| re: Amen. Yeah, Encores! is a terminal case right now. | |
| Last Edit: ShowGoer 05:19 pm EST 02/16/22 | |
| Posted by: ShowGoer 05:15 pm EST 02/16/22 | |
| In reply to: re: Amen. Yeah, Encores! is a terminal case right now. - theOtherJames 04:37 pm EST 02/16/22 | |
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| Exactly. I didn't renew, same as you, but relented and got a last-minute ticket for Tap Dance Kid, only to mostly regret it. (it had moments, but I wish I'd left my memories of the original production alone.) "The Life" seems poised to make the same mistakes. Even 25 years ago, most of the appeal of "The Life" was that we all knew it was kind of a trashy glitzy Frankenstein monster of a show – a musical conceived and begun in the 1980s about the seediness of Times Square during that period, but which took so long to develop that it happened to be opening the same year that "Lion King" re-opened the New Amsterdam and that the Disneyfication of 42nd Street was beginning, staged to a fare-thee-well by Michael Blakemore and with a terrific cast that included 4 of the show's eleven (!) Tony nominations (2 of whom of course won, Lillias White and Chuck Cooper). So it was already a period piece that asked us to care about its characters even as it somewhat romanticized the milieu they lived in, and still made room for catchy tunes like "Use What You Got (Until What You Got Is Gone)" and "My Body" which weren't that different from the dance-hall-girl numbers in Sweet Charity.... in short, the perfect example of a show that tried to have it both ways, and to a degree, love it or hate it, succeeded in its limited way. But love it or hate it, right from conception, that's all baked in to the material. What I can't imagine working, or that I have much interest in seeing (to borrow a phrase from portenopete) is a production of "The Life" that tries to make it into something profound and capable of changing history.... one that condems "the infrastructure that creates pimps, prostitutes and drug addicts", as Billy Porter said in the Times, at the expense of any of the wit and glitz that helped put "The Life" over in 1997 (or for that matter Sweet Charity 30 years before that). I'm loathe to pass judgment on anything before I've seen it, so I'll stop there. But you're absolutely right, the people who have supported Encores the last 3 decades tend to be people who have affection for the original shows, warts and all. People who like these old 'museum pieces', not only despite the flaws... but in some cases BECAUSE of them. That's the core base. And to alienate them by, for example, taking the fondly-remembered and Tony-nominated role of a heavyset teenage girl and making her into a generic thin adolescent whose problem is thus never quite clear, seems the apotheosis of not knowing (let alone respecting) your audience. |
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| Previous: | re: Amen. Yeah, Encores! is a terminal case right now. - theOtherJames 07:17 pm EST 02/16/22 |
| Next: | re: Amen. Yeah, Encores! is a terminal case right now. - gcarl44 08:20 pm EST 02/18/22 |
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