Amazon.co.uk Review
Shakespeare meets MGM is nothing new, ever since Cole Porter adapted
The Taming of the Shrew as
Kiss Me, Kate (1953). The twist with Kenneth Branagh's
Love's Labours Lost, though, is that the play is made to look like a classic Hollywood musical, complete with grandly staged production numbers. It is a novel approach to resurrecting this most neglected of the Bard's comedies, although one that presented composer Patrick Doyle with some tough challenges. Doyle's music has been an inestimable asset to Branagh's previous Shakespeare movies--
Henry V (1989),
Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and
Hamlet (1996)--but here the brief was to work around a selection of Golden Age standards from Gershwin, Porter, Kern and Berlin. Thankfully, the result really does feel like an organic whole, with the songs acting "like arias, springing out of a moment to highlight a thought or to advance the narrative", as the composer observes in the CD booklet. The original score itself is a quintessential Patrick Doyle creation--ebullient, vibrant and brimful of lyrical invention--and the tricky segues from underscore to songs and back again are seamlessly handled. The orchestrations and song arrangements are courtesy of a team led by Doyle's regular musical collaborator, Lawrence Ashmore, and they certainly have a lush, Hollywood feel without sounding quite like authentic MGM (you will have to go back to the masterful arrangements of Conrad Salinger and André Previn among others to hear the real McCoy). If there is a problem with the album it is that here we have actors who can sing instead of singers who can act. In the movie this works perfectly well, but away from the screen one can't help but miss the vocal glories of Howard Keel, Doris Day or Judy Garland. Still, with Patrick Doyle at his sunny best this is a delightful album, and one which just goes to prove that in Shakespeare, anything goes. --
Mark Walker
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