Thread:Belle pullman/@comment-39097528-20200313030011/@comment-3182821-20200313125705

I don't know for sure, but I know other alterations for the Palladium material were just workshopped by the cast themselves, so to a fair extent that might be the case. It may well have been Andrew Lloyd Webber himself, as he re-worked the new melody, picking out lines of text as he wanted them. apparently it's a recording of his Lordship himself doing the rolled R "Grrrrrrr-owltiger" as well as the cast singing live. IDK, but there's definitely a recorded track in there.

The Italian would need to have been drafted out to fit the new melody though. I'm really not fluent in Italian, I'd love to find someone who was to discuss it - I suspect it's fairly "Cod Italian" where it's designed to sound Italian to English speakers, it kinda makes sense but isn't anything a native speaker would write. This makes sense with the pastiche Music Hall framing of the original.... If I'm right then it's likely to have been Trevor Nunn or someone he handed the job to, who came up with the original version, and then the revised version is further chopped up... or I might be wrong, and it's actually perfectly decent Italian lyrics from someone fluent in the language!