| re: MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG -- Can the Original 1981 Version Ever Be Shown Again? |
| Posted by: AlanScott 08:04 pm EDT 08/24/22 |
| In reply to: re: MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG -- Can the Original 1981 Version Ever Be Shown Again? - comedywest 07:53 pm EDT 08/24/22 |
|
I think he felt that a lot of the changes he made were made under duress. Which was why I would have hoped that some stuff would have been restored when they revised it, but little if anything was restored, except "The Blob," which was not the book. And to me "The Blob" makes little sense with the mix-and-not-really-match Gussie of the revision.
It seems that both Furth and Sondheim felt that the problem was casting young people. The script and score had been written for young people to perform. A lot of the playfulness of the original book disappeared.
I think one problem with the revision is that if the book was going to be changed that much, the score needed to be changed a lot more to fit the book. Sondheim wrote his score to fit that book. The book pretty much preceded the score.
But since most everyone liked the score a lot, relatively little of the score changed, at least compared to how much the book changed. I don't think they fit together all that well now.
And who are those people singing to us at the beginning and why are they singing to us? Productions keep trying to solve this via staging and projections, but there is a limit to what can be done without bringing back the frame. |
|
reply
|
|
| Previous: |
re: MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG -- Can the Original 1981 Version Ever Be Shown Again? - Chazwaza 08:29 pm EDT 08/24/22 |
| Next: |
re: MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG -- Can the Original 1981 Version Ever Be Shown Again? - Chromolume 10:33 pm EDT 08/24/22 |
| Thread: |
|
