Post by santtu on Mar 15, 2010 15:22:06 GMT -5
Ok, a warning first:
I'm going to go through the plot (below in purple) with spoilers and all, so if you don't want to know what happens in this show stop reading now!!
The show opens with a prologue scene, which takes place on the boardwalk of Coney Island. A woman in black, Mme Giry, is remembering the “Phantasma” after seeing an old ad poster on the wall of the boardwalk, eventually joined in by Fleck, one of the 'freaks' of the "Phantasma". The scene turns into the Coney Island Waltz, the overture, during which we are taken back in time. As the waltz is finished, we see the crowds flocking at the gates of “Phantasma“ - an attraction in Coney Island, owned and designed by a mysterious Mr Y, a genius who wears a mask - curious to see what’s inside. One of the performers there is Meg Giry, now the new leading lady in the Vaudeville group the Ooh-La-La Girls, making her debut performance, nervous and wanting to impress “him”, their boss. After the performance Meg meets her mother, Mme Giry, now her producer. The “him” did not attend Meg's first performance, he was busy in his private quarters called The Aerie. “Him” being of course the Phantom. After 10 years he’s still desperately in love with Christine and totally obsessed with her. Meg bursts into the Aerie with Mme Giry wanting to know if he saw her show, only to find the Phantom preoccupied. Mme Giry realizes why and gets furious with him, reminding him of who helped him to survive and to attain the “Phantasma“, demanding him to show more respect to her and her daughter. The Phantom writes a letter and hands it over to Fleck, one of his minions (the letter turns out to be his/Mr Y’s well-paid invitation to Christine to arrive to New York to sing.). 3 months pass and a ship has arrived to New York with press and crowd at the pier. One of the most anticipated passengers on board is "the Soprano of the Century", Christine Daaé, arriving in New York with her husband Raoul and 10-year-old son Gustave. They are met at the pier by a strange mechanical horse and carriage, out of which steps three Mr Y’s minions. Christine, Raoul and Gustave travel on the carriage to Coney Island where Christine is staying with her family in a hotel. Raoul, now a bitter alcoholic and gambler, is annoyed that they are in New York, but is reminded by his wife that they need the money. After Raoul leaves, Gustave asks his mother why his father never plays with him, doesn’t he love him? She replies, telling him to “look with your heart”. Christine is left alone, and the music box Gustave was playing with earlier starts to play again, this time the tune is different, more familiar… And suddenly the balcony doors open and the Phantom walks in and the two see each other for the first time in 10 years. After the first shock wears off, they recall the last time they met, in Paris, after the mob caused the Phantom to flee: the night before Christine was wed to Raoul, she somehow managed to find the Phantom and they spent a night together. Gustave runs in and meets Mr Y (= the Phantom) who promises to show him all the secrets of Phantasma. The next day, Meg is rehearsing her new number “Bathing beauty” as Christine, Raoul and Gustave walk into the theatre and the former close friends meet for the first time in 10 years. With Mme Giry joining in the four seem to be glad to see each other, but Mme Giry lets Raoul know that she is now working for the Phantom and it is he who has invited Christine to sing. Meanwhile, Phantom’s minions have brought Gustave to the Aerie, full of Phantom’s strange inventions. Gustave sits by a piano and starts to play a melody he has written which startles the Phantom. After ‘a revelation‘, the Phantom shows Gustave the strange objects he has in the Aerie, including a chandelier of singing heads, he takes off his mask - and the boy screams in horror. Christine appears and asks Fleck to take Gustave away. Once alone, the Phantom confronts Christine about the true father of Gustave and she tells him that instead of Raoul’s, the Phantom is Gustave's father. Once assuming he’s alone, the Phantom swears that everything he ever accomplishes on this earth he will leave to his son. Mme Giry and Meg overhear this and once the Phantom’s gone, Mme Giry bursts with rage. All her and Meg’s hard work is now going to profit the boy leaving them with nothing.
