Just pointing out a principle of our culture: shallow sells. Flash productions wothlittle substance, like Phantom run for years, while Sondheim, infinitely superior to ALW in every way, can’t get a hit so save his life.
Next up, Pets with Hats (to the background of “Yakkety Sax”)
Just pointing out a principle of our culture: shallow sells. Flashy productions with little substance like Phantom run for years, while Sondheim, whose work is infinitely superior to ALW’s in every way, can’t get a hit to save his life.
Next up, Pets with Hats (to the background of “Yakkety Sax”)
Sondheim’s shows:
I think a few of these would be classified as “hits.”
Sondheim also did the lyrics for “Gypsy” and “West Side Story.” He is talented and has had success, just not the mega-success of Lloyd Webber.
A very few. Moving On and *Saturday Night * played in London for brief runs, but they don’t even matter because they didn’t play in New York. His last show that ran successfully (i.e.more than a year) was the 1987 Broadway production of Into the Woods. Every show since then has more or less flopped. *Passion[/i, for example, which is one of his best works, IMO, ran for a mere 280 performances. BTW, you left out Gold, which ran briefly here in DC, but has not yet made it to Broadway.
Saturday Night did play New York, just not Broadway. In 2000 it ran off-Broadway at the Second Stage Theater for three months.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
::: The moderator pounds his gavel, hard, to get attention :::
gobear, the election is over. Get over it. Your comment is a complete and utter hijack, and thoroughly inappropriate. If you want to gripe about the stupidity of the American populace, go to the Pit and open a thread there.
(You were clearly NOT just talking about the shallowness of culture, unless there was a major new Sondheim musical “earlier this month.”)
You have, I think, been warned about hijacking before. The next offense will be a Serious Violation.
Slyfrog, you’re out of order. If someone is behaving like a jerk (as gobear was) the proper response is to hit the REPORT THIS POST button (the little exclamation point [!] in the upper right corner.) Do NOT insult him. Personal insults are not permitted in this forum. You want to ream him out, open a thread in the Pit.
Are we clear on this?
:::: BANG! :::::
OK, as you were.
If we define a successful show as one that makes back the money put into it, Sondheim’s last hit was A Little Night Music.
In fact, as far as I can tell, Sondheim’s only financial successes as a composer are Night Music, A Funny THing Happened On The Way To The Forum, and Company.
My apologies to all.
I’ll admit that I’m not familiar with most of the plays you list there. But it seems to me that most of ALW’s music just sounds like the same thing over and over. Joseph, Superstar, Cats, Evita, Starlight Express… They just somehow all sound the same to me. One play worth of that would be fine, but one tires of it after a while. Perhaps I have an uncouth ear for such things, and perhaps I’ve just heard all the wrong ALW music, but I’m just calling it like I hear it.
I’d suggest running down to the CD store and getting Aspects of Love and/or The Beautiful Game. Both are very different from ALW’s usual scores. I especially love Beautiful Game, and wish it had come to Broadway.
By Jeeves is great too. A whole nother side to the man.
I’m planning to see it, but I have little hope for it. It’s been a long time since Schumacher made a movie I liked (to be fair, I haven’t seen Phone Booth). I loved *Phantom * as a teenaged voice student back in 1992 or so, but I’ve listened to the cast album recently and I don’t feel that most of it holds up very well. And yet I must go see it, mostly because I want to see how the movie ended up after so many years, but also because I want to support movie musicals in general.
I heard there’s vogueing in the Masquerade sequence. Yikes. I thought that died with 1990.
I was forced to listen to the entire cast recording of POTO one day on a long car drive.
Now, I like the repeating musical motifs in Evita and JC:Superstar; but POTO took the cake. It was the same thing over and over again. And the motifs were all similar, so it started to sound like one song… the same three hour long song.
Unfortunately, but not surprising, the repititious music seemed to match the plot. The love triangle is more like a love circle, the plot kept going in circles… like my eyes.
It seemed to me that the plot and music were padded by an hour. Modern musical theater goers expect a three hour spectacle for their $100 ticket. But there isn’t enough plot for three hours, so they padded.
Luckily, movie theaters aren’t keen for three hour movies (LOTR excepted). And so POTO clocks in at 2 hrs 20 mins. I’m debating whether that’s still too long for me to subject myself to the repetition.
Peace.
Actually I did hit the exclamation button as an immediate reaction, but then decided that I should read the standards for reporting someone (don’t remember why exactly, it just didn’t seem to). It didn’t seem to fall under any of the stated standards, so I didn’t report. Next time I will.
Oh. My. God.
We just got back. That was incredible! It was probably the most faithful adaptation of a musical to the screen that I’ve seen in a long time. I think ONE number was cut (the rehearsal of the Phantom’s opera), and a scene of Christine being driven to the cemetery in a carriage was substituted. Some of the sung-through parts were adapted to normal lines, but otherwise everything was there.
I cried in exactly the same places I cried when I saw it onstage 12 years ago. I was mouthing along to the songs. I never even noticed that 2 1/2 hours had passed. Schumacher actually made a GOOD movie!
Now, there were a few very minor things that annoyed me. I could have lived without the voguing at the masquerade. And there was an awful lot of unfortunate lipsynch (or non-synch, as the case may be). And the phantom’s makeup wasn’t all that horrific (hell, I look almost that bad before I moisturize…).
Oh, and Schumacher does indeed get to indulge in his fetish for huge architectural statuary. But it works.
Five stars out of five on the jayjay scale…
I saw it last night and was very pleased with how it came out. I was worried that Schemeur was going to screw it up and I was pleased to see that he didn’t. I will say that I saw the play a couple years ago and I really liked it. The bad reviews didn’t phase me much once I picked up on the fact that quite a few of the reviewers hated the stage show as well.
Things I liked-
Sets and costumes were Gorgeous. Particulary the sewers and the cemetary(Yeah, I know it’s not realistic, but it’s quite gothic).
The Decision to move the Chandelier scene seems like a good one, now that I recall it happened at the very end of the First act and in retrospect, it seemed a bad move.
Minnie Driver may not be able to sing, but she did a nice job with her role.
I was suprised at either the sound quality or the enuciation. I have the London Cast on CD and have attended a performance and I understood the Lyrics more in the movie then I did in either of those.
Things I didn’t like/bugged me-
Butler isn’t nearly as good a singer as Micheal Crawford. Even Atonia Banderas seems like he would have done better(He was very good in Evita, IMHO).
The Phantom isn’t that ugly with the mask off. I see people riding public transit who look like that, for gods sake. though his hair suddenly goes from slick and dapper to mottled and sparse once he is unmasked near the end.
The “Modern” scenes(other then the first and last scene) don’t seem to serve a purpose and slow the pace of the movie a bit.
Two parts during the first layer scene caught my attention in a bad way.
-There’s a hint of electric guiter that that either isn’t in the rest of the movie or just isn’t noticable. I know it’s probably a stupid complaint when there’s a lot of synethizing going on, but it seemed like a distraction.
-There’s one point where a particulary noticable Echo is heard while the Phantom is singing “Music of the Night”.
I don’t understand why some of the singing lines were changed to speaking lines. Particulary Roaul and Christine’s lines during the maqurade scene. Going from one to another constantly is a distraction.
What the hell is holding the Phantom’s Mask on? Granted, it still didnt make such sense in the play, but it makes even less sense with the half-mask.
But it looks like it was made for the fans, which I appreciate.