Welcome to the Shadows
Tonight belongs to the villains. Broadway has always known that the bad guys get the best tunes: a barber with a grudge, a doctor with a secret, a sea witch with a contract, a masked genius beneath an opera house. Why do we love them? Because fear set to music is a thrill, not a threat. Some of tonight is truly dark. Some of it is wickedly funny. Some of it is so tender it hurts. All of it sounds best with the lights down low.
Psycho
Bernard Herrmann: Prelude and The Murder
Alfred Hitchcock’s instruction was firm: “Please write nothing for the murder in the shower. That must be without music.” Bernard Herrmann wrote it anyway, and the director gave in the moment he heard it. Herrmann used strings alone, a black-and-white sound for a black-and-white film. First comes the Prelude, racing like a car fleeing down a dark highway. Then the stabs, when the violins become a scream. You know them already. They will still make you jump.
Jekyll and Hyde
Frank Wildhorn: “This Is the Moment” and “Alive”
One man, two songs, two souls. In “This Is the Moment,” Dr. Jekyll stands alone in his laboratory, about to test his formula on himself. The melody climbs and climbs, full of hope, and it has since been sung at the Olympics and the Super Bowl. Then the potion takes hold. In “Alive,” Edward Hyde bursts out and discovers that being wicked feels wonderful. Frank Wildhorn’s music trades dignity for raw, pounding appetite.
Sweeney Todd
Stephen Sondheim: “Johanna,” “Epiphany” and “Not While I’m Around”
A barber returns to Victorian London to take revenge on the judge who destroyed his family. At fifteen, Stephen Sondheim sat through a thriller twice to memorize Bernard Herrmann’s music, and you can hear the composer of Psycho in every uneasy chord. “Johanna” is pure young love, a sailor singing up at a window. “Epiphany” is the moment Sweeney snaps and his rage turns on the whole world. “Not While I’m Around” is the gentlest tune of the night, a boy’s promise to protect the woman who took him in. He has no idea whom he is singing to.
The Witches of Eastwick
John Williams: Dance of the Witches
Three bored New England friends wish for the perfect man. What arrives is the devil, and he looks exactly like Jack Nicholson. John Williams, the composer of Star Wars, gave him a dance: a whirling tarantella with sawing, devilish fiddles and a tune that keeps twisting where you least expect it. This is temptation with a grin, charming right up to the moment it isn’t.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Rupert Holmes: “Moonfall”
Charles Dickens died in 1870 with his last novel half written and its murder unsolved. Rupert Holmes finished it by letting the audience vote on the killer at every performance. “Moonfall” is the show’s haunted heart. The choirmaster John Jasper has written it for his young pupil Rosa Bud and has her sing it at her lesson. On the surface it is a shimmering love song. Listen closer and you hear his obsession, and a girl singing words that frighten her.
Love Never Dies
Andrew Lloyd Webber: “’Til I Hear You Sing”
What became of the Phantom after he vanished, leaving only a mask on a chair? Andrew Lloyd Webber called it “unfinished business.” Ten years on, the Phantom has fled Paris for the fairground lights of Coney Island. He is rich, powerful and miserable, unable to write a note without Christine’s voice. The tune rises through one key change after another, each a little more desperate. Lloyd Webber judged it “probably as strong a song as I’ve ever done.”
Intermission
Tango del Ángel
Astor Piazzolla: La Muerte del Ángel
Tango was born on the rough edges of Buenos Aires, among knife fighters, and it has never lost the feeling that desire and danger are dancing together. Astor Piazzolla scandalized the city by mixing it with jazz and Bach. This piece comes from a 1962 play in which an angel comes down to a shabby tenement to heal its broken spirits and is killed in a knife fight. It begins as a fugue, Bach’s strict musical chase, with one jagged tune pursued by copies of itself. First the chase. Then the knives come out. Hold on to that rhythm: the next couple on the program would rather tango than breathe.
The Addams Family
Vic Mizzy: The Addams Family Theme
Passion with a hint of danger: nobody understands the tango better than Gomez and Morticia Addams. She murmurs a word of French, he cries “Tish! That’s French!”, and they are off across the floor. They have tangoed on television, on the movie screen, and on Broadway, where their duet is called “Tango de Amor.” That is the secret behind the cobwebs. This ghoulish household holds one of the most devoted marriages in American entertainment. Vic Mizzy caught the whole family in four notes and two finger snaps, and sang every voice in the chorus himself. Please snap along.
Little Shop of Horrors
Alan Menken: “Dentist!”
A man-eating plant, a skid row flower shop, and a score soaked in early-1960s rock and roll and doo-wop. “Dentist!” belongs to Orin Scrivello, D.D.S., a leather-jacketed bully who has found the one profession that pays him to cause pain. His mother, he explains, spotted his talent early. It is the oldest fear in the waiting room, turned into a rock and roll party.
