Confession: I detest musicals. I think they are silly. Pretentious.
Illogical. They aim low. They bore.
The dancing is just dumb.
If you’re offended, maybe I
can redeem myself by admitting that I like some
musicals very much, one of which is The
Wizard of Oz.
Maybe it’s the
familiarity. Or it just stuck with me as
a big deal since childhood. But I like the story. The music is not nauseating. Somewhere
Over the Rainbow is a powerful, emotional song. I enjoy the movie whenever I see it, and I
loved a stage production I saw about 20 years ago.
Not so, however, this new
production with new songs by Webber and Rice.
They aren’t needed. They don’t
add a thing. They don’t fit. They should just go away.
This new material proves
that Webber’s best before date was a while back. But you knew that. There have been some big flops. Really big. And now, rather than coming up with a new
clunker of his own, he has ridden the coattails of a timeless classic and
managed to drag it down to the level of just another dumb musical, i.e. a waste
of time. Like the Wizard, he should be
ashamed.
New tunes and lyrics and
jokes, oh my.
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