The Act II opens with Mme Giry handing a letter to Meg urging her to deliver it forward. After her morning swim, Meg meets the drunken Raoul in a bar and hands him the letter which contains three tickets to a ship leaving for Europe asking Raoul to take his family back to France. After Meg exits, the Phantom appears and makes a deal with Raoul: if Christine sings that evening the Phantom’s song, Raoul will leave alone, and if she won’t sing, all Raoul’s debts are paid off by the Phantom. That evening Meg leads the Ooh-La-La Girls through their number “Bathing Beauty” in which Meg eventually appears topless with only small parasols to cover her breasts. After her performance she is met by her mother who tells her that the Phantom wasn’t there to see her show, once again, and that he’s still obsessed with Christine. In her dressing room Christine is preparing for her performance with Gustave who eventually wanders off to explore the backstage area of the theatre promising his mother to meet her right after her song has finished. Raoul has entered and apologizes to her the way he has been behaving and treating her and Gustave and he asks her not to perform. After he leaves Christine, ecstatic with the possibility to make a new start with Raoul starts to change in order not to perform after all when the Phantom enters and pleads her to sing. Once alone Christine is torn apart like 10 years ago. She gets ready for the stage not sure of what to do, as Raoul, the Phantom and Mme Giry watch her in the wings. Eventually Christine starts to sing and Raoul realizes he has lost and leaves. Later Christine finds a note from Raoul where he says he hopes the Phantom can give her what he never could. Suddenly Christine notices that Gustave is absent. Panicked, they search for him, but can’t find him. Eventually they understand that Meg has taken Gustave. Finally they find Meg and Gustave on the pier and Meg is about to push the boy (who can’t swim) into the ocean. Gustave runs to his mother, Meg pulls out a gun and threatens to shoot the Phantom. Meg reveals that it wasn’t her mother who earned them all the permissions, funds etc. to enable the "Phantasma" to become reality, it was her - sleeping with the ‘money-men’. In her self-pity she turns the gun to her own head and threatens to shoot herself, but the Phantom calms her but eventually slips in a wrong word, “Christine”, which enrages Meg. In a sudden rush of anger she swings her hand holding the gun and the gun goes off. Christine is hit. Gustave cries for his father and the fatally wounded Christine tells him once again to “look with your heart” and Gustave understands that the Phantom is his real father. Christine asks the Phantom to kiss her and during the kiss she dies. Meg, terrified of what she has accidentally done, cradles Christine in her arms, as the Phantom turns to his son. Gustave tries to remove the Phantom’s mask but the Phantom stops him. After hesitating for a moment, the Phantom removes his mask himself and lets his son look at him. Gustave touches the deformed side of his face and, after a moment, hugs him. Slowly the Phantom wraps his arms tightly around his son. And the curtain falls.
The performers were good. Ramin Karimloo was ok as the Phantom. He's an excellent singer (god, the last note of "'Til I hear you sing" seemed to last forever!!), he sounded so much better live than on the Youtube clips I'd seen or on the OLCR of the show. Unfortunately his Phantom seemed lacking charisma here and that bothered me. Now Karimloo makes the Phantom very normal guy with a deformity, instead of the obsessed and troubled character he was before. He doesn't have many scenes where he could bring out that 'old' Phantom, but where he has the chance, he doesn't really use those moments. Sierra Boggess played Christine very well. Mind you, this still isn't The Greatest Character Part Ever Written nor is it a stretch acting-wise, but Boggess gave the role some maturity and charm. And she had a very nice chemistry with the two boys playing Gustave (I saw the show twice, with two different boys playing G.) Joseph Millson did great job in his role as Raoul. He has a nice voice, which he gets to use too little. His solo "Why does she love me" is sadly one of the most boring songs in the show. Liz Robertson was very good as Mme Giry. Only I didn't really understand Mme Giry's reaction in the "Prologue" scene when it turns into "Coney Island Walts" - the projections start with huge waves crashing to the shore with horses(!!??) jumping among the waves. Mme Giry stares upwards to the horses and waves with this weird enthralled, almost orgasmic look on her face...
For some reason Robertson doesn't sing on the OLCR, on the cd the role is sung by Sally Dexter with a horrible accent! Robertson dropped the accent - thank heavens!! Robertson's accent was the same kind as Mme Giry has in TPOTO - without the French 'r' Dexter uses on the cd. Summer Strallen played Meg Giry very well. Her songs weren't that great but she did a very good job with them anyway. Of all the characters in the show, Meg is the one to make the biggest emotional 'journey' and Strallen portrayed it well.
