| re: THE LIFE | |
| Posted by: Phaedrusnyc 05:26 pm EDT 03/14/22 | |
| In reply to: THE LIFE - standingO 11:12 am EST 03/12/22 | |
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| I am keeping an open mind until I see it. HOWEVER, the interviews with Billy Porter I read seems to imply that this is going to be just unremitting pain (or "drama") from beginning to end. I understand the intention; I even support it. But I find more and more with these revisals that a lot of people doing the revisions don't truly understand how integrated an artform musical theater is. The score needs to FIT with the book, and changing the book to make it much more serious comes from good intentions but still ignores that Cy Coleman didn't write *that* kind of music. I felt much the same way about the recent "Oklahoma!" I admired it, but I didn't like it. Unless your INTENTION is to highlight the disparity between what is being sung and what is being acted you just can't take Richard Rodgers "fun" music and pretend it's illustrative of a book that's been staged as a suspense thriller. You could turn the book for "Anything Goes!" into drama on the high seas but it would be nonsensical to have some woman tap-dancing to the Cole Porter music in that case. It's the same in the other direction, too--you couldn't do "Caroline or Change" with a zippy, Coleman-esque score and no changes to the book. You can't transfer the libretto of "Les Miserables" and score it as though it's "Six." It simply won't work, and I have a feeling keeping the Coleman score with a 100% "serious" book is not going to work here. In interviews, Porter has also basically slagged Cy Coleman off as a woman-hater: maybe he was, maybe he wasn't, but it's hard to see anything great coming from someone rewriting something he evidently has NO fondness for at all. Tangentially, I also think that the complete change in the Encores! mandate should be reflected in a new name. A complete tear-down is not an "encore" of any sort. If the consensus is that there is no value anymore to presenting little-seen musicals *as written* (not here, but at City Center), then that's fine, but it isn't "Encores!" (And I know people have discussed this at length, but I'm not about to start replying to months-old-threads.) I was frankly bothered by what happened with "Tap Dance Kid." First by the revisions--not that it was ever a classic to begin with, but setting it in the 50s rather than "the present" raised ALL sorts of questions that were never adequately answered by the book, and erasure of the fat girl was, frankly, a head-scratcher. But even more by the fact that the program didn't even acknowledge the original writers in the bios. That is absolutely anathema to what "Encores" should be about, and it is incredibly disrespectful of the creative process, the creators, and the basic idea of authorship, no matter how flawed the results. If they do that again (and I suspect they will, considering Porter claims that this is a "reclamation" (from whom?!)), I may have to do a lot of thinking about whether I want to support that kind of theft. |
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