fifty frenchmen can't be wrong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
some_stars) wrote2012-07-17 03:24 pm
some_stars) wrote2012-07-17 03:24 pm
(no subject)
I am home and listening to my brand new Newsies soundtrack! You guys, this SHOW, it was so GOOD. I am unaccustomed to the pain of musicals, where I want to watch it over and over, like I do with everything I love, but I CAN'T. I will only hear the non-music parts, or see any of it, once in my entire life. How am I supposed to even DEAL with that???
So, there were two major changes from movie to stage. The first is that Jack is essentially different in the stage version. He's not using a fake name or lying about his parents, and the yearning-for-a-family aspect is much less central. These changes make him feel a lot older (although he's still seventeen, as per the song). I'd say that movie!Jack feels like a 1992 seventeen-year-old, and stage!Jack feels like a seventeen-year-old from 1899, before the invention of teenagers--an actual young adult.
The second change is that the emotional heart of the story is no longer Jack's orphan issues and his relationship with David. Most of the intensity between them has been transferred to Jack's relationship with Katherine (the new composite character who is both reporter and love interest) and his relationship with Crutchy. That second one kind of threw me, to be honest--Crutchy, really?--but it's big. I'd say the general emotional oomph of the Jack/David relationship has been redistributed to about 40% Katherine, 40% Crutchy, and 20% still David, but in a much less "...omg they are in ridiculous perfect love, OH THE FEELINGS" kind of way. Like, I didn't get that at ALL. (There's actually a slyly hilarious moment--at least, I thought it was funny--where David invites Jack home for dinner with his family, early on...and Jack says no. And no more is spoken of it. Because it's DIFFERENT, you see. They CHANGED things! Please pay $100 even though you've seen the movie fifty times.) (All of which is true, of course, but it was still hilarious. To me.) But honestly I barely missed the slash, because this new Jack really works. It's his show all the way, and he turns "Santa Fe" into a chilling, heart-wrenching showstopper. Which I wasn't quite sure could be done. These changes did leave David's character in kind of a weird position, dramatically--he got his own arc and everything, but it felt disconnected from Jack's even though the story kept shoving them together for plot reasons. So I guess that was a flaw.
The invention of Katherine is almost entirely successful! There were recurring moments where she was clearly being written as The Spunky Girl rather than a female character one of whose traits is spunk, and at one important point I was completely unclear on her motivations or what she was supposed to be thinking. But she is on the whole a real person with characterization and an important role in the plot, which is an improvement on Sarah, and she's not a resentful-of-his-own-career-choices Bill Pullman who can't really sing and clearly wants to be elsewhere, which is an improvement on Denton.
Also the whole thing was a bit more political. I mean, the movie is blatantly political, that's one reason I love it so much despite its flaws. But it manages to keep itself remarkably distant from any specifics that might remind viewers of actual present-day labor issues, and of course it's all sanitized and Disneyfied. The stage version is certainly still a Disney story, but the kids are rougher around the edges, and bad things happen onstage, not just the suggestion of them. And there's a lot less of the most extreme silliness, and generally it all feels less like a distant alternate universe and more like real people in our world. There's more talk of unions as things that non-adorable adults might also benefit from, for one thing, and a truly priceless moment between Jack and Pulitzer involving (and sending up) the phrase "a compromise we can all live with," to which the audience responded with great enthusiasm.
I've seen a lot of people saying they just didn't like it as much because they missed the general amateur, bad singing, Kenny Ortega nature of the movie. And I admit those things are charming, but the stage version in no way felt too polished to me. I mean, nobody screwed up their dance steps (that I saw), but the whole thing had an appealingly fresh feeling, and I wasn't at all surprised to find out that the actors in three major roles (Katherine, David, and Spot) and several smaller ones were all making their Broadway debuts. It had a lot of the good qualities of improv or amateur stuff--the energy, mainly, and a general unconstrained feeling--but was also totally professional in quality.
