I Fell In With Evil Companions
May. 22nd, 2003 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Confession: I love musicals. Broadway musicals. I lap 'em up. I collect show tunes and play them loudly when I wash dishes. Current favourites: "The Music Man", "My Fair Lady", "The Pajama Game", "The Sound of Music". I've been listening to "Chicago" a lot lately, which is bad, because the songs stick in my head and won't go away. "Mr Cellophane" is obnoxious by the time it's played in the brain for the 100th time in a row and you're ready to listen to something really, really bad to get rid of it.
Anyway, I discovered a new musical today. I would dearly love to find a CD of the music from it: perhaps I could order it online. It's called "Her Own Roman" and it came out in 1968. Ever heard of it? I hadn't. It starred Kevin Riley and Leslie Uggams (I always liked her singing; so did my mother) and it was a musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra". Hey, if they could make a musical of "Pygmalion" - why not?
When I was in my Shaw phase, "Caesar and Cleopatra" was one of my favourite plays. "Hail, Sphinx! Salutations from Julius Caesar." I think that's the opening line; but my memory is faulty these days and I haven't read the play (or seen it) in at least twenty years. After a decade or so as a Shaw fan I went right off his style for various reasons, and never really got back to him, though he has some great quotes and passages.
It's difficult to dislike a play with a character in it named Ftatateetah. He also has, if I recall correctly, Domitius Ahenobarbus, possibly under a variation of his name. I remember him best from Shakespeare.
I still love the Caesar in Shaw's play, as I remember him. Caesar as a witty Edwardian gentleman. I have wonderful memories of a production I once saw where Edward Atienza was Caesar - he was magnificent. Of course, it's fairly easy to make me like Julius Caesar. Caesar is one of my favourite guys in history: he had all the qualities I find dramatic and sexy and admirable and fun. A charismatic bisexual writer/historian/poet who conquers the world? A conquering general nicknamed the Queen of Bythinia? What's not to love?
Oddly enough, Shaw leaves out most of the really good stuff about Caesar, and I suppose "Her Own Roman" does too.
I heard a few online clips from the show, with intriguing titles - though "I Fell in With Evil Companions" wasn't one I found. It's the one I went looking for. I heard the line continues: "...and I had a wonderful time". I'd like to know where it goes from there.
I wonder if the title of the musical ("Her Own Roman") refers to Caesar or Antony - probably the latter, if I remember the play rightly. In Shaw's rather unhistorical version, Caesar and Cleopatra aren't lovers, they don't have sex, they don't marry, and how she's going to bear his son Caesarion I can't imagine.
Maybe Shaw wanted us to think that Caesarion wasn't really Caesar's son, but Anthony's, which might be an idea worth playing with.
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Date: 2003-05-23 03:56 am (UTC)Sort of makes one think of Lex, doesn't it? The Queen of Metropolis, perhaps?
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Date: 2003-05-23 04:43 am (UTC)Obviously I like the 'type'.