The Little Mermaid
Alan Menken: “Poor Unfortunate Souls”
The team behind Little Shop then went to work for Disney, and they brought Broadway with them. Ursula the sea witch was modeled on the drag performer Divine, and Pat Carroll played her as a faded Shakespearean actress who now sells used cars. The song is exactly that: a sales pitch dressed up as a cabaret number. Ursula preys on a teenager’s longing, and by the last chorus she has Ariel’s voice in writing.
The Threepenny Opera
Kurt Weill: “Mack the Knife”
The most cheerful song ever written about a killer. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht dashed it off days before their 1928 Berlin premiere, because a vain leading man wanted a bigger entrance. The trick is the smile: the tune strolls along, easy and charming, while the words count the bodies. Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darin and Ella Fitzgerald taught it to swing. Tonight’s version follows Frank Sinatra, who recorded it at 68, tipped his hat to all three by name, and then swung it harder with every verse.
Gayaneh
Aram Khachaturian: Sabre Dance
Count the blades tonight: a knife in a shower, a barber’s razor, a knife fight over an angel, the blade Mack keeps out of sight. Now come the sabres, and for once nobody gets hurt. Aram Khachaturian wrote the dance in a single eleven-hour sitting in 1942, a show of pure daring for a wedding scene. The real shadow fell on the composer. In 1948, the very year America made the Sabre Dance a jukebox craze, Stalin’s cultural chief denounced his music as “anti-people” and he was made to apologize in public. Tonight’s villains are make-believe. His was not.
The Phantom of the Opera
Andrew Lloyd Webber: “The Music of the Night” and “The Phantom of the Opera”
Most readers took the old French novel for a horror story. Andrew Lloyd Webber saw the “high romance” he had always wanted to write: a disfigured genius, hidden beneath the Paris Opera, in love with a young soprano. “The Music of the Night” is his seduction, the most tender music of the evening, sung by a very dangerous man. The title song is the descent to his lair: a pounding rock beat, a thundering organ, and Christine’s voice driven higher and higher, up to the highest note in the entire show. It ran on Broadway for 35 years, longer than any show in history.
The Artists
Bronson Norris Murphy
Bowling Green native Bronson Norris Murphy trained at Western Kentucky University and at New York University. He created the title role in the first North American production of Love Never Dies, the Phantom who sings “’Til I Hear You Sing,” and has sung Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. His other credits include the 2019 New York City Center revival of Evita, the national tour of Cats, and Tony in several productions of West Side Story. He is Associate Artistic Director of The Stephen Foster Story in Bardstown, where he has also played Stephen Foster himself, in the United States and in Japan.
Hugh Panaro
Few singers have lived behind the mask as long as Hugh Panaro. He played the Phantom on Broadway in more than 2,500 performances, after more than 900 as Raoul, both roles cast by the original director, Hal Prince. He made his Broadway debut as Marius in the original production of Les Misérables, created Buddy in Side Show and Julian Craster in The Red Shoes, and earned an Outer Critics Circle nomination for the title role in Lestat. He has toured Europe with Barbra Streisand, sung Jean Valjean at the Muny in St. Louis, and appears with symphony orchestras across the country. A Philadelphia native, he is a graduate of Temple University.
Jeremy Stolle
Jeremy Stolle spent fifteen years in the Broadway company of The Phantom of the Opera. He starred in Disney’s pre-Broadway production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, played the title roles in Jekyll and Hyde and The Scarlet Pimpernel, winning an Elly Award as Best Actor in a Musical, and toured the country as Gaston in Beauty and the Beast. As a concert artist he has sung with symphonies across the United States and in China, and at New York’s 54 Below and Birdland. His solo album, In the Moment, has found listeners in more than 30 countries. Audiences here met him in April as Billy Bigelow in Carousel.
Elizabeth Welch
Soprano Elizabeth Welch sang Christine Daaé in The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway and was part of the company that closed the show’s record-breaking run. She knew the role well before New York: she had sung it in German, in Das Phantom der Oper, with critics praising her as “akzentfrei,” without an accent. Trained as a classical soprano at the University of Colorado and the University of Illinois, she began her opera career in Germany, singing Susanna, Despina, Adina and Olympia. Her musical theatre roles include Cosette, Belle, Anna, Marian the Librarian, and Maria in West Side Story, which won her a Denver Post Ovation Award. She is a founding board member of Broadway Hearts, which brings Broadway performances to children in hospitals. Audiences here met her in April as Julie Jordan in Carousel.
Joseph Trafton, conductor
Joseph Trafton is Music Director of Orchestra Kentucky and of the Ramsey Theatre Company at SKYPAC, and founder of Upbeat, a free after-school music program for children in Bowling Green who might not otherwise have access. A Bowling Green native, he studied in Miami, Rochester and Vienna, then spent some twenty-five years conducting in the opera houses and concert halls of Europe. He made his German debut in 1999 with Cyrano – The Musical, held theatre appointments in Regensburg, Braunschweig and Mannheim, and from 2017 was Music Director of the Hagen Philharmonic Orchestra. He has guest conducted in Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, France and Switzerland. His repertoire runs from symphony, opera and ballet to musical theatre, including Les Misérables, Jesus Christ Superstar, Fiddler on the Roof and My Fair Lady.