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Randy Newman's Faust
Randy Newman's Faust is the ninth studio album and a 1995 musical by American musician and songwriter Randy Newman, who based the work on the classic story of Faust, borrowing elements from the version by Goethe, as well as Milton's Paradise Lost, but updating the story to the modern day, and infusing it with humorous cynicism.
In this retelling, God and the Devil fight for the soul of Henry Faust, a student at the University of Notre Dame.
The musical was performed at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego in September 1995, and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in Sept 1996, as well as released as a CD as a concept album.
In a 1995 New York Times piece, Newman said that he was first inspired to create a work based on Goethe's Faust in the 1970s, after a first reading of the play. However, during a 2014 staging of the show at the New York City Center, Newman said onstage that "[Goethe's] Faust, of course, is a masterpiece: I read the classic comic book, and I concur.”
Newman said he had already been a fan of works that concern Heaven (such as the 1930 Marc Connelly play Green Pastures, and the 1945 movie The Horn Blows at Midnight), and that "[i]t's such a big idea, with God and the Devil, that I thought I could put everything I knew into it and say whatever I wanted[.]" Regarding his own designs for the material, however, Newman also said that "...there's something so wise about [Goethe's Faust] that it made me want to try to destroy it, in a way," and "have all its wisdom frustrated by the nature of real human beings[.]"
In 1980, Newman wrote a few songs for the project, as well as a rough draft of a script; he then put it aside to focus on his solo career and film composing.
At one point Newman showed a script of the show to Mike Nichols, who criticized the conception of the show's "Faust" character, "Henry Faust," saying (as Newman put it), "The kid doesn’t have any arc. Nothing happens to him.” Newman later said, in 2017, "But I liked that. It makes for a gruesome evening of theater."
The song "Sandman's Coming" was recycled from an episode of the 1990 television series Cop Rock, for which Newman had written a number of songs.
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Randy Newman's Faust
Randy Newman's Faust is the ninth studio album and a 1995 musical by American musician and songwriter Randy Newman, who based the work on the classic story of Faust, borrowing elements from the version by Goethe, as well as Milton's Paradise Lost, but updating the story to the modern day, and infusing it with humorous cynicism.
In this retelling, God and the Devil fight for the soul of Henry Faust, a student at the University of Notre Dame.
The musical was performed at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego in September 1995, and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in Sept 1996, as well as released as a CD as a concept album.
In a 1995 New York Times piece, Newman said that he was first inspired to create a work based on Goethe's Faust in the 1970s, after a first reading of the play. However, during a 2014 staging of the show at the New York City Center, Newman said onstage that "[Goethe's] Faust, of course, is a masterpiece: I read the classic comic book, and I concur.”
Newman said he had already been a fan of works that concern Heaven (such as the 1930 Marc Connelly play Green Pastures, and the 1945 movie The Horn Blows at Midnight), and that "[i]t's such a big idea, with God and the Devil, that I thought I could put everything I knew into it and say whatever I wanted[.]" Regarding his own designs for the material, however, Newman also said that "...there's something so wise about [Goethe's Faust] that it made me want to try to destroy it, in a way," and "have all its wisdom frustrated by the nature of real human beings[.]"
In 1980, Newman wrote a few songs for the project, as well as a rough draft of a script; he then put it aside to focus on his solo career and film composing.
At one point Newman showed a script of the show to Mike Nichols, who criticized the conception of the show's "Faust" character, "Henry Faust," saying (as Newman put it), "The kid doesn’t have any arc. Nothing happens to him.” Newman later said, in 2017, "But I liked that. It makes for a gruesome evening of theater."
The song "Sandman's Coming" was recycled from an episode of the 1990 television series Cop Rock, for which Newman had written a number of songs.