Wednesday, June 9, 2004

Going off on Broadway...and stuff

By LINDSAY BIANCHI
lbianchi@ThecitizenNews.com

Has this ever happened to you? You manage to get tickets for some hot new musical. The show is months and months away. The night of the performance gets closer and closer. When the day finally arrives, you begin to convince yourself that this is going to be great! Then you get ushered to your seat and wait patiently while you flip through your Playbill. Finally everyone has found their seats and the overture begins. Suddenly it’s showtime and you sit there with this constipated look of enjoyment on your face while the same tired dance moves and the same loudmouth singers cavort in front of you for two hours until you just want to stand up and scream, “CUT!”

I hate to be a party pooper, but the goofy, over-the-top mugging and exaggerated gesticulating of Broadway stage performers makes me wince. Everyone always comes out of these shows like they’ve just seen the secrets of the universe. I’m sorry, but the stage musicals these days seems about as culturally relevant as Bozo the Clown. Not that the old ones, “Oklahoma!”, “Kiss Me, Kate”, “Pippin”, “South Pacific” (etcetera, etcetera) were any better. They just seemed better because there wasn’t anything else to compare it to. Revived to death, these shows come back to haunt us and taunt us over and over again.

Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the movies because there are many movie musicals that I enjoy. “Hello Dolly”, “Oliver!”, “Cabaret”, “A Chorus Line”, “Bye, Bye Birdie”, “Annie”, “Paint Your Wagon”, “My Fair Lady”, “Little Shop of Horrors” to rattle off a few are all wonderful entertainment. Great songs, great performances and no painful mugging! I know you have to project when you’re on stage, but can you point it the other way? Jeez!

I wanted to like “Hairspray.” I saw it in New York with Harvey Fierstein. Colorful sets, cute costumes and lots of lights could not hide the fact that underneath it all was a bunch of boring showtunes that sounded like every other bunch of boring showtunes. They all end with everyone hitting a high note with their hands outstretched and their eyes bugging out of their head. Then they freeze while they wait for the applause to hit them. You can see the actors all breathing really hard if you look closely. Singing yourself to death is so yesterday.

But, of course, we treat “singers” in this country like they’re the be-all and end-all of talent. Just look at “American Idol.” (You’ll have to, because I can’t!) Who buys this stuff? Does the word irrelevant mean anything to you? I remember when I went to see “Truth or Dare”, the Madonna documentary years ago. (Don’t ask me why) She and her dancers got a lot of screentime, but you never saw the musicians. That really bugged me. Maybe it was all on tape and she just Karaoked her way through it. I don’t know. All I know is that I have never gone to see a musical performance for the dancing or the clothes. I don’t care if they’re cute or not. Can they play? That’s all I want to know...

I’m getting a little off the track here, but this whole singer, dancer, leap around like a nut stuff is, in the words of Southpark’s Cartman, “Lame! Totally not cool!”

Now there’s a musical I can sink my teeth into. “Bigger, Longer , Uncut” was “Awesomo!” Then again, it had really cool animation, not anime, ANIMATION. Actually, “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” is another recent musical that is so cool, you need to watch it several times just to be sure it’s real. There’s some cool animation in that one too. But the point is, the songs are great, the scripts are hilarious and they don’t sound like Ethel Merman on a hampster wheel!

One other musical on film that has never been on stage which never received the acclaim it deserved is “Absolute Beginners” directed by Julian Temple. It was his second film after the somewhat messy “Great Rock and Roll Swindle”, the Sex Pistols vehicle that sunk under its own weight. It made a great record, but the film was as uneven as British teeth. “Beginners” on the other hand is so jam-packed with style and substance, even if it is about the rise of rock in England, that one viewing will only give you the basics. Here again is something so full of detail, you have to grip the chair to keep from falling over backwards.

I’ve seen “Rent” and found it to be blaringly loud for all the wrong reasons. It tries to rock and it tries to be hip like “Hair”, but it just makes me want to sublet. I saw “Mama Mia” when it came to town. Talk about a contrivance! Make up a story to fit around a bunch of syrupy pop songs much? Funny, because I liked the music from “Chess.” I saw “Les Miserable’ and I really wanted to love it. The book blew me away when I was in junior high (middle school). I sat through it with my chin on the chair in front of me thinking to myself, ‘Will they ever stop singing?’

But the worst one has to be (even though I haven’t seen it...I can’t! You see it!) “Movin’ Out”, the Billy Joel story told in the words and music of America’s Elton John, that is if you take away Elton’s talent and Bernie Taupin’s lyrics. Songs like “Piano Man”, “Just the Way You Are”, and “Only the Good Die Young” fill me with a nebulous and unknown dread akin to what the Cthulhu did to H.P. Lovecraft’s nap time. Only someone as bland and pandering as Mr. “Bug Eyes” Billy could make someone as middle-America as John “No wait, I”m changing my name back to” Mellencamp, sound like a genius.

This, of course, is all conjecture. I could be totally wrong. People say, “You’ve got issues!” I say, “Actually, I have back issues!”