Friday, September 19, 2008
Critics Mostly Find Musical Tale As Worst Of Times
Steve On Broadway (SOB): "Last spring, London had its inglorious over-the-top literary-derived flop with Gone With The Wind - The Musical. Apparently, now it's Broadway's turn, as critics gleefully dug and twisted their knives into A Tale Of Two Cities - The Musical, which opened last evening at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre."
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4 comments:
This summer when i was working in New York i saw posters for this musical and i remember thinking "how awful. it already looks like a flop". i guess i was right. some stories are told the first time in the way that they're supposed to be told and they shouldnt be touched. and some stories are just not meant to be belted.
I feel like this musical was just trying to be Les Mis. I'm surprised that the author was working on it for 20 years, because it seems like an idea that was just thrown together. That they wanted to put on a play that wasn't following or similar to any of the shows on Broadway now that are all based on movies and pop culture. There are some adaptations that work as musicals because the element of music adds another layer to work that expresses the work. But I can't imagine Tale of Two Cities as one of them.
I can respect the author's intentions of taking a veerryyy well known novel and adapting it into a musical. I think what really failed about this show is that no one, literally no one, could imagine this story as a glitzy musical. It's one thing to go into a production knowing it will attract audiences because of its history. However, it may have well been this story's history that instated the dissatisfied hopes in its audiences to begin with.
When I saw ads for this, I thought it was some kind of joke. There are some stories that lend themselves to be adapted to a musical, however A Tale of Two Cities is not one of them. (And neither is Gone With The Wind)!!! These are literary classics that should remain literary. No matter how powerful the theatre is there is a certain aspect of reading that brings something to a story that is untranslatable to any other art form.
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