Our reviewers cast a critical eye over the latest shows around town.
Brightman needs no introduction. She is the iconic Andrew Lloyd Webber muse , immortalised in the role she inspired and originated: the beguiling ingenue Christine inBrightman’s star rose, and she soon left stage shows for a chart-topping recording career. Her voice, with its uncomplicated sweetness, was perfect for both Lloyd Webber’s style and the technical limits of the recording studio.
Unfortunately, the Brightman-Christine persona is light years apart from unhinged Hollywood has-been Norma Desmond, the grotesque, manipulative and ultimately pitiable star of. There’s a fierce magnetism in Norma’s character and songs, which are best sung with a tormented, complex vocal belt. Powerful actresses capable of danger and madness, like Glenn Close, Nicole Scherzinger and Patti LuPone , all sizzled in the role.
Brightman doesn’t sizzle so much as sweetly simper. There’s little difference in her acting when Norma is happy, suicidal, sane, mad, loving or murderous. Brightman’s “arrested development” interpretation – that Norma is developmentally stuck in being an ingenue – is simply unsuited to carrying the vocal or theatrical weight of this tragic role.
Her voice retains its recognisable Brightman sound. Other commentators question her current singing ability, but in my view the decades have simply made more obvious what she always had: a very sweet voice with less tonal complexity, and a wide vibrato now more audible without youth’s sheen. She sings Norma’s line “Let me kiss his severed head … he fought to his last breath” stylistically like Christine’s “Wishing you were somehow here again”.
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