Friday, October 26, 2007
GO AHEAD & 'CRY'
NY Post: "IS there a musical out there the critics and Tony voters can rally around this season? Everybody's asking that question now that it's blazingly clear the new crop of musicals is iffy."
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5 comments:
This season looks sad for broadway. Maybe a local strike would do good to save the reputation of broadway theatre. That said, "cry baby" does sound like a show that I would want to see, but more and more "Young Frankenstein" is shaping up to be bust on broadway. Mel is quoted at the end saying that he would kill Meehan if "cry baby" where to win. I'm not even going to go into the Disney side of the page due to my general dislike of their adaptations.
Why is it obsurdly popular to make musical adaptations of movies? This season looks sad because there really is nothing original in it! When you go to a movie-based musical, you have expectations. Sometimes when those expectations are not met, the audience has trouble overlooking that. Not to mention, some stories just cannot transfer over to the stage well. As for cry baby, well, I feel like it may be better as a stage show than it was a flick. There's something there, something the movie was missing, that might befound on the stage. It's a fun show, so a live audience may be want it needs to really spice up its energy. Poor Broadway, how you've fallen from grace!
It seems to me that for awhile now Broadway as been bringing nothing but bad musicals. Not just this season but in the seasons past. Legally Blonde, The Wedding Singer, Young Frankenstien, The Little Mermaid. They are all trying to recreate hits in the past that these simply can not become. It seems that a musical version of cry baby is an interesting choice for a new musical production. Something that people wouldn't expect to move to Broadway. Some movies people just don't want to see transformed for the broadway stage, but this one might be such a surprise that it might just kill all other new shows. It certainly be welcomed.
The reason that so many theatres are trying to bring back either movies or other forms of entertainment as Broadway shows is because many of them are highly successful. If you look at the past five years of Tony Award winners for Best Musical you have two based on movies (Hairspray, Spamalot), one based on a 19th century play (Spring Awakening), and one that took its music from old pop music (Jersey Boys). (And the original one features puppets having sex- probably not something anyone expected to be a hit.) More than half of them have some sense of "unoriginality" to them, but then become original enough to gain new life on Broadway. Unfortunately, for every Hairspray we're going to get a Wedding Singer (which was also Tony-nominated, mind you), but this doesn't mean that all the adaptations are going to be awful. What makes this season look so sad has more to do with teh lack of variety in the musicals, and the lack of musicals in the first place, not because of the fact they are based on movies. This seasons adaptations look like they aren't going to be great shows to begin with, which will make it look even worse for adaptations on Broadway.
And also, none of us can say yet how bad these musicals are actually going to be. The new John Waters adaptation sounds interesting, and YF and TLM may not be as bad as the critics are saying.
And one more thing I really feel compelled to add... let us not forget that The Phantom of the Opera is also a movie adaptation, and Les Miserables is a book adaptation. As I think about it, its harder to think of original musicals than musicals with some lack of originality in them. Guys and Dolls is based on a novel, The Lion King is based on a movie, etc.
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