Visually the show was... good. I wish I could say fantastic or brilliant, but I didn't find it that stunning. Costumes were well designed and colorful, but nothing to shout about. The sets were sometimes very impressive, but then sometimes almost boring. "The Aerie", the Phantom's lair this time, was excellent design, but for example Christine's hotel suite with the balcony was very 'blah'. The horse carriage in Act I was great, as were the Phantoms 'gadgets' in The Aerie (chandelier of singing heads, the half-woman-half-skeleton walking table-pushing thing... etc.). I really liked the almost black-and-white design for "Prologue", it reminded me of the opening scene of TPOTO. The colors appear once "we've travelled back in time".
There was a great deal of projections used in this show. Especially during the Act I. The transition from "Prologue" to "The Coney Island Waltz" had some impressive projections, and being projected to the scrim on the front edge of the stage and the backdrop at the back of the stage they created at times almost a 3D-effect! Especially when seen from the orchestra level.
ALW's score was a bit disappointing. A couple of good melodies ("'Til I hear you sing" (yes, I think it's one of the best songs in the show!!), "Dear old friend" and "Love never dies", "Look with your heart"), some ok melodies ("Devil takes the hindmost", "The Beauty underneath", "Beneath a moonless sky") and some truly horrible melodies ("Bathing beauty" and "Once upon another time"), ALW seemed to be obsessed with having waltzes on this score, there's at least 3. But he has cleverly taken some musical cues from TPOTO! We hear a fragment of "Angel of music", "Little Lotte", "Notes", "Twisted every way...". Also some of the numbers are sort of 'tributes' to some of the TPOTO songs: "Dear old friend", a waltz, sung by 4 characters at times in counterpoint, is kind of step-sister to TPOTO's "Prima donna" even having the same sort of thundering break at the end before the last line. And "The Beauty underneath" is aiming for the same kind of oddball number as the TPOTO's title song, with a steady basic beat only this time the arrangement is more hard-rock than pop.
The biggest problem with the music are the Glenn Slater's lyrics. They're mostly dull and repetitive with a few exceptions. Of course the situation for the characters is now different, but still, if you have to use the word 'love' 23 times in one song it does make you wonder a bit - it didn't bother me the first time I heard the title song, but more I listen to it the more it annoys me. The same goes with the lyrics to "Bathing beauty" - too repetitive, no matter how 'Meg's stage number' that song may be, the use of imagination is allowed. But they weren't all bad. I did like lyrics, for example, to "Dear old friend" which I thought were quite clever, actually.
But the book is the main problem. It's just forced. Not to mention predictible. And some of it just doesn't make any sense. If the Phantom has fled from the Paris Opera the night he let Christine go, then how did Christine find him to spend one night with him? How would he ever spend a night with her, since in final scene of TPOTO the Phantom sings "The fate which condemns me to wallow in blood, has also denied me the joys of the flesh..." And if Christine is so in love with Raoul that she is ready to spend her life with the Phantom to save Raoul, why would she spend a night with the Phantom to begin with?? And not just any night, but the night before her wedding. And here in LND Christine sings to the Phantom "And I loved you, yes I loved you" (in "Beneath the moonless sky") - um... when exactly did she love the Phantom? The reason she kissed him in TPOTO was pity, not love. As for the characters, only Christine hasn't been turned into something totally different from TPOTO. Raoul is now a heavily drinking gambler, ok with that I can live with. Meg is now a Vaudeville star who's ready to sell her body to get the funds for The Phantasma... The Phantom, an obsessed and somewhat maniac weirdo who kills people, is now a more or less respectable entertainment big-shot?! And Mme Giry, a woman who has lived her whole life in the world of ballet - a world of strict disipline - is now this greedy show-biz whatever whose only reason to help the Phantom seems to be only making profit by his genius... Could someone tell me where the logic is here...?!? I do understand that in a time period of 10 years a lot happens and people will 'roll with the punches' but to change all of the leading characters this much...? I found that too drama-seeking. With all due respect, maybe Ben Elton shouldn't be let anywhere near musical theatre! I've seen 3 shows with his book (THE BEAUTIFUL GAME, WE WILL ROCK YOU and this) and they all suffer from the same thing: weak book and one-dimentional characters. Coincidence? I don't think so. Of course, ALW himself was writing the book for LND as well, but then again he did the same thing with TPOTO and that one turned out all right...
All in all, LND isn't the disaster I was expecting it to be, not by far. It's "watchable", even enjoyable at times. But it isn't brilliant either. I hope they do some serious re-writing for the book and the score before transferring to Broadway!
I'm going to go through the plot (below in purple) with spoilers and all, so if you don't want to know what happens in this show stop reading now!!
