Brainal leakage

You all know the warnings on those fat free products and foods cooked with synthetic oils: MAY CAUSE ANAL LEAKAGE. Well, I've decided to coin a new term describing what happens when you have too much information to learn in too short an amount of time - Brainal leakage. I can't believe how many songs I have to memorize for next week's benefit concert. I think my brain might literally explode, leaking rhymes and poetic metaphors about birds and the moon and all that other bullsh*t all over the floor. I'm even starting to get dorm room flashbacks from those all-nighters I used to pull for my chem and bio classes in college - Intermediary Metabolism, Hystology, Genetics, Physics - I used to be a f*cking genius. Now I can't even memorize two verses of a song. Oh, for the simple days when you could just roll out of bed, grab a piece of 2-day old pizza from the box under your mattress and just head to class in the clothes you had slept in.

One benefit from all this cramming is my newly realized appreciation for the art of lyric writing, especially the old schoolers. Take Oscar Hammerstein (we're performing a butt load of his songs from South Pacific, Sound of Music and State Fair). His lyrics always make emotional sense and seem to fit Rodgers' melodies perfectly. He is succinct and specific. And when he goes off on a poetic tangent, it is always for a reason (to clarify a point, accentuate a previous idea, or as a riff on an existing "trite" phrase thereby reinventing it for a fresh perspective). Take the opening lyric for "It's A Grand Night for Singing": "...the moon is flying high. And somewhere a bird who is bound he'll be heard, is throwing his heart at the sky." Hammerstein takes a metaphor that in lesser hands would read cliche, and through an unexpected adjective and verb, creates something original.

I even have to give props to Andrew Lloyd Weber for being smart enough to borrow T.S. Eliot's poetry for his snoozefest, Cats. And I'm not being sarcastic, I literally fell asleep during the second act pirate ship scene. Anyway, I've always tuned out during any rendition of "Memory." But now that I have to memorize it (yes, I have to perform "that song" at next week's concert), I can actually see why ALW was drawn to the text in the first place.

Speaking of genius lyricists, I just purchased tickets for the New York premiere of Sondheim's newest musical, Roadshow. Yippee! It's playing a limited run off-Broadway at the Public. This will be my second time seeing an original production of a Sondheim show (the first being Passion). I'm so excited, yet a little depressed thinking that at the ripe old age of 78, this may be his last. Hope to report good things about it soon.