Around Valentine's Day every year, I get this impulse to comb my music collection and construct a multitude of playlists. Bouncy, poppy love songs, crazy desperate breakup songs - romance is a fruitful topic for musicians and lyricists. This year, I hit on a previously unrealized subgenre that is actually ideal for the holiday: show tunes. Musicals are one place where wearing one's emotions on their sleeve is a necessity, and some fabulous love songs have been created for them. Here are some of my favorites:
A couple of years ago, I watched a documentary on Broadway musicals where they discussed Oscar Hammerstein's skill with what they described as the "speculative love song" - it allows the writers to place a love song for the romantic leads in the first act by talking about it as non-real. (I don't know, I thought it was interesting.) Anyway, here's some of my favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein selections.
"If I Loved You" from Carousel
"People Will Say We're in Love" from Oklahoma
"Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?" from Cinderella
"Ten Minutes Ago" from Cinderella
Let's just take a moment to bask in the very concept of a musical created specifically for television. The original version, from the 1950s and starring Julie Andrews, was filmed live. Live! A live original musical on television! When the fairy godmother gives Cinderella her new gown for the ball, they just sort of pushed Julie Andrews out of camera range and changed her clothes super-fast! It just makes Glee seem like they're not really trying very hard, doesn't it? The sixties version (with Leslie Ann Warren, up top) is the one I watched to death as a kid before misplacing the tape, the nineties version (with Brandy) resurrected the show in my mind, and the fifties version is the one for which I have the soundtrack. Really, I love all three because of songs like these.
"Make Believe" from Show Boat
This is actually Jerome Kern, not Richard Rodgers, but it still fits the whole Hammerstein speculative song thing. Oh, Show Boat. So deeply problematic, so academically intruiging.
And from other writers and shows:
"One Boy" from Bye Bye Birdie
Hugo is kind of a lame character (that whole super-chaste kiss sequence in the middle of this scene cracks me up), but I love how Bobby Rydell's voice sounds in this song. It makes early-sixties conformity sound so appealing.
"Someone is Waiting" from Company
Having had groups of close male friends, the whole conceit of wishing to pick and choose everyone's best parts to create someone ideal is so terribly spot-on.
"I Can Hear the Bells" from Hairspray
Hairspray always manages to have just the right amount of edge and humor in its songs, which acts as a buffer against what can be saccharine about them.
"Tonight" from West Side Story
Just so wonderfully swoon-y. I love "Somewhere," too, but this is my favorite.