The show opens with a prologue scene, which takes place on the boardwalk of Coney Island. A woman in black, Mme Giry, is remembering the “Phantasma” after seeing an old ad poster on the wall of the boardwalk, eventually joined in by Fleck, one of the 'freaks' of the "Phantasma". The scene turns into the Coney Island Waltz, the overture, during which we are taken back in time. As the waltz is finished, we see the crowds flocking at the gates of “Phantasma“ - an attraction in Coney Island, owned and designed by a mysterious Mr Y, a genius who wears a mask - curious to see what’s inside. One of the performers there is Meg Giry, now the new leading lady in the Vaudeville group the Ooh-La-La Girls, making her debut performance, nervous and wanting to impress “him”, their boss. After the performance Meg meets her mother, Mme Giry, now her producer. The “him” did not attend Meg's first performance, he was busy in his private quarters called The Aerie. “Him” being of course the Phantom. After 10 years he’s still desperately in love with Christine and totally obsessed with her. Meg bursts into the Aerie with Mme Giry wanting to know if he saw her show, only to find the Phantom preoccupied. Mme Giry realizes why and gets furious with him, reminding him of who helped him to survive and to attain the “Phantasma“, demanding him to show more respect to her and her daughter. The Phantom writes a letter and hands it over to Fleck, one of his minions (the letter turns out to be his/Mr Y’s well-paid invitation to Christine to arrive to New York to sing.). 3 months pass and a ship has arrived to New York with press and crowd at the pier. One of the most anticipated passengers on board is "the Soprano of the Century", Christine Daaé, arriving in New York with her husband Raoul and 10-year-old son Gustave. They are met at the pier by a strange mechanical horse and carriage, out of which steps three Mr Y’s minions. Christine, Raoul and Gustave travel on the carriage to Coney Island where Christine is staying with her family in a hotel. Raoul, now a bitter alcoholic and gambler, is annoyed that they are in New York, but is reminded by his wife that they need the money. After Raoul leaves, Gustave asks his mother why his father never plays with him, doesn’t he love him? She replies, telling him to “look with your heart”. Christine is left alone, and the music box Gustave was playing with earlier starts to play again, this time the tune is different, more familiar… And suddenly the balcony doors open and the Phantom walks in and the two see each other for the first time in 10 years. After the first shock wears off, they recall the last time they met, in Paris, after the mob caused the Phantom to flee: the night before Christine was wed to Raoul, she somehow managed to find the Phantom and they spent a night together. Gustave runs in and meets Mr Y (= the Phantom) who promises to show him all the secrets of Phantasma. The next day, Meg is rehearsing her new number “Bathing beauty” as Christine, Raoul and Gustave walk into the theatre and the former close friends meet for the first time in 10 years. With Mme Giry joining in the four seem to be glad to see each other, but Mme Giry lets Raoul know that she is now working for the Phantom and it is he who has invited Christine to sing. Meanwhile, Phantom’s minions have brought Gustave to the Aerie, full of Phantom’s strange inventions. Gustave sits by a piano and starts to play a melody he has written which startles the Phantom. After ‘a revelation‘, the Phantom shows Gustave the strange objects he has in the Aerie, including a chandelier of singing heads, he takes off his mask - and the boy screams in horror. Christine appears and asks Fleck to take Gustave away. Once alone, the Phantom confronts Christine about the true father of Gustave and she tells him that instead of Raoul’s, the Phantom is Gustave's father. Once assuming he’s alone, the Phantom swears that everything he ever accomplishes on this earth he will leave to his son. Mme Giry and Meg overhear this and once the Phantom’s gone, Mme Giry bursts with rage. All her and Meg’s hard work is now going to profit the boy leaving them with nothing.
