| re: getting back to the title song in hello Dolly | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 10:04 pm EDT 08/02/24 | |
| In reply to: re: getting back to the title song in hello Dolly - larry13 11:57 am EDT 08/02/24 | |
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| I just want to clarify something here. Prince never tried to cut the title song to Cabaret once he accepted it in the first place. According to Ron Field in the Dramatists Guild Quarterly group discussion of the creation of the show, Prince turned down the song "Cabaret" when Kander and Ebb first played it for him. He told them that he didn't want two title songs. He thought that "Wilkommen" was the title song because it had the lines welcoming the audience to the cabaret. One day, Kander and Ebb played "Cabaret" for Field. He thought it was terrific. They asked him if he would bring it up to Prince. So Field told Prince that they had played him a terrific song that he had turned down. Prince asked to hear it again, and he changed his mind. Kander, Ebb and Masteroff were also participants in this discussion, although not Prince, who perhaps was not available at the right time. What then happened was that when the show was out of town, Goddard Lieberson urged Prince to move "Cabaret" to where "Don't Tell Mama" was, and to add "I Don't Care Much" to the show, and to put it where "Cabaret" was sung. Kander and Ebb had written "I Don't Care Much" well before they were hired to write Cabaret, and Streisand had recorded it. Prince, who discusses this in his memoir (it was also discussed in the Dramatists Guild talk), said that not just Lieberson but friends and even strangers who wrote to him knowing that they were working on fixing the show urged him to do this. (I'm a bit skeptical that many strangers wrote to him about this, but that's what he said.) Even though "I Don't Care Much" had not been in tryout performances of the show, the song had been considered for the show (where it would have been sung by a streetwalker as part of a series of songs setting up the Berlin of the time period), and it was even in the first published vocal selections book. Once Prince felt confident that the show was working. during New York previews, he tried doing what had been suggested: moving "Cabaret" to replace "Don't Tell Mama," and adding "I Don't Care Much" where "Cabaret" had been. It was a disaster, and after one or two performances, things were put back the way they had been. |
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