![]() ![]() At some point people just have to accept that no matter how open minded they are for younger generations, they just aren't part of it and their thinking.Ī) realize that his main fanbase has been with him since the 70s and 80s and is now middle-aged. Whether this is due to bad collaborators or ALW's massive ego, who knows.Īnother issue with Cinderella is certainly that he tried to hard to vibe with the zeitgeist. But Love Never Dies, Stephen Ward and Cinderella were all dire book-wise, whereas School of Rock, which was very closely based on the movie worked for me. Back then shows like Evita, Cats, StEx, even Phantom were created based very loosely on their source material and yet they worked. Maybe today's audiences are too cynic for just a bit of theatre magic the way you felt transported into that "moonlit night on a junkyard" or enjoyed performers zipping all around you on rollerskates back then?Ĭollaborators are certainly an issue as I feel his shows are worst when there's an original book involved these days. But the last London revival wasn't a big success and there was a lot of snark (not least on this board) about how awful and pointless the show was. That said, were he to go back to something truly unconventional, how would it be received today? Cats and Starlight Express made me fall in love with musical theatre in the late 80s and Cats especially was incredibly popular. Those early shows made him rich and popular enough to try things that had never been tried before (dancing cats, rollerskating trains!) and the gamble paid off.īut ever since Sunset (which I agree was his last big show) I feel he's gone to try and create "conventional" musicals and it never really worked. I can think of a few things here: In the late 60s and 70s he was young and perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist and he had a great collaborator in Tim Rice with his snarky lyrics. For convoluted reasons I don't care to explain I listened to Jesus Christ Superstar yesterday and I was struck by just how massive the difference is between those early masterpieces and the rubbish he's churned out more recently. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |