Anyone know the Thai music scene of the late 90s well and want to help me find an old musical?
In about 2001, someone played the soundtrack to a Thai musical for me. I loved it so much that they found my enthusiasm for it hilarious, and they gave their tape to me. (They had seen it performed a few years earlier while on a year long student exchange to Bangkok - it must have been sometime between 1997-2000. They brought the tape back as a souvinear, but they weren't as enthusiastc about it as I was.) I played that tape constantly until the ribbon eventually wore out (I left it in the car even in the heat of summer and the cold of winter, which I'm sure didn't help) and had to toss it. Unfortunately everything on it was written in Thai, and this was the pre-internet era so I didn't have access to a Thai-English dictionary (yes I probably could have ordered one from the public library intercity loan program, but I never did; I never even knew enough to realize Thai is an abugida (kinda alphabet-like) and thus I could have transliterated the title pretty easilly - I assumed it was more like Chinese with a bazillion characters).
As a result, I have never known what the the musical was called, or what the plot was, or anything besides that the music was great. Lately I've really wanted to listen to it again, and I thought maybe someone here might know it?
90s music in the US was grunge, but the musical's sound was much more like the rock of the 80s (in the US). Emotionally it hit the same beats for me as like, Bon Jovi's Living on a Prayer, or Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out for a Hero, but I know very little about music, so it is 100% possible it was a diferent genera. (I classify music more by how they make me feel than music style.)
The inside cover had a picture of a stage with a lot of purple and red spotlights and I feel like the costumes were very flashy with sequins and stuff, but I think that might be what I expected based on the music more than actually shown in the photo. It felt kinda like it was following the wild success of The Phantom of the Opera and Cats by doing a Thai rock opera, if that makes sense.
And that is the totallity of everything potentially useful I know about it. Some other probably unhelpful bits:
The music was so diverse I kinda thought it might be more like that ABBA movie Mama Mia!, where the songs existed first, and then someone strung them all together into a narrative in order to make a play.
I vaugely recall that the person who gave me the tape hadn't seen it in Bangkok, it was some other city. But perhaps it was just on the other side of the city from where they lived or something. They had been traveling around playing tourist the weekend they saw it, anyhow.
They thought it was a musical, and the songs frankly felt like it, but it is possible that it was just a rock concert designed to tell a story as an artsy hook for the music or whatever (although it has so many performers that seems less likely.)
Um, you know how Thai music is kinda gentler on the ears than US music tends to be? Like, I feel like Jeff Satur fills kinda the same sensually aggressive and transgressive role as bands like, I dunno, The Cure? Evanescence? X-Japan? , but his stuff like...has less exclaimation marks? It is softer and like... the sense of danger is coming from the side?, instead of feeling like a direct attack? Anyhow, I feel like a lot of Thai music is like that, but several of the songs in the musical I'm looking for were more direct in a way Thai music doesn't seem to be often. Which was part of why it felt Phantom-inspired to me. (Phantom kinda does something similar - it's rock made in the era of hair metal, and you can tell, but it's not ...hard? So they are both like super restrained US 80s music.)
(Reblogs requested in hopes of reaching someone who knows 90s Thai musicals.)
