Page 11 - Fujifilm Exposure_9 Love's Labour's Lost_ok

ON LOVE
ON LOVE
“When Love speaks,
the voice of all the gods makes Heaven drowsy with the harmony.”
William Shakespeare
lives - study - proves to be quite the opposite. It’s love which turns them into poets and singers, making them ecstatic with pleasure, pain and anguish. The idea of it then also being a musical seemed to set very well with the music and lyrics of songs by Gershwin, Porter and
Berlin who are, in their own way, just as eloquent and witty about love.
“The songs take the story on and even manage to replace what we’ve cut; which are sections of the text that would be very hard for an audience in 1999 to understand anyway because they refer to con-
temporary events or topical subject matter often using words that aren’t even in the language any more.”
Branagh, who grew up in the era of great escapist, massively budgeted musical movies like The Sound Of Music, Mar y Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, says there
was a brief moment when he con- sidered commissioning an original score for Love’s Labour’s Lost.
“But we then had to face the idea that our lyrics would somehow be sitting alongside Shakespeare’s. It seemed more likely people would accept Cole Porter or Irving Berlin.
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