5. Night Music, Pacific Overtures

Class Preparation

Our main topic will be A Little Night Music, but we will also touch briefly on Pacific Overtures. If you're not familiar with the score of these shows, then you might want to listen to some of the available recordings.
Here are links to the Wikipedia pages for A Little Night Music and Pacific Overtures.

A Little Night Music:

Audra McDonald sings "The Glamorous Life" (movie version) at the 80th Birthday Concert with the NY Philharmonic.
D. Jamin-Bartlett sings "The Miller's Son" from the Original Broadway Cast Recording. This is audio only, and from this link you should be able to access all of the tracks from this recording.
BONUS: "A Weekend in the Country" from a stage production of the New York City Opera (broadcast on PBS long ago). Someone has posted nearly all of the sections of this production (this is #9 of 17). The quality is not up to contemporary HD standards (and for some reason Henrik's mike doesn't work), but it is certainly well sung! Sally Anne Howes plays Desirée.
BONUS: Judi Dench sings "Send in the Clowns."
BONUS: A Broadway.com preview of the 2009 Revival with the replacement cast of Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch.

Pacific Overtures

The entire 1976 original Broadway production was filmed for broadcast in Japan, though not shown in this country as far as I know. Recommended scenes include:
- The arrival of Perry’s war ship at 0:31:20 (a major moment for Boris Aronson's set)
- “Please Hello” (1:29:25)--with the various admirals singing songs in the style of their countries
- "A Bowler Hat" (1:46:45)
- “Someone in a Tree” (1:14:40)
Anatomy of a Song: A documentary (about 30 minutes, presented in two parts) about the creation of "Someone in a Tree": Part 1 and Part 2. The young host is future drama critic Frank Rich.

What worked?

What would make it even better?