To Life

Friday night, Linda and I saw What If? at La MaMa, a show that takes musical theatre songs and reinterprets them. I'd never seen anything there before, which is weird because it's practically around the corner from where I went to grad school and I walked by there a zillion times, so right away I was excited to see the space. The show was in their smaller space, and I liked it a lot. It had this weird kind of part warehouse, part barn feel to it that I thought was really interesting, and it was kind of exciting to think about what kinds of shows would really work there.

You can read about the show overall at Linda's blog; I just want to talk about how moving I found their version of "L'Chaim" from FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, which was done in a slow, Cuban style.

I'm probably the only Brandeis alum who will say this, but I'm not much of a FIDDLER person. I think the book is a lot stronger than the score, but overall the show doesn't really speak to me. I absolutely loved the recent revival, though--I thought David Leveaux's staging was brilliant, and it was the first time I felt anything emotional from the material. I actually became mildly obsessed with what I thought the show's potential was (not in a pretentious way!), so much so that I even wrote a play adaptation of it, which I set in a Korean-American family living in Vermont soon after 9/11.

So there's something about FIDDLER that touches me, but the material alone doesn't really bring it out. And "L'Chaim" is one of my least favorite songs from that show, right there with "Wonder of Wonders, Miracle of Miracles." The arrangement I heard Friday night, however, was amazing. They played it once through without vocals, then again with two singers, and listening to the song slowed down significantly--especially without vocals--allowed me to focus on the music in a way I never had before. I was surprised by how beautiful the melody became at that tempo; the song felt like a prayer, rather than a rousing celebration as it is originally. There's some really cool musical things going on that I hadn't noticed, too. The melody in the hook, for example, does this really awesome, kind of unexpected thing where it goes a little flat (I think, I'm not a composer!), and it's so satisfying. I think its corresponding lyric is "L'Chaim, to life." I think it's actually the notes "L'Chaim" sits on that I really love.

Hearing the song in that style also created such a vivid scene for me. As much as I enjoyed the other reinterpretations, none of them conjured up a whole story the way this version of "L'Chaim" did for me. I felt like I understood the character singing and that I was there, in some kind of factory in Cuba, listening to someone trying to inspire a crowd by paying homage to God. It was honest and simple and beautiful, and I know I'll never hear that song the same way again.