeteer's hands and whose heads are stiff, hood-like constructions that rise high above the puppeteer's head. Taymor's style is based on Asian and African puppetry and mask techniques, as long-time Center Stage patrons may remember from her 1982 production of Christopher Hampton's "Savages." Her stamp on "The Lion King" is evident immediately, in the breathtaking opening number, "Circle of Life," when a parade of African animals fills the stage and aisles. But physical production is where "The Lion King" really sings.įor "The Lion King," Disney surprised most of the theater community by dispensing with the live-action-cartoon approach of its first Broadway musical, "Beauty and the Beast." Instead, the studio hired Julie Taymor, an avant-garde director/designer with a bold, idiosyncratic artistic vision. In any other season, Santo Loquasto's lush period costumes and Eugene Lee's evocative "Ragtime" sets - with girders and a bridge that represent everything from an Atlantic City pier to the daunting power of big industry to crush the worker - might walk away with Tonys. The 2002 reissue adds Newman's demo of the "Ragtime Theme.(That said, it should be acknowledged that "Ragtime" may face serious competition from Paul Simon's "The Capeman," since best score is the one category this multimillion-dollar flop could actually win.) A period song, "I Could Love a Million Girls," sung by Donald O'Connor, gives a sense of frivolity "One More Hour," sung by Jennifer Warnes and, like the score, nominated for an Oscar, has a drawing-room formality and Newman himself is heard singing "Change Your Way" (which was not in the film), the sort of song that would be at home on any of his solo albums.
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On this soundtrack album, billed as "music from the motion picture plus additional music," one gets to hear several vocal numbers in addition to the instrumental cues. Especially impressive is the three-part "Dénouement," which brings the plot strands together.
Newman naturally re-created much of the cakewalking Tin Pan Alley style of the turn-of-the-century era depicted in the film, but he actually had a more challenging assignment than might have appeared, since the story moves from one social stratum to another and ranges in tone from the comic to the melodramatic to the tragic.
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Doctorow's novel Ragtime? So must movie producer Dino DeLaurentiis have reasoned in giving Newman the assignment. Who better, therefore, than Newman to make his debut as a big-budget film composer by scoring an adaptation of E.L.
Listening to his records, you could always tell that he knew his way around Scott Joplin's rags.
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And in his songs, heard on his series of solo albums, he displayed far more knowledge of popular music styles of the early 20th century than any of his singer/songwriter peers. Randy Newman was the nephew of film composers Alfred, Emil, and Lionel Newman, which would suggest at least some familiarity with the field, even though he had only scored one minor movie (Cold Turkey).
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