Musical Faggery
Aug. 16th, 2005 12:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talktoolooseFirst, Fucking Chris Columbus is directing the movie or Rent? This may be sad. At least it's not fucking Alan Parker. Most of the original cast is in the movie which isn't a bad sign, but I fear they will approach the material almost too reverently. Rent needs to be rough around the edges and I think this will be all high-gloss.
Second, I've been listening to the original Broadway soundtrack of Wicked. I approached it with great prejudice because I think that Gregory Maguire's novel on which it is based is insightful, subtle, mysterious and contradictory -- all the things you are unlikely to find in a Broadway musical, especially a contemporary one. Unlike most original cast recordings, there is no synopsis included to give context to the songs. This seems to have been a "no spoilers" decision by the creators.
Luckily the Internet abhors a vacuum, so I was able to get a clue. The smartest idea the creators had was to basically jetison the entire novel and find a slightly different story to tell with similar themes. And really, it could have worked if they weren't trying to put it on Broadway in a way that would also please the kiddies and the tourists from the actual Kansas.
The book is simultaneously brutal, sad and wryly funny. It is about conviction and disillusionment. The musical blows up the fascism of the Wizard's reign into something less sinister and more like a propoganda cartoon. The complex relationship between Glinda and Elphaba (the eventual Wicked Witch of the West) is transformed into what the New York Times noted was something like the best friends in Beaches.
SPOILER PARAGRAPH: In fact, the most heinous crime of the script is taking away the inevitable death of the Witch which, we know from the books and the movie, is a given. But, no! Elphaba is granted an out, a graceful retirement from radical politics and a reunion with the man she loves. In the book, he is killed by the Wizard's secret police and that is the event that forever kills her career as a revolutionary and sends her first into madness and then into solitary cynicism.
Stephen Schwartz's score is vitually indistinguishable from the pap he wrote for Pippin 35 years ago. Or for Godspell, for that matter and it's all a terrible shame. I long for a place where this play could have actually been created properly. It would be a dark and sliding work whose score would have been complex and layered. The creators would not have been afraid of creating a flawed character of the Witch, grappling with her inability to express her love and eternally, dangerously furious at her own impotence.
Despite it all, the Broadway boy in me thrilled to Edina Menzel's voice as Elphaba, especially on the song Defying Gravity. In that scratchy chant and that wild whoop was a momentary glimpse of the Elphaba I loved in the novel.
Second, I've been listening to the original Broadway soundtrack of Wicked. I approached it with great prejudice because I think that Gregory Maguire's novel on which it is based is insightful, subtle, mysterious and contradictory -- all the things you are unlikely to find in a Broadway musical, especially a contemporary one. Unlike most original cast recordings, there is no synopsis included to give context to the songs. This seems to have been a "no spoilers" decision by the creators.
Luckily the Internet abhors a vacuum, so I was able to get a clue. The smartest idea the creators had was to basically jetison the entire novel and find a slightly different story to tell with similar themes. And really, it could have worked if they weren't trying to put it on Broadway in a way that would also please the kiddies and the tourists from the actual Kansas.
The book is simultaneously brutal, sad and wryly funny. It is about conviction and disillusionment. The musical blows up the fascism of the Wizard's reign into something less sinister and more like a propoganda cartoon. The complex relationship between Glinda and Elphaba (the eventual Wicked Witch of the West) is transformed into what the New York Times noted was something like the best friends in Beaches.
SPOILER PARAGRAPH: In fact, the most heinous crime of the script is taking away the inevitable death of the Witch which, we know from the books and the movie, is a given. But, no! Elphaba is granted an out, a graceful retirement from radical politics and a reunion with the man she loves. In the book, he is killed by the Wizard's secret police and that is the event that forever kills her career as a revolutionary and sends her first into madness and then into solitary cynicism.
Stephen Schwartz's score is vitually indistinguishable from the pap he wrote for Pippin 35 years ago. Or for Godspell, for that matter and it's all a terrible shame. I long for a place where this play could have actually been created properly. It would be a dark and sliding work whose score would have been complex and layered. The creators would not have been afraid of creating a flawed character of the Witch, grappling with her inability to express her love and eternally, dangerously furious at her own impotence.
Despite it all, the Broadway boy in me thrilled to Edina Menzel's voice as Elphaba, especially on the song Defying Gravity. In that scratchy chant and that wild whoop was a momentary glimpse of the Elphaba I loved in the novel.
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Date: 2005-08-16 08:08 pm (UTC)