Monday 9 May 2016

Musical Monday #103

Today is a pick-your-favourite musical number!  Personally, I'm surprised by how annoying all three are, considering it's quite a good song.  Well, 'song' may be a stretch as it's mostly just two words repeated over and over.

Easy Street
Written by Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin

from Annie (1982)
Performed by Carol Burnett, Tim Curry and Bernadette Peters
from Annie (1999)
Performed by Kathy Bates, Alan Cumming and Kristin Chenoweth
from Annie (2014)
Performed by Cameron Diaz and Bobby Cannavale 


I think I'd go with the middle one, even if it is so stagey you're afraid they might fall into the orchestra pit.

Which one do you like best?

6 comments:

  1. I agree! Middle version definitely is best, quite possibly because the actors are more charismatic than the other two movies', and because it puts the music at its centre. The 1982 version adds too much choreography and silly "humour" sound effects - very annoying. The 2014 version suffers from that movie's big problem: they filed down the melodies and autotuned them until the singing became too bland to tell any voices or songs apart.

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    1. Having now watched these several times, I quite like the middle one, whereas the other two are just annoying. I was excited by the premise of the 2014 one, I thought casting a black actor as Annie would be a lot more interesting than the usual clichéd poppet, but I heard the movie was terrible and, disappointed, quickly lost interest so I never saw it.

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    2. I agree. I'd had very high hopes, as the 2014 cast actually includes very talented actors. Shame about the direction and the way they handled the music: genuinely a film that should have been much better, but was ruined by the producers / director. (However, Cameron Diaz, though talented, was miscast)

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  2. They're all quite annoying, and the first two are pretty stagey. But the third is easily the worst: they're only singing and dancing in a dream (?) and both actors sound like they were dubbed years later by robots. Whole thing looks like they'd rather not bother making a musical. Gee, I wonder why that flopped.

    Alan Cumming's American accent is pretty shonky, but at least their routine's quite tidy. I thought that first one would go on forever.

    So in summary, this is great, this is great!

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    Replies
    1. You leave Alan Cumming alone! The shoes and hat alone sell it. But I think he's doing a good performance here, as is Kathy Bates. In fact, is it wrong to kinda want them to win?

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I look forward to your enthusiastic and loving comment.