Spotlight
Musical theatre is somewhat of a guilty pleasure of mine. Imagine my delight when I discovered Musical Theatre star John Owen-Jones was releasing his fifth album, Spotlight. I had to give this one a go!
John has a CV to die for. He has played the role of ‘The Phantom’ in ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ nearly 2000 times, more than any other actor in the history of the West End production. At the age of 26, John became the youngest actor ever to play the role of ‘Jean Valjean’ in the West End and was the first British actor to play the role both in the West End and on Broadway. He has also worked with some of the biggest names in the business, Michael Ball, Katherine Jenkins and Beverly Knight, to name but a few.
Spotlight is a collection of thirteen songs and refreshingly, it’s not the predictable, over done musical theatre classics that you might expect. There are one or two ‘classics’, but we’ll get to them shortly.
The album opens with ‘From Now On’ from the Greatest Showman. A wonderful song and the vocal delivery by John is staggering. What really hits you with his rendition of this song, is just how good a vocal range he has. The music moves nearly two and a half octaves and John Owen-Jones just breezes through it, without even breaking a sweat.
To be honest, each song is a vocal highlight. John has such finesse in his voice, there was many a moment I sat listening with the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
I mentioned that there were one or two ‘predictable’ musical theatre standards included on the album. Well, the first came at track 5, in the form of ‘I dream a dream’. However, interestingly, John explains he wanted to sing the song as if Jean Valjean was singing it, rather than Fantine. As such and I quite enjoyed this, the song contained lots of musical motifs from the show that are closely associated with Jean Valjean. This gave the song a freshness and hint of originality that we haven’t heard before from this song.
The songs keep coming from a whole host of shows, South Pacific, Love Never Dies, Sound of Music, Rocky Horror plus many more. Then the albums single begins to play and believe me, that is something else. ‘The Prayer’ is a duet with Lucie Jones and let me tell you, it is a massive song and the pair are well and truly up to the task. It easily stands up against the Andrea Bocelli and Celine Dion version. Absolutely amazing!
Another highlight of the album for me is the final track, ‘While Floating High Above’. This is a song from Ken Hill’s ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ – the show that inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber to write his version of the show. Ken Hill scored the show using already existing operatic arias but with new lyrics. The music for this track is originally from Bizet’s ‘The Pearl Fishers’. This song, unlike the rest of the album is very held back and controlled. There are no musical theatre ‘belts’ here, in fact the vocal delivery is very soft and contained, making for a lovely and surprising change. What a wonderful way to conclude wonderful album.
Spotlight is brilliant; it is a journey into theatre land with a few surprises thrown in. John Owen-Jones is superb and the song arrangements are somewhat unique, to say the least. All in all, a refreshing, feel good album that you just have to listen to, again and again.