The Act II opens with Mme Giry handing a letter to Meg urging her to deliver it forward. After her morning swim, Meg meets the drunken Raoul in a bar and hands him the letter which contains three tickets to a ship leaving for Europe asking Raoul to take his family back to France. After Meg exits, the Phantom appears and makes a deal with Raoul: if Christine sings that evening the Phantom’s song, Raoul will leave alone, and if she won’t sing, all Raoul’s debts are paid off by the Phantom. That evening Meg leads the Ooh-La-La Girls through their number “Bathing Beauty” in which Meg eventually appears topless with only small parasols to cover her breasts. After her performance she is met by her mother who tells her that the Phantom wasn’t there to see her show, once again, and that he’s still obsessed with Christine. In her dressing room Christine is preparing for her performance with Gustave who eventually wanders off to explore the backstage area of the theatre promising his mother to meet her right after her song has finished. Raoul has entered and apologizes to her the way he has been behaving and treating her and Gustave and he asks her not to perform. After he leaves Christine, ecstatic with the possibility to make a new start with Raoul starts to change in order not to perform after all when the Phantom enters and pleads her to sing. Once alone Christine is torn apart like 10 years ago. She gets ready for the stage not sure of what to do, as Raoul, the Phantom and Mme Giry watch her in the wings. Eventually Christine starts to sing and Raoul realizes he has lost and leaves. Later Christine finds a note from Raoul where he says he hopes the Phantom can give her what he never could. Suddenly Christine notices that Gustave is absent. Panicked, they search for him, but can’t find him. Eventually they understand that Meg has taken Gustave. Finally they find Meg and Gustave on the pier and Meg is about to push the boy (who can’t swim) into the ocean. Gustave runs to his mother, Meg pulls out a gun and threatens to shoot the Phantom. Meg reveals that it wasn’t her mother who earned them all the permissions, funds etc. to enable the "Phantasma" to become reality, it was her - sleeping with the ‘money-men’. In her self-pity she turns the gun to her own head and threatens to shoot herself, but the Phantom calms her but eventually slips in a wrong word, “Christine”, which enrages Meg. In a sudden rush of anger she swings her hand holding the gun and the gun goes off. Christine is hit. Gustave cries for his father and the fatally wounded Christine tells him once again to “look with your heart” and Gustave understands that the Phantom is his real father. Christine asks the Phantom to kiss her and during the kiss she dies. Meg, terrified of what she has accidentally done, cradles Christine in her arms, as the Phantom turns to his son. Gustave tries to remove the Phantom’s mask but the Phantom stops him. After hesitating for a moment, the Phantom removes his mask himself and lets his son look at him. Gustave touches the deformed side of his face and, after a moment, hugs him. Slowly the Phantom wraps his arms tightly around his son. And the curtain falls.
The performers were good. Ramin Karimloo was ok as the Phantom. He's an excellent singer (god, the last note of "'Til I hear you sing" seemed to last forever!!), he sounded so much better live than on the Youtube clips I'd seen or on the OLCR of the show. Unfortunately his Phantom seemed lacking charisma here and that bothered me. Now Karimloo makes the Phantom very normal guy with a deformity, instead of the obsessed and troubled character he was before. He doesn't have many scenes where he could bring out that 'old' Phantom, but where he has the chance, he doesn't really use those moments. Sierra Boggess played Christine very well. Mind you, this still isn't The Greatest Character Part Ever Written nor is it a stretch acting-wise, but Boggess gave the role some maturity and charm. And she had a very nice chemistry with the two boys playing Gustave (I saw the show twice, with two different boys playing G.) Joseph Millson did great job in his role as Raoul. He has a nice voice, which he gets to use too little. His solo "Why does she love me" is sadly one of the most boring songs in the show. Liz Robertson was very good as Mme Giry. Only I didn't really understand Mme Giry's reaction in the "Prologue" scene when it turns into "Coney Island Walts" - the projections start with huge waves crashing to the shore with horses(!!??) jumping among the waves. Mme Giry stares upwards to the horses and waves with this weird enthralled, almost orgasmic look on her face...
For some reason Robertson doesn't sing on the OLCR, on the cd the role is sung by Sally Dexter with a horrible accent! Robertson dropped the accent - thank heavens!! Robertson's accent was the same kind as Mme Giry has in TPOTO - without the French 'r' Dexter uses on the cd. Summer Strallen played Meg Giry very well. Her songs weren't that great but she did a very good job with them anyway. Of all the characters in the show, Meg is the one to make the biggest emotional 'journey' and Strallen portrayed it well. Visually the show was... good. I wish I could say fantastic or brilliant, but I didn't find it that stunning. Costumes were well designed and colorful, but nothing to shout about. The sets were sometimes very impressive, but then sometimes almost boring. "The Aerie", the Phantom's lair this time, was excellent design, but for example Christine's hotel suite with the balcony was very 'blah'. The horse carriage in Act I was great, as were the Phantoms 'gadgets' in The Aerie (chandelier of singing heads, the half-woman-half-skeleton walking table-pushing thing... etc.). I really liked the almost black-and-white design for "Prologue", it reminded me of the opening scene of TPOTO. The colors appear once "we've travelled back in time".
