As with the Tanz der Vampire post, we are in stage musical territory and so I am a bit out of my element for talking about some of this work. However, unlike Tanz der Vampire, at least this one is in the language I know! I have also never seen a performance of this show, so I’m basing this post on what is credited as the Original London Cast recording.

While they had not worked together, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jim Steinman had known each other for years. It makes sense that they would, since the similarities in their careers are obvious: Both worked from the late ’60s onward on trying to merge traditional stage musical sounds with rock music. Steinman left the theater world and instead tried to work from the other direction, bringing theatrical sounds and drama to the world of rock. Lloyd Webber stayed in the theater world but pushed the envelope of including rock sounds (and other modern music sounds) in his work. They were essentially pushing toward the same place from opposite directions.

Sometime in the mid-’80s, Lloyd Webber, recognizing the “dark obsessive side” of Steinman’s work, asked Steinman to write the lyrics for his upcoming work, The Phantom of the Opera. Steinman turned it down due to a commitment to a Bonnie Tyler album. It eventually worked out for Lloyd Webber, as The Phantom of the Opera went on to become one of the most famous, successful, and enduring stage musicals of the 20th century. But Steinman and Lloyd Webber would not find a chance to collaborate until over a decade later, resulting in Whistle Down the Wind. The show first premiered in Washington, D.C., in 1996 but its expected Broadway run was canceled quickly amid a shower of negative reviews and the show went back to the drawing board. There is hardly any sign of that version of Whistle Down the Wind in existence now. It would then debut in London in 1998, and that version is what spawns the cast album that serves as the basis for my post. That version seems to be considered a success, running for about 2-1/2 years and spawning a few revivals since.

As opposed to Tanz der Vampire‘s rather rote plot, Whistle Down the Wind instead offers a tale of the dangers of blind faith. A southern US town in 1959 gets two surprise visitors. The first is a snake-handling Revivalist troupe that sets up in town and invites tests of faith among the locals, riling up religious arguments among the faithful. The second, secret visitor is a convicted murderer whose escape is reported in local newspapers. When he comes upon a local barn, the murderer takes refuge, only to be discovered by a group of local kids and teens, led by 17-year-old Swallow. When she asks who he is and he exclaims, “Jesus Christ!,” the entire group misunderstands his exclamation as his self-identification.

Steinman only wrote the lyrics for this show, not the book or music. Even when he’s just writing lyrics, Steinman recycles, but he doesn’t do it much. “The Vaults of Heaven” and “A Kiss Is a Terrible Thing to Waste” are reused titles from unreleased previous projects (see the notes). But, within the realm of what had been released, the only real case of reusing a line is “We’ll never be as young as we are right now” in “A Kiss Is a Terrible Thing to Waste,” which is a line from “Lost Boys and Golden Girls.” There are definitely some repeated ideas like “They all want you to crawl when I want you to dance” in “Try Not to Be Afraid” being sort of a remix of “You gotta learn to dance before you learn to crawl” from “Everything Louder than Everything Else” or “Those good girls never know what they’re missing, but us bad girls almost always do” sounding like an alternate title for “Good Girls Go to Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere).”

While I wouldn’t put many of the lyrics in this show in the same zip code as Steinman’s best work, there are definitely some good lines. “Tire Tracks and Broken Hearts,” “A Kiss Is a Terrible Thing to Waste,” and “Off-Ramp Exit to Paradise” in particular are filled with some really great lines. But if you know this show, you might notice something about all of those songs: they are actually songs primarily set in the B-plot of Candy and Amos’s teenaged plans to escape town (and Amos’s feelings for Swallow). The religious conflict at the heart of the show? That just doesn’t seem to engage Steinman–those lyrics are competent but have none of his usual spark and personality.

While much of this musical has a relatively similar sound to Tanz der Vampire (albeit less grandiose and gothic and more poppy and accessible), but it tries out some real genre changes. “I Never Get What I Pray For” is a piano-only little song that really has a vaudevillian character. “Cold” is a slice of ’60s country-blues that Steinman must have loved writing. “When Children Rule the World” mixes child-like singalong elements with jazzier modern additions. These little genre excursions are nice because they help break up what could otherwise be a very “same-y” show.

The first act is pretty focused on setting up a second-act conflict between the adults of the town, having recognized the killer for who is, and the children, thinking he is Jesus based on sound logic built out of what their parents have taught them. It has some memorable moments in “Cold,” “Tire Tracks and Broken Hearts,” and “When Children Rule the World,” but I don’t find much of it all that interesting, including “No Matter What,” which would be the enduring song from this show.

Surprisingly like Tanz der Vampire, the second act really picks up. “A Kiss Is a Terrible Thing to Waste,” “If Only (Reprise),” “Off-Ramp Exit to Paradise,” and the climactic “Nature of the Beast” are all absolute winners, filled with killer melodies and powerful mixes of strings, horns, pianos, guitars, and seemingly any other instrument Lloyd Webber can get his hands on. It’s no surprise to me that the more this show rocks out, the more I like it. But it is interesting to me how much it really does.

I don’t really think of this show as Steinman’s work–it’s more Lloyd Webber’s than his, for certain. But I do like it overall, and some of its best moments are just great. I find stage musicals a bit frustrating to listen to–it feels like the melodies are constantly getting cut off just as they catch until the end and then they’re getting repetitive–but I do like this one anyway.

As I was looking forward to writing this piece, I discovered something that I had not known: that there was an album of guest artists recording the songs from Whistle Down the Wind produced by Steinman that came out around the same time. I had to buy an actual, physical compact disc to hear it, but that’s where we will go next.

Notes

• Michael Crawford, who would become an important part (some would say the most important part) of the failed Dance of the Vampires Broadway show, became a star from the very same The Phantom of the Opera Steinman turned down.
• Steve Barton, the originator of the Graf von Korlock role that leads Tanz der Vampire and who was the planned lead for Dance of the Vampires until his death in 2001 (its own tragic story), also had his highest-profile role to date in the same show, basically playing this show’s version of what Alfred was to his von Korlock later.
• Surprisingly, given the stereotypes of the region and small-town America more generally, the show accurately portrays that most view the Revivalists as dangerous lunatics. As someone who grew up in small-town America, I have always rather appreciated that this show doesn’t pretend that everyone is a snake-handling type.
• “The Vaults of Heaven” was linked in my last review, as it became “Für Sarah” in Tanz der Vampire. That was essentially its final form. It has some lyrics in common with this song but that is all. “A Kiss Is a Terrible Thing to Waste” is a song Steinman wrote and produced for the Everly Brothers in 1987 that is often erroneously claimed to be the song from this musical but is in fact easily recognized by a Steinman fan as a rewrite of “Out of the Frying Pan (And into the Fire).” It would eventually see release on the Everly Brothers’ 2005 release On the Wings of a Nightingale: The Complete Mercury Studio Recordings (1984-1988). While I would definitely take any version of “Out of the Frying Pan (And Into the Fire)” over it, it’s still good. Some of the lyrics besides the title see reuse here as well.