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Review of Love's Labour's Lost (Patrick Doyle)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you appreciate both Patrick Doyle's exuberant score
for Much Ado About Nothing and the fluffy style of standard songs
of the 1930's/MGM musical era.
Avoid it... if the bright and energetic sound of the Busby Berkeley atmosphere is as nauseating to you as its wild camera angles over complicated choreography.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Love's Labour's Lost: (Patrick Doyle) Kenneth
Branagh has never been one to shy away from a challenge. His ambitious
work as writer, producer, actor, and director to bring William
Shakespeare's forgotten Love's Labour's Lost to the big screen
for the first time was all the evidence of Branagh's determination you'd
ever need. Not only was the obscure play difficult to adapt for modern
audiences, but Branagh also decided to set the narrative in the setting
of a 1930's Busby Berkeley musical. While he was able to convince enough
people of the idea's merits to produce the film, skeptical audiences
more in tune with the director's successful, previous Shakespearian
adaptations didn't warm up to Love's Labour's Lost. Unlike
Much Ado About Nothing, which embodies much of the same grandiose
and charming spirit, Love's Labour's Lost whips through its
frenzy of musical production numbers and connecting segues so fast that
it's difficult to identify with the four lead couples in the same way.
Whether it was ultimately a cinematic success or not, you have to admire
Branagh's zeal for both Shakespeare and classic MGM musicals. The
merging of these elements are an unusual experiment that allowed
Branagh's usual musical collaborator, Patrick Doyle, to romp in the same
spirit. Not for fifty years had the genres of Shakespeare and the
musical been combined on such a grand scale as they are in Love's
Labour's Lost, and Doyle had the pleasure of working with Branagh to
determine which classic songs of the 1930's to adapt into the bright
tones of Doyle's own original writing. Obviously, the audience for the
film and its music will largely be the same. Whether you can tolerate
Doyle's extremely upbeat original music in conjunction with the lovable
song numbers depends solely on your attitude towards the glamorous genre
of energetic musicals that were so popular in mainstream movie houses of
the 1930's and 40's. Skepticism over the merits of an endeavor to
reconstruct some of the most popular musical songs of the time into a
Shakespearean mold is understandable. And yet, the beauty of Doyle's end
result in Love's Labour's Lost is its fantastic melding of the
different famous genre songs into the Shakespearean story without too
many awkward turns.
As a musical production, the orchestral underscore breaks into full-fledged song and dance for ten neatly choreographed performances with smaller instrumental ensembles. Only a few times does a sharp edge exist in the transitions between score and song, most notably before "I Won't Dance," but it's likely that these are faults of the album rather than of the music as presented in the film. The classic Golden Age songs of Gershwin, Porter, Kern, and Berlin work remarkably well together on the album; their selection was wise. The classically educated ear will pick up on several adaptations of fragments of these composers' (cited) works throughout Doyle's underscore. In his original work, Doyle's greatest achievement in Love's Labour's Lost is the necessary enthusiasm that he injects into the tone of the music. The musicals of the thirties and forties are always jubilant, smiling, and overwhelming with energy (not to mention the creative camera angles that Branagh imitates during the numbers). Doyle's previous scores for Branagh's films proved that he could well enough produce a believable Shakespearean spirit, but this time he also succeeds in creating the necessary 1930's atmosphere to keep the music and film floating on air. The title overture is a remarkable fanfare of Korngold style, introducing the lush and lavish lifestyles of the era with one of the composer's more infections themes. This idea permeates the score despite the heavy presence of the songs, and the composer even reproduces a very genuine newsreel march for the "Cinetone News" cue that is adapted into several scenes in the film. The album, while a success, still has a few minor problems. The lengthy score cue "Twelve Months and a Day," while necessary in its purpose, breaks the flighty mood considerably, with a far more somber and serious tone than the rest of the bright, fluffy album. The second flaw of the music is the fact that Branagh employed actors to play the lead parts in the musical rather than accomplished singers. In traditional musicals, the voices were always as fine-tuned as their dancing. But in Love's Labour's Lost, the actors don't always perform well, and unlike Moulin Rouge the following year, the ensemble doesn't seem as well coached. Still, their enthusiasm mostly compensates for this problem, and the album remains a unique and entertaining experience, especially if you're into those old MGM musical productions. ****
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 58:10
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert contains extensive notation, credits, and pictures. Notes from both
Doyle and Branagh are included, and the text of the Branagh comment is as follows:
Whatever the reason, Patrick and I were pretty sure that we would be setting ourselves an irresistibly exciting and demanding creative challenge by fusing Shakespeare and the musical. And so it proved. A plot that many critics have described as silly; a style that moves from high romance to farce to social satire; characters who can veer from narcissism to the grotesque - all are inside a play which, alone among Shakespeare's works, went unperformed for some two hundred years after his death. Add to that the very genre of film musical, rarely revived, replaced, we were told, by the rock video. The soundtrack is the essential element with which we attempted to overcome these difficulties. We chose classic songs from composers whose economy, lightness of touch, and linguistic and melodic brilliance could stand beside the equally delicate poetry of the playwright. And we strived to create new arrangements that took their style from the drama (and the comedy); orchestrations that would viscerally give audiences the vicarious thrill of on-screen emotions; and finally, a narrative score that required Patrick to tackle the awesome challenge of complementing both Shakespeare and some of the major popular songwriters of the twentieth century."
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