Misbegotten beauty and general beastliness

[desperance]

mizkit asked me in a comment, whether she'd missed a commentary on 'Beauty and the Beast' because I'd mentioned it sidelong in last night's post but not apparently otherwise.

I guess I didn't talk about it, because I don't think of this as a review blog; I'm at the theatre all the time, and really don't want to start thinking of it as a job ('specially a non-paying job). I don't talk about books much, for the same reason; only when I'm excited, or occasionally enraged.

However, when I'm invited...

'Beauty and the Beast' didn't enrage me; mostly, it bored me. Which is what troubles and depresses me, because this is - predictably - the way that musical theatre is heading. It seems that these days, Disney is to Broadway as Lloyd Webber is to the West End: an arbiter, a standard, the measure of success.

The trouble with this, of course, is that animated feature films - even though, yes, they do have songs - do not transfer readily to the musical stage. The magic of animation does not transfer at all, because it lies in, it inheres to those aspects that cannot be replicated in live action (we wouldn't need animation, let alone marvel at it, if spoons could dance and stars could sing); the charm and wit of animation doesn't transfer well either, because it consists largely in giving character to things that have none of their own.

Which means that if you want to transfer animation to the stage - tho' God alone knows why you would, except in pursuit of money, for precisely those reasons outlined above: it's artistically inappropriate and creatively null - then the sine qua non is to replace those elements that cannot be transferred, to substitute theatre-magic for cartoon-magic. It's not enough to dress people up as spoons and give them dance-steps; this does not replicate the charm or magic of a dancing spoon.

Guess what Disney does?

Yup. We have people in cutlery costumes.

Which I could forgive if they were witty, if they had a lively and interesting script; because that's where theatre-magic lives, in the words, but Disney doesn't know that. Disney is all about look-see. I don't know the movie, so I couldn't say if they've simply transferred the script of that to this, but I wouldn't be surprised. It's dreary: flat, leaden, deathly dull.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the music, and some of the songs have their moments - but moments aren't enough, not when there are hours to sit through. (And there is of course the whole other problem of little girls in princess costumes, who will sit entranced through the DVD time and time again, because they are two feet from the screen and there is magic right in front of their noses; so of course they want to come to the stage show, and of course their parents bring them, and they're a hundred feet from grown-ups in costumes and it's not the same at all, and they're quickly bored and restless and querulous and... but this is not a review of audiences, I'll save that for another day.)

Mostly, it's the whole concept that's corrupt. Transferring animation to the stage is pointless and without merit, but it is financially rewarding, and so they do it more and more. Of course Broadway has always been about making money, but they used to go looking for talent to achieve that. Now they take short-cuts, they settle for substitution, how to turn that dollar into this dollar; what they put on stage as a result is hollow in concept and flawed in realisation, it's just not good at any point. And there will be more and more of it, and it will come to be what musical theatre means, and we will have charted another loss.

(And then I go to see 'The Producers' and feel all optimistic again, because that's an adaptation that has entirely found its own magic, twice, from original film to stage musical and then of course back to film again, and it works in all three incarnations...)