Elfman in NY Times

[Ryan Keaveney]

July 10, 2005
Sing Along With Roald
by JON BURLINGAME

There are many ways in which Tim Burton’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (opening Friday) hews more closely than its predecessor, the 1971 “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” to the Roald Dahl book on which both are based. In one case, the new film went directly to the source: of its five songs, four feature lyrics Dahl wrote for his 1964 children’s classic (also called “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”). Danny Elfman, who wrote the score, said he “wouldn’t have dreamt” of writing his own words: “Dahl already had such great, rhythmic lyrics,” he said. “They were just waiting to be put to some form of melody.”

In the new film, the Oompa-Loompas – who toil inside Mr. Wonka’s factory making his confections – perform elaborate production numbers, each explaining why one of Charlie’s bratty companions has met an unpleasant fate. The gluttonous Augustus Goop gets a brassy Bollywood-style number; the obnoxious video-game freak (a conspicuous update), Mike Teavee, gets a theatrical, heavy-metal Queen parody. Dahl’s words for Mike – in 1964, an excoriation of television – include: “It clogs and clutters up the mind!/ It makes a child so dull and blind/ He can no longer understand/ A fantasy, a fairyland!” Just as all of the Oompa-Loompas are played, with the help of computer graphics, by the diminutive actor Deep Roy, all of the voices are sung by Mr. Elfman, who overdubbed himself dozens of times.

For “Willy Wonka,” Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse wrote a single Oompa-Loompa theme with separate lyrics for each child, none of which used Dahl’s macabre poetry. Of the six Broadway-style songs written for that film, only “Wondrous Boat Ride,” sung by Gene Wilder, was drawn largely from Dahl’s prose. (Mr. Burton’s 1996 “James and the Giant Peach,” also based on a Dahl book, featured songs by Randy Newman, only one of which used Dahl’s words.) Though Hollywood has rarely turned to literary texts for lyrical inspiration, Mr. Elfman joins a lineage that includes the MGM composer Herbert Stothart, who set poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning for Norma Shearer to sing in “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” (1934); John Barry, who used Lewis Carroll’s words for several songs in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1972); and more than a few people who have adapted Shakespeare, including John Williams for the “Macbeth”-derived Hogwarts school song in “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”

“We didn’t want it to feel like a Broadway musical, where adult characters would begin singing their feelings,” Mr. Elfman said, explaining the decision to go back to Dahl’s words. “We felt the only characters who should ever sing would be the Oompa-Loompas. They’re this weird tribe; their world was very musical.”

Ryan

[Author]

Posts