It is where we are...
On Tuesday evening I went with Jimmy and David to see the musical The Lion King, which is playing at Boston Opera House. It was almost a spur of the moment plan: Rahul mentioned earlier in the day that he was planning to go, and although we missed him (we were eating meal number 1, and discussing functionals, integration and coordinate transformation), we went anyway.
It was an enjoyable show. I stand by my earlier comment about preferring natural voices. Obviously the scale of the production meant it needed to be amplified, and it was done very professionally, but there's something not quite the same about it.
Some have complained that one doesn't see musicals like The Lion King for the singing anyway, but for the 'event. I can understand their point: there were certainly many animal costumes (the approximately life-sized elephant walking down the aisle right beside us was a favourite) - and many costume changes from the ensemble, I believe - familiar tunes, substantial sets (particularly Pride Rock), although nothing show-stealing... When it comes down to it, though, the essence of the show is still in the singing, dancing and witty banter - mostly taken verbatim from the movie, but lines like "a king? Lady, have you got your lions crossed!" don't lose from the anticipation.
It was certainly lots of fun, but I think it's a show that works best as a cartoon kids' movie. The characters are all complete stereotypes (let's see, there's the fatherly king, his queen who does nothing much but stands up for the women after the king dies, the evil usurper, the overly confident child-become-man, the love interest who convinces him to turn away from his selfish ways, the wise old monkey, the clumsy comic duo, the incompetent sidekicks...). Now that's all very well in a cartoon, but in a musical we'd like at least a little depth or originality! Also, for some reason I didn't find the songs as memorable as I'd expected. The famously sensitive Jimmy mentioned that he'd have them stuck in his head all week, but that certainly hasn't been the case for me. I guess one has a higher expectation from a musical than from a cartoon movie.
While it was a very pleasant evening out, I hope my irony will be indulged if I suggest that it was 'nothing to write home about'!
Using some basic time zone conversions, it's most likely I too was savouring an aural meal of Tim Rice whilst you were at The Lion King. I've been listening to a lot of Joseph recently, and had it on constantly over the weekend. Are you going to see Love Never Dies when it opens?
ReplyDeleteAny show with a life-sized elephant in it gets my vote. Sounds like you're enjoying MIT. Hope life's treating you well!
ReplyDelete@Patrick
ReplyDeleteSequels never live up to the original...
@Steph
It is indeed.
And I always suspected there are people who read my blog but don't comment, but it appears that some subjects are of enough interest to them to provoke a comment. I'll remember that large animals are your weakness (I should have guessed!), and see if I can encourage others out of the woodwork!
What about The Godfather Part II or Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey? I've spent the last three days on the Gold Coast in terrential rain. I won a $2,500 travel voucher yesterday.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen either of those (although I did spend an hour in line with Bill and Ted on my first day at Berkeley), so I'll defer to Vik for his opinion.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking the lads in this queue weren't Bill S Preston and Ted Theodore Logan, but another gnarly pair?
ReplyDeleteI don't think they were a pair: we just started chatting because we were in the line together, and discovered they were Bill and Ted.
ReplyDelete