Incidentally, I was pleased to discover that there really are no bad seats in the Nederlander Theatre, because it is so much tinier than the one where I saw Anything Goes. SO much tinier. I was way off to the side in the mezzanine (though admittedly only three rows back instead of seven like last time) and the view was almost flawless. The couple next to me who talked during the show, not so much. But in this life we cannot have everything.
So, there were two major changes from movie to stage. The first is that Jack is essentially different in the stage version. He's not using a fake name or lying about his parents, and the yearning-for-a-family aspect is much less central. These changes make him feel a lot older (although he's still seventeen, as per the song). I'd say that movie!Jack feels like a 1992 seventeen-year-old, and stage!Jack feels like a seventeen-year-old from 1899, before the invention of teenagers--an actual young adult.
The second change is that the emotional heart of the story is no longer Jack's orphan issues and his relationship with David. Most of the intensity between them has been transferred to Jack's relationship with Katherine (the new composite character who is both reporter and love interest) and his relationship with Crutchy. That second one kind of threw me, to be honest--Crutchy, really?--but it's big. I'd say the general emotional oomph of the Jack/David relationship has been redistributed to about 40% Katherine, 40% Crutchy, and 20% still David, but in a much less "...omg they are in ridiculous perfect love, OH THE FEELINGS" kind of way. Like, I didn't get that at ALL. (There's actually a slyly hilarious moment--at least, I thought it was funny--where David invites Jack home for dinner with his family, early on...and Jack says no. And no more is spoken of it. Because it's DIFFERENT, you see. They CHANGED things! Please pay $100 even though you've seen the movie fifty times.) (All of which is true, of course, but it was still hilarious. To me.) But honestly I barely missed the slash, because this new Jack really works. It's his show all the way, and he turns "Santa Fe" into a chilling, heart-wrenching showstopper. Which I wasn't quite sure could be done. These changes did leave David's character in kind of a weird position, dramatically--he got his own arc and everything, but it felt disconnected from Jack's even though the story kept shoving them together for plot reasons. So I guess that was a flaw.
The invention of Katherine is almost entirely successful! There were recurring moments where she was clearly being written as The Spunky Girl rather than a female character one of whose traits is spunk, and at one important point I was completely unclear on her motivations or what she was supposed to be thinking. But she is on the whole a real person with characterization and an important role in the plot, which is an improvement on Sarah, and she's not a resentful-of-his-own-career-choices Bill Pullman who can't really sing and clearly wants to be elsewhere, which is an improvement on Denton.
Also the whole thing was a bit more political. I mean, the movie is blatantly political, that's one reason I love it so much despite its flaws. But it manages to keep itself remarkably distant from any specifics that might remind viewers of actual present-day labor issues, and of course it's all sanitized and Disneyfied. The stage version is certainly still a Disney story, but the kids are rougher around the edges, and bad things happen onstage, not just the suggestion of them. And there's a lot less of the most extreme silliness, and generally it all feels less like a distant alternate universe and more like real people in our world. There's more talk of unions as things that non-adorable adults might also benefit from, for one thing, and a truly priceless moment between Jack and Pulitzer involving (and sending up) the phrase "a compromise we can all live with," to which the audience responded with great enthusiasm.
I've seen a lot of people saying they just didn't like it as much because they missed the general amateur, bad singing, Kenny Ortega nature of the movie. And I admit those things are charming, but the stage version in no way felt too polished to me. I mean, nobody screwed up their dance steps (that I saw), but the whole thing had an appealingly fresh feeling, and I wasn't at all surprised to find out that the actors in three major roles (Katherine, David, and Spot) and several smaller ones were all making their Broadway debuts. It had a lot of the good qualities of improv or amateur stuff--the energy, mainly, and a general unconstrained feeling--but was also totally professional in quality.
Incidentally, I was pleased to discover that there really are no bad seats in the Nederlander Theatre, because it is so much tinier than the one where I saw Anything Goes. SO much tinier. I was way off to the side in the mezzanine (though admittedly only three rows back instead of seven like last time) and the view was almost flawless. The couple next to me who talked during the show, not so much. But in this life we cannot have everything.