They're Not Gonna Live Forever
The opening for Fame on 42nd Street lived up to all the talk I heard on the street. And that is not saying much.
When you hear that they are going to make a musical Fame, you think you will see Coco, Bruno, Doris, Leroy and the rest of them singing the songs like "Hot Lunch," "I Sing the Body Electric" and "Fame." You also expect that the plot will be what you remember the movie to be. Take, for example, the musical adaptation of Saturday Night Fever which was an exact replica of the movie. Or Footloose, which took the movie and changed only parts of it to make it work on stage. Fame took the movie, failed to get the rights and changed everything just a bit, wrote new (bad) songs, and made everything just not quite right. It was as if it were generic Fame. You know, close to the real thing, but clearly not the original. The only song from the movie that made it in the cut was "Fame." It was melded into another, new song. Then it was sung again at the finale, when the taxi rose through the stage. It was almost as though the creative team were saying, at the end, look it really is the same as the movie.
My prediction is it will last through the holidays and close in the January slump. Not a whole lot of people are going to be happy about seeing a knock-off of a familiar movie. I'm not even getting into the other problems that this show has; book, songs, choreography, lighting, strange rolling set pieces, oddly timed emotional swings, characters you can't really fully follow - nor want to, lack of understandable character motivation. Let's just say that this is not one of the better shows out there right now.
When you hear that they are going to make a musical Fame, you think you will see Coco, Bruno, Doris, Leroy and the rest of them singing the songs like "Hot Lunch," "I Sing the Body Electric" and "Fame." You also expect that the plot will be what you remember the movie to be. Take, for example, the musical adaptation of Saturday Night Fever which was an exact replica of the movie. Or Footloose, which took the movie and changed only parts of it to make it work on stage. Fame took the movie, failed to get the rights and changed everything just a bit, wrote new (bad) songs, and made everything just not quite right. It was as if it were generic Fame. You know, close to the real thing, but clearly not the original. The only song from the movie that made it in the cut was "Fame." It was melded into another, new song. Then it was sung again at the finale, when the taxi rose through the stage. It was almost as though the creative team were saying, at the end, look it really is the same as the movie.
My prediction is it will last through the holidays and close in the January slump. Not a whole lot of people are going to be happy about seeing a knock-off of a familiar movie. I'm not even getting into the other problems that this show has; book, songs, choreography, lighting, strange rolling set pieces, oddly timed emotional swings, characters you can't really fully follow - nor want to, lack of understandable character motivation. Let's just say that this is not one of the better shows out there right now.
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