| But I'm not sure any film produced and directed by anybody 10 years after the original could have captured the excitement of the stage production in its first couple of years. In 1975, it seemed like the people onstage were telling you all about their own lives. Even when you knew they weren't, you still knew that the performers were standing in for other people just like themselves, other people of the same age in the same profession, so the original production, with live actors in front of a live audience, had a kind of confessional immediacy that you can't have now, and couldn't even have had in the '80s. The movie certainly didn't capture it. But, as noted below, while people who saw the stage original tend to hate the movie, people who didn't don't generally mind the movie too much. |
