Midnight Musings

My teenaged son and I watched a TV broadcast of the animated film, Mulan, several years after it came out. I was looking forward to hearing the songs sung by the amazing Lea Salonga and was surprised by the quality of the male singer on I'll Make a Man Out of You. (There was also the humorous bonus of seeing my son shudder violently as the final note was sung because, he said, "No adult human male should be able to sing that high.") I looked up the movie online and was shocked to find out that the adult human male in question was Donny Osmond. Donny Osmond!? I remembered a girly, squeaky-voiced (like the sound an old doorknob makes) boy by that name with a lot of hair and a huge smile. Could this possibly be the same person? He fell off my radar as he was trying to reinvent himself in order to stay on our collective radar. Well, good for him, I thought. He's certainly come a long way. And, like the similar shock of finding out that sensitive, geeky, whispery-voiced Robby Benson was behind the Beast in the animated version of Beauty and the Beast a few years earlier, it wore off and I gave it no further thought.

That is until The Pandemic hit and Andrew Lloyd Webber generously decided to grace us with free viewings of his most famous musicals, some of which I had never seen. I missed the first show of the series and they apparently ran out of options before the lockdown ended, so I was able to watch the second airing of 1998's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat starring - surprise (to me, anyway) - Donny Osmond! Forgetting his impressive turn in Mulan - it was also over 20 years ago, after all - I had low expectations going in and the actual story in the Bible is far more dramatic than the show, itself. But his tour-de-force number, Close Every Door, was absolutely stunning. I didn't actually find the song itself very impressive but the performance was everything. I couldn't get it out of my head for weeks on end. (It neatly replaced the earlier, self-propelled earworm of Phantom of the Opera which literally declares that he is there, inside my mind. And he does not leave when asked.) And it brought with it a host of old Osmond songs that I hadn't heard in years, including the incredibly annoying Go Away, Little Girl. (You were wondering when I was getting around to that, weren't you?) What a message. The singer is a man (or a squeaky-voiced boy, as the case may be) in a committed relationship, who is tempted by another woman. So, what does he do? Exercise self-control? No. Try to forget about her? Nope. He tells the other woman to leave, even though she bears no fault in this scenario. And then he sings about it, as if this were some sort of romantic notion with which we would empathize. Really? This is clearly his problem, not hers. Get a grip, buddy. Take some responsibility. Why doesn't *he* go away? Be a man! Oops, wrong song.

'night.