Tag: musicals

Nobody can do it like a Dampf Lok!

On By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany3 Comments

It would be fair to say that a great deal of my musical taste was formed in the 1980s.  Brian, my best friend at the time, was constantly sharing music with me, and I absorbed it and ran with it.   He introduced me to diverse artists such as Kraftwerk and Mannheim Steamroller, both of which I still love to this day.  Then there were the musicals.   I’m an unabashed and admitted musical theater geek, but I wouldn’t be if Brian hadn’t had musicals in the collection.

In 1984, he got the soundtrack to a new Andrew Lloyd Webber show that had just hit Broadway called Starlight Express.  The show is about toy trains come to life in the mind of a small boy, and it’s a spectacle-  the actors portraying the trains perform on roller skates.  I wanted to see it badly.

The original Broadway run was only a few years, but the UK show was on the West End in London for years- over 7400 performances.   In the early 1990s, I found out that another friend of mine, Chris, had been to see it in London.  He told me that he fell asleep during the show because he was jet-lagged, and I never quite forgave him for that blasphemy.

In 1992, the London show was heavily revised as “The New Starlight Express,” and a new cast recording was released.  I didn’t care much for the revisions-  they removed a villain character who I always felt was vital to making the plot interesting.  They also dropped a few songs that I was particularly fond of, and added a bunch of new songs that I didn’t think were as good.  I still wanted to see it though.

(Editor’s Note:  If you’re interested in a  detailed breakdown of the changes made in the 1992 version, the Starlight Express Wikipedia article contains more information than anyone will ever need.)

About two months ago, I was perusing a list of live music scattered around Germany.  Concerts, musicals, and the like were all represented, and I saw that Starlight Express was in Bochum.   A quick map check showed me that Bochum is easily reachable by train,  and I put it on my list of “I’d like to do that sometime” jaunts.  It’s a pretty big list.

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Mufasa!

On By StevenIn Life In Germany1 Comment

You might have noticed that there are more posts from me on weekends-  that’s because I have more time to myself.  Week days are work days, which means I usually don’t have as much time to think of things to say.  Not so with weekends.  Especially Sundays, where I have to find ways to fill the time because nothing is open.

Today I filled some of the time by going to see Disneys Der König Der Löwen, also known as The Lion King.  I’ve been thinking about seeing it for a while, but I’m glad I waited-  I found that I could actually follow more of the German now than I would have been able to a few weeks ago.

I’ve always been somewhat facsinated by the voice actors who dub over well known parts on television and in movies.  While watching television here, I found that the German version of “How I Met Your Mother” was really fun to watch because the voice actors who cover Neil Patrick Harris, Jason Segel, and all the rest really do sound like their American counterparts- almost uncannily so.

That was mostly the case with the German cast of the Lion King.  They had a hard time matching someone to the timbre of James Earl Jones, but everyone else was more or less spot on.  Here’s a sample of my favorite part of the movie:

http://youtu.be/1IIUrnd9_Ww

Something else that I found interesting was that despite the massive shift in language, many of the songs retained a rhyme scheme.  On those parts where I could pick out the translations, I noticed that they had changed the order of the words around to make it fit the rhyme scheme. It seems to me like that would be somewhat awkward, but I’ll have to ask a native speaker for their opinion.

Something else that I thought was interesting was that while most of the songs were English in the original were in German, Zazu’s “Nobody Knows” while he’s in the cage was in English.  And in the bit where he sings “I’ve Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts” in the English version, the German version changes to a little tune I’ve never heard before. I’d be willing to bet that it’s a song that is very common to people who’ve lived in Germany all their lives, though.

All in all, a very fun outing.  And one of the previews was for Die Muppets!  I can’t wait to see that one.