Aladdin Central Messageboard

[AladdinsGenie]

A recent chat with a friend has me curious...

How do you guys feel about the Broadway soundtrack?

I noticed I've only really listened to the songs live - both through unofficial recordings and then seeing the show live on Broadway in New York City - but gave the official soundtrack a proper listen the other night, and man , are these songs super cleaned up from their orchestra arrangements. There's a lot of nuance missing in general, I think, and it almost sounds overly produced? If that makes any sense? I know nothing beats a live experience but in this case it's a drastic difference.

[Edward Falcon]

I like it. Mainly because of Courtney Reed. ❤️

[Meesh]

I don't love it but I entertain it once in a while. Definitely very clean, and it suffers from having a pit orchestra, probably comprised of freelancers (as opposed to a large studio orchestra that plays together regularly). And as much as I love the leads, they have some singing quirks that irk me. (Actually Adam's live performance when I saw him was better, but Courtney's was worse.)

But it's written for a different medium and different decade than the original material, so I can casually enjoy it with that grain of salt. I do rarely find myself listening to it, but I would not say that I dislike it. I find that I enjoy the new songs more than the old, probably because I'm not conditioned to expect them to sound a certain way.
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[arisha]

It was a long time between when I saw the musical and when I listened to the recorded songs so if there is nuance missing in the recordings I completely missed that. Is there a particular song or moment that suffers a lot?

I've seen the Japanese version of the musical several times and sad to say the theatre company that produces it doesn't use live orchestras in any of their productions. So if you watch the Aladdin musical in Japan, the vocals are live but the music is prerecorded (and the exact same as on the soundtrack CD, as far as I can tell).

I listen to the musical soundtrack fairly frequently. Sometimes in English and sometimes in Japanese, depending on my mood. The songs I like to listen to most often are "Arabian Nights," "Proud of Your Boy" and its first reprise, "Babkak, Omar, Aladdin, Kassim," "A Million Miles Away," "Diamond in the Rough," "Prince Ali," and "High Adventure." I think the song I listen to the least is "Friend Like Me" ... I listen to the movie version quite a lot but the musical version just goes on forever with all that stuff in the middle, and to me the added jokes are not the kind of jokes that stay funny over repeated listenings ...

I always wish that "daba daba da" part that plays while the dancers are all leaving the stage after "Prince Ali" had been included on the soundtrack. It's so catchy!

[Meesh]

That longer "Friend Like Me" sequence is a good example of something that is better shown on stage than listened to casually.

Regarding nuance... I don't listen enough to give you specific examples. But it's basically so clean that you can basically see the dead room they're recording in. And everything is perfect, and every teensy little nuance or stylized "imperfection" is autotuned out. As opposed to a live performance, where the performance is left up to chance and the moment. (Not to mention the acoustics of a live performance vs. an over-compressed production in a dry room.)

Take 1992 AWNW for example... Lea doesn't 100% nail "come so far," but it makes it more real and the producers back then had the sense to leave it that way. Nowadays, they'd autotune it or isolate that spot - both of which they defo did with Mena quite a bit.
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[AladdinsGenie]

That's exactly it. It sounds like it was recorded in a room with nothing but a piano and a microphone. I feel like if I remove the vocals it could pass as a karaoke instrumental cause it just had that quality to it.

I hear it a lot with A Million Miles Away. That build up in the middle, starting around 1:55 or so isn't as big as it is live and that's like the best part hearing them get excited as the music builds the moment up more before they slow dance. I'm probably just biased to the original way they sang it when they went back and forth with the lines in the beginning as opposed to Aladdin singing that whole first half of the song by himself, though, but it doesn't have the same swept up optimism of adventure on the track like it does live (but somehow manages to have more sense of movement than AWNW, which is odd). Same thing with One Jump Ahead, too, but to be fair he has to run around singing that song versus standing there singing it in a booth so naturally it's going to sound better live I think. I feel like you have to run a mile and then come sing that song to get it to sound right

[AladdinsGenie]

For reference on A Million Miles Away, this is what I've been listening to since the Seattle shows in 2011. Idk how to explain it, it just hits differently

Live from the 5th Avenue Theater 07/2011

https://www66.zippyshare.com/v/voq0wjib/file.html

versus the official soundtrack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaXUWgEuuts

[Robo4900]

I dunno what exactly it is, but I never thought it came off great. Some things REALLY work IMO -- Friend Like Me, Prince Ali, Diamond In The Rough, and Arabian Nights -- but the rest, I don't think come off well at all. The rest of the songs from the film all feel like inferior performances, the reinstated cut songs feel like they've lost a lot of charm and energy compared to the original demos, and most of the new songs are IMO not very good (and it honestly really annoys me that they went through the trouble to write an IMO quite bland new song for Jasmine, when To Be Free exists and is awesome).