Song and Dance
| Song and Dance | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Music | Andrew Lloyd Webber |
| Lyrics |
Don Black Richard Maltby, Jr. (additional) |
| Productions | 1982 West End 1983 Australia 1985 Broadway 2007 Israel |
Song and Dance is a musical comprising two acts, one told entirely in "Song" and one entirely in "Dance", tied together by a unifying love story.
The "Song" act is Tell Me on a Sunday, with lyrics by Don Black and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, about a young British woman's romantic misadventures in New York City and Hollywood. The "Dance" act is a ballet choreographed to Variations, composed by Lloyd Webber for his cellist brother Julian, which is based on the A Minor Caprice No. 24 by Paganini.
The Song portion was written specifically for Marti Webb, and presented at the Sydmonton Festival in the summer of 1979. It was subsequently recorded and aired as a one-hour television special by the BBC the following January. The Dance portion was recorded in 1978, and nearly became incorporated into Cats. The opening sequence was utilized as the theme music for London Weekend Television's South Bank Show.
Producer Cameron Mackintosh proposed that the two pieces be combined under the umbrella title Song and Dance to acknowledge the primary aspect of each act, billing the piece as "a concert for the theatre".
Black altered some of the songs from the original album and worked with Lloyd Webber on new material: "The Last Man in My Life", "I Love New York" and "Married Man", the latter set to the same tune as "Sheldon Bloom". A new orchestration of the Variations for a sixteen-piece theatre orchestra was produced from the original symphonic version played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra but Harry Rabinowitz retained the baton for the stage production. "When You Want to Fall in Love", with a tune previously released by Marti Webb and Justin Hayward as "Unexpected Song" which itself was later added to the score, was used at the climax of the dance section to meld the two halves.
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