World of Wonder

Yesterday, before the tree came down, I sat before it with the laptop as I have so many mornings these last few weeks, reading and writing in the quiet hours before dawn. The last holiday movie I saw this year was "Scrooge," one of my favorites. This is not the dark comedy version of A Christmas Carol  starring Bill Murray. It's the lovely if corny musical version of A Christmas Carol starring Albert Finney.

What makes the film is the music by Leslie Bricusse:

Sing a song of gladness and cheer
For the time of Christmas is here
Look around about you and see
What a world of wonder
This world can be. 

Like any self-respecting writer who finds herself down the Google rabbit hole when she should be focusing her attention on the page, I spent a few minutes Sunday morning looking up this composer, at first hesitantly because I very much wanted him to still be alive, then eagerly once I found out he was. Not only did he write the music for "Scrooge," the LP of which I once hunted down for years and finally found in  a moldy basement of a record shop in the West Village, but he also composed the score of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" and teamed up with Henry Mancini on "Two for the Road" — two more favorite flicks.

There's a certain satisfaction in learning that some of your favorite scores are written by the same person. It makes you want to know that person a little better. So I found an interview with Bricusse, now 86. At the end of the interview was what I would call the "nut graph," the news value of the story — why there was an interview with Bricusse last November. It was because Scrooge, the musical, was just revived at the Curve Theater in London. In fact, its final performance was happening two hours from when I read the article. Not quite enough time to hop the pond and get there in time. But that's not to say I didn't think about it.

(Movie posters: Wikipedia)