Your points are well taken, but the problem then is that the show would easily become very very academic in nature - which might be interesting for us theatre geeks, but wouldn't be interesting to anyone else. It would have closed already.
I assume they were consciously trying to avoid the Jerome Robbins' Broadway model - understood, but clearly what they've ended up with is something which may be an entertaining evening of songs, but nothing that really puts the spotlight on Prince. Your ideas sound a little more in the vein of Sondheim On Sondheim, which they were probably also trying to avoid, especially given how recent that was. And again, I tend to think that only the Sondheim fans really appreciated the video segments, etc.
I think with the Robbins and Fosse revues, it was generally much easier to present the choreography and let it speak for itself. The same way that any number of composer revues can let the songs speak for themselves, or with bits of narration to clarify. I think it's much harder to illustrate what a director does in this kind of a format. So they didn't try to. Which makes for a rather generalized evening of songs. Ah, well... |
