Fame, the 1980 movie about students at a special performing arts high school in New York, was successful not only in theaters but also in record stores, where the soundtrack album, featuring the Top Ten title song, was a million seller. Film producer David De Silva not surprisingly had the idea of adapting the movie into a stage musical, which got on its feet in the late '90s. The creative team that wrote the screenplay and the movie score, however, was absent, replaced by librettist José Femandez and songwriters Steve ...
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Fame, the 1980 movie about students at a special performing arts high school in New York, was successful not only in theaters but also in record stores, where the soundtrack album, featuring the Top Ten title song, was a million seller. Film producer David De Silva not surprisingly had the idea of adapting the movie into a stage musical, which got on its feet in the late '90s. The creative team that wrote the screenplay and the movie score, however, was absent, replaced by librettist José Femandez and songwriters Steve Margoshes and Jacques Levy. (The title song was the sole holdover.) Femandez's story was sort of a sequel to the movie, following the class of 1984, with sardonic references to the film in the script. But in practice, many of the plot lines were exactly the same, even if all the character names were different. Margoshes' music did not follow in the style of film composer Michael Gore's synthesizer-heavy '80s pop/rock, but was instead earnest contemporary show music, with lots of soaring ballads. The show was first produced as a road tour and generated a cast album in 1999. It finally got to New York at an off-Broadway theater, billed as Fame on 42nd Street, on November 11, 2003. This is the cast album of that production, and even though the cast is entirely different from the 1999 version, the music is essentially the same. The singers are a bit less accomplished, but not bad, doing their best to sell the serviceable songs that seem even further removed from the '80s than they did five years ago. The disc runs out to the limits of a CD, 75 minutes, by including bits of dialogue and adding a seven-and-a-half-minute orchestral suite of the music as a so-called "bonus track." The result is a modest success, as long as the listener wasn't expecting more of the Michael Gore music. ~ William Ruhlmann, Rovi
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