Winter 2000
Christiane Noll: A Broadway
Love Story
Varese Sarabande (VSD-5956), US, 1998
Reviewed by Ted Naron; Chicago, Illinois
Christiane Noll is one of several young Broadway songbirds - Randy Graff and Kim Huber are others - who, it seems certain, would be more celebrated had they only been born forty years earlier. Noll has everything it takes - a voice that can belt out like a clarion or "go inside" with heartbreaking loveliness; bulls-eye intonation; a stunning ability to hold any note as long as she wants without losing a molecule of steam; great vibrato control; and enough acting technique to plumb a lyric for all its meaning and subtext without crossing into histrionics. All she lacks are good new musicals to star in. Alas, Broadway, relative to what it once was, is moribund.
As it is, she has supplemented the occasional Broadway role with a plenitude of work in regional and touring productions. Recently her voice was heard as Anna in the (lamentable, I'm told) animated film version of The King and I. But one imagines that if the year were 1959 and not 1999, and new, fabulous musicals were opening on Broadway every season, Noll would be a Hirschfeld drawing and a household name.
A Broadway Love Story is an album in which what's good makes the little that's bad inconsequential. Noll's strengths make her shortcomings - principally an inability to swing when called for - insignificant. Overall her sound is casual, colloquial, all-American.
Bruce Kimmel, producer of many theater music albums for Varese, has created a clever concept for this one. The songs, all from different Broadway scores, are sequenced to tell the story of one love affair. The opening track finds our character having just broken up with a lover and vowing never to open herself up to a romance again. With each subsequent song, our character begins to adjust to life alone, experiences the trepidation of a blind date, feels the exhilaration of new love when the blind date actually works out, explores the complexities of a new relationship, scales new heights of eros, comes "this close" to ultimately committing, and then suffers the dissolution of the relationship because "this close" isn't close enough. The final song, the little-known Rodgers-Hammerstein The Next Time It Happens, finds our character back where she started, but with just a soupcon more self-awareness.
The more a song gives Noll to work with, the more she shines. To get the album's flaws out of the way: She's unable to bring anything fresh to the Gershwin medley of Things Are Looking Up and Nice Work if You Can Get It. And the pedestrian, "Broadway Lite" offerings of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Frank Wildhorn are thin gruel.
But on the moving Marvin Hamlisch-David Zippel No More, she not only dramatizes a text full or rage, but raises goosebumps by conveying that the song's character may not be as insightful and invulnerable as she thinks.
Times Like This - by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, who wrote the score for Ragtime - offers Noll a tender moment to sing the praises of canine companionship, an unconventional subject that Noll succeeds in making serious, not silly. The marvelous A Quiet Thing (introduced by Liza Minnelli several eons ago in Kander and Ebb's Flora, the Red Menace) may be the album's best moment, warmly introspective in Noll's hands, full of the curiosity, wonderment, confusion and awe of a character overwhelmed by newfound love.
Sondheim's Marry Me a Little (dropped from Company to be replaced by Being Alive) presents another opportunity for Noll to explore the subtext; the character says she wants commitment, but plainly doesn't. Rage returns in I Don't Remember Christmas, but once again, Noll makes the rage more interesting with her ability to convey self-delusion. She makes it clear that the character singing will not so easily forget her lover as she seems to believe.
By the album's final song, The Next Time It Happens, our heroine seems finally to have achieved some ability to feel her own sadness without denial, to assess her own failings with some honesty, and to cherish her pain as human. And in that there is hope.
The album gains its unity from the implied plotline, and also from the
arrangements, which appositely quote from one song in the context of another.
Whoever is responsible for the arrangements (Kimmel, Todd Ellison or David
Siegel) deserves a lot of credit; the overall feel of the album is contemporary
yet theatrical in the best sense. Kimmel has produced a large body of
work on Varese, much of it featuring Noll as part of his repertory company
of contemporary musical theater talents.
This album, like all his others, has the trademark "Varese sound"
- punchy and compressed. It makes for an exciting, in-your-face presentation,
bright but not lacking in bass impact, achieving the sonic effect of an
orchestra somewhat larger than the adequate one employed.
Unless you absolutely can't listen to a singer who doesn't swing - as is normally my case - do yourself a favor and listen to what Christiane Noll can do.
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1. Opening / Wherever He Ain't / No More (Jerry Herman; Marvin Hamlisch,
David Zippel)
2. Times Like This (Stephen Flaherty, Lynn Ahrens)
3. Tonight at Eight / Look at that Face (Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick;
Anthony Newley, Leslie Bricusse)
4. Things are Looking Up / Nice Work if You Can Get It (George Gershwin,
Ira Gershwin)
5. You're Just in Love (Irving Berlin)
6. A Quiet Thing (John Kander, Fred Ebb)
7. Twenty Four Hours of Lovin' (Carol Hall)
8. Unexpected Song / The Last Man in my Life (Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don
Black, Richard Maltby, Jr.; Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black)
9. Who Are You Now? (Jule Styne, Bob Merrill)
10. Marry Me a Little (Stephen Sondheim)
11. Good Thing Going (Stephen Sondheim)
12. Now When the Rain Falls (Frank Wildhorn)
13. What Did I Ever See in Him / I Don't Remember Christmas (Charles Strouse,
Lee Adams; David Shire, Richard Maltby, Jr.)
14. The Next Time it Happens (Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II)
Produced by Bruce Kimmel. Arranged by Bruce Kimmel and Todd Ellison. Orchestrated by David Siegel. Total Time 53:36.
