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Title: Good music, hurt by bad casting
Review: Too bad Disney didn't have the original movie artists record this CD - the Broadway actors often sound contrived. Susan Egan as Belle especially makes me wish Paige O'Hara had reprised her role. Egan is given a beautiful new song all her own ("Home"), but often tries too hard and ends up sounding artificial to me. Gaston, too, was better in the movie; although "Me" is a good enough song that it masks his shortcomings, elsewhere he sounds like he's overacting. So does Terrence Mann as Beast. Though Robbie Benson had few lines to sing in the movie, I felt he rendered them much better than Mann - more naturally. My feeling is that the entire cast sounds as if it could lighten up a bit and just be themselves a bit more, and the whole thing would sound less like an obvious stage production and more like a story flowing out naturally.
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