Sigh, let me start off with a story *GROAN!* Okay, okay, I'll make it short... Once upon a time, in the magical fairyland of Easton, I was with a freind in the Virgin Megastore and was (as always) looking in the Broadway section. I had an extra $20 (that's £13.33 for our British friends), so I decided to be adventurous and do something I had never done before: buy a soundtrack without knowing anything about it (except the story, in this case). I was torn between The Scarlet Pimpernel and Martin Guerre (don't ask how I narrowed it down, I honestly don't know). Anyway, I went with SP because I'm reading the book and have a general idea of what's going on. Plus, the cover was really cool. Not that MG's wasn't.
Well, I got home at around midnight, but that didn't deter me from listening to the whole thing through. The first thing that struck me was the cast. Well, just one person, actually. I bet you'll never guess who. Yep, it was Terrence Mann. The first Javert I ever heard was Terrence Mann and I remember thinking he was... okay, but not nearly as good as PQ. I also have the OBC of Cats, where he plays the... uh... highly respected Rum-Tum Tugger. So, I'm not Mann's biggest fan, but I figured that anyone who was on two OBCs of such tremendously successful musicals couldn't be all that bad. Well, the music was very nice. I thought the woman's voice (I forget her name) was okay, and Douglass Sills was a little pip-squeaky sounding in some parts, but overall very nice.
Then... then came "Falcon in the Dive". My God, when that song was over I remember feeling completely overwhelmed, but played it again. Then came "Where's the Girl?", my favorite song from the show right now (it will probably change later). It should've been "Where's My Head?" from the feeling I got afterwards. I literally melted into a pool of feminine goo when I heard this song. I will now quote from the liner notes in the album covering the making of SP:
"Terrence Mann is recording "Where's the Girl?" Every woman in the control room is draped over something, languorous and hanging on his every word."
When he gets to "I'll warm you, I'll rouse you..." one of the women says, "Yeah, well, I think I need to hear that track about 17 more times..."
