Unimpressed

A slight break from my top 100 list to give you guys an update on the new musicals I'm listening to:

The Last Five Years: I gotta say, I'm really kind of disappointed. I guess I shouldn't be, but I had such high expectations based on the great things I'd heard about this show. I'll start out with the good: "Still Hurting" is great and stinging, it even made my top one hundred list. Most of Jason Robert Brown's jokes and lyrics are pleasurable and very real, probably too real. I always get a feeling that I'm listening to his autobiography, and I just want to say, "Too much information man". But that is also a part of the beauty of the show: it's realism is admirable even if annoying.
Now to the bad (though you see I couldn't even finish the good without taking a couple shots at the show): I'm most disappointed in the Act 1 Finale, "The Next Ten Minutes" and the finale "Goodbye Until Tomorrow". It seems to my amateurish ears that Brown has missed one of the simplest tricks of songwriting: He doesn't present a catchy, repeated key line. It feels like there is no chorus, it's all verses leading to nowhere. The rest of the songs are, though sometimes heartfelt, are just fluff.
I'll keep listening and I'm sure eventually this show will find a way to win me over.

Hair: This one was difficult for me to listen to, it's definitely not my genre of music, but I was immediately thrilled with "Aquarius" and a few other songs. Most of the other songs seemed to just blend together, until I found the movie on YouTube. Now I kind of really love the hippie feel of the music. I'm still getting to know most of the songs, but this one looks like it has a very promising future on my iPod.

The King and I: I'm only given this show two or three listens, but my initial observations seem to be that it is very simple, not bad, just simple. It's nothing like the beauty and complexity of "Carousel" or even "Oklahoma". But perhaps the classic nature of the musical is rooted more in it's staging, dancing, and superb acting. Oh, but a bonus: As a cast album junkie, I often lose the beauty of the ballets and dance numbers because I skip over them, not so for "The Small House of Uncle Thomas" which is hilarious and a signature part of the show.

Rent: Again, the word, "unimpressed" comes to mind. True, because of it's length it's difficult to sit down and listen to a large chunk of it at a time, but that's part of the problem. Larson's "conversations in music" are a nuisance. I listen to thirty minutes of useless conversations put to music to get to one or two good songs.
But, THE BEAUTY IS that those one or two songs are just simply wonderful. "Seasons of Love",  "La Vie Boheme", "Will I?", and others are beautiful. But overall, the album is hard to get into when I'm interrupted every other song with a "Tune Up" or a "Voice Mail".