There was a great deal of projections used in this show. Especially during the Act I. The transition from "Prologue" to "The Coney Island Waltz" had some impressive projections, and being projected to the scrim on the front edge of the stage and the backdrop at the back of the stage they created at times almost a 3D-effect! Especially when seen from the orchestra level.
ALW's score was a bit disappointing. A couple of good melodies ("'Til I hear you sing" (yes, I think it's one of the best songs in the show!!), "Dear old friend" and "Love never dies", "Look with your heart"), some ok melodies ("Devil takes the hindmost", "The Beauty underneath", "Beneath a moonless sky") and some truly horrible melodies ("Bathing beauty" and "Once upon another time"), ALW seemed to be obsessed with having waltzes on this score, there's at least 3. But he has cleverly taken some musical cues from TPOTO! We hear a fragment of "Angel of music", "Little Lotte", "Notes", "Twisted every way...". Also some of the numbers are sort of 'tributes' to some of the TPOTO songs: "Dear old friend", a waltz, sung by 4 characters at times in counterpoint, is kind of step-sister to TPOTO's "Prima donna" even having the same sort of thundering break at the end before the last line. And "The Beauty underneath" is aiming for the same kind of oddball number as the TPOTO's title song, with a steady basic beat only this time the arrangement is more hard-rock than pop.
The biggest problem with the music are the Glenn Slater's lyrics. They're mostly dull and repetitive with a few exceptions. Of course the situation for the characters is now different, but still, if you have to use the word 'love' 23 times in one song it does make you wonder a bit - it didn't bother me the first time I heard the title song, but more I listen to it the more it annoys me. The same goes with the lyrics to "Bathing beauty" - too repetitive, no matter how 'Meg's stage number' that song may be, the use of imagination is allowed. But they weren't all bad. I did like lyrics, for example, to "Dear old friend" which I thought were quite clever, actually.
But the book is the main problem. It's just forced. Not to mention predictible. And some of it just doesn't make any sense. If the Phantom has fled from the Paris Opera the night he let Christine go, then how did Christine find him to spend one night with him? How would he ever spend a night with her, since in final scene of TPOTO the Phantom sings "The fate which condemns me to wallow in blood, has also denied me the joys of the flesh..." And if Christine is so in love with Raoul that she is ready to spend her life with the Phantom to save Raoul, why would she spend a night with the Phantom to begin with?? And not just any night, but the night before her wedding. And here in LND Christine sings to the Phantom "And I loved you, yes I loved you" (in "Beneath the moonless sky") - um... when exactly did she love the Phantom? The reason she kissed him in TPOTO was pity, not love. As for the characters, only Christine hasn't been turned into something totally different from TPOTO. Raoul is now a heavily drinking gambler, ok with that I can live with. Meg is now a Vaudeville star who's ready to sell her body to get the funds for The Phantasma... The Phantom, an obsessed and somewhat maniac weirdo who kills people, is now a more or less respectable entertainment big-shot?! And Mme Giry, a woman who has lived her whole life in the world of ballet - a world of strict disipline - is now this greedy show-biz whatever whose only reason to help the Phantom seems to be only making profit by his genius... Could someone tell me where the logic is here...?!? I do understand that in a time period of 10 years a lot happens and people will 'roll with the punches' but to change all of the leading characters this much...? I found that too drama-seeking. With all due respect, maybe Ben Elton shouldn't be let anywhere near musical theatre! I've seen 3 shows with his book (THE BEAUTIFUL GAME, WE WILL ROCK YOU and this) and they all suffer from the same thing: weak book and one-dimentional characters. Coincidence? I don't think so. Of course, ALW himself was writing the book for LND as well, but then again he did the same thing with TPOTO and that one turned out all right...
All in all, LND isn't the disaster I was expecting it to be, not by far. It's "watchable", even enjoyable at times. But it isn't brilliant either. I hope they do some serious re-writing for the book and the score before transferring to Broadway!
cuz his voice is angel of music to me LOL. It's really possible to sing better than Youtube one?? I bought the 3cd and thanks to liner notes which has very detailed explanation about the scene with libretto, I feel like I have already seen the show and I'm loving some songs Til I hear you sing and love never dies, dear old friend, devil take the hind most ... and I don't like Bathing Beauty most as you do kekeke
xx