For the last  four years, I have wanted to make a trip to New York City to catch Aida on Broadway. Unfortunately, my schedule has never permitted this and the end result now is that I will  be unable to catch this musical before it closes on 5 September 2004.

One of the main reasons why  I fell in love with this musical is its score by Elton John and Tim Rice. There are so many beautiful songs in the musical. "Written In The Stars", "Elaborate Lives", "A Step Too Far", "I Know The Truth" and "Not Me" are just some of the songs that I really like.

Reading "Aida - The Making Of The Broadway Musical", I realized that there is so much more to Aida than just its music. This book is filled with so many large and vivid pictures from the musicals and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who has been unable to watch the musical like me. This book can never be a substitute for the stage musical but it sure is a good guide to the show.

Aida falls under Walt Disney Theatrical Production like The Lion King and Beauty And The Beast but this fact has not been played up like the other two stage musicals. One reason would probably be to attract a different demographic for the more serious musical.

This book is split into four main chapter: The Story, Composition, Production and Performance.

The Story

Aida was first made famous by Giuseppe Verdi's 1871 opera and it revolves around a doomed love triangle where an enslaved African princess Aida  falls in love with her Egyptian captor, Radames, who is engaged to the royal princess Amneris. The decision to transform a famous piece of opera into a more contemporary rock-pop musical was a difficult one to take but the writers eventually decided to take up the challenge. This chapter writes about  the conception of Aida The Broadway musical and its beginnings.

Composition

The leading individuals involved in the production are described in this chapter and the chapter also includes interviews with them. These individuals include Elton John (who wrote the music), Tim Rice (who wrote the lyrics), Robert Falls (the director and co-writer of the book), Linda Woolverton and David Henry Hwang (both co-writers of the book). Sometimes, it is easy to forget how much work goes into just setting up and arranging a musical even when the score is done. A number of songs were moved from Act I to Act II and vice-versa ("The Gods Love Nubia"), removed from the score ("The Messenger") and some songs were allocated to other  characters (Aida's "Elaborate Lives" to Rodames is one notable example) before the final version reached the Broadway stage in 2000.

Production

Of the four main chapters, I found this the least interesting but other readers may disagree with me. Information on the props, sets, costumes and stage technology are detailed here.  One particular description of the use of laser lights to form a pyramid (which also represented the love triangle between the three title characters) stood out for me.

Performance

Performing in Aida is definitely no easy task. Not only do all members of the cast have to rehearse under the watchful eyes of the production team, the more unfortunate in the cast have to prepare for a wide variety of roles in the musical. This would include the swings who have to learn the dance choreography of all the other members of the ensemble and the worse thing is that all their dance steps are quite different. Imagine being able to find out your role and having to recall the unique dance steps for that character only a couple of hours before the curtain comes up.

This chapter was the most interesting for me and it describes the rehearsals, how the show was put up and how scene changes were done. More interestingly was Heather Headley's admission that she was very disappointed that her character Aida was not going to sing one of the best songs in the musical, "Elaborate Lives".  Probably as a consolation, Headley gets to record the song on the album that is recorded by various pop and rock artistes entitled Elton John And Tim Rice's Aida. The song "The Messenger" which was left out of the musical score is also included in this album.

This book explains everything that you want to know about Aida The Broadway Musical and comes along with many pages of lavish pictures from the production. Seeing that I may be unable to watch the musical for some time now, this book may just about be the next best thing. 

 

Reviewed on 18 July 2004