Sunday, December 11, 2005

WE BELIEVE YOU; THOUSANDS WOULDN'T: Dave Poland has an early review on The Producers (and, yes, this blog has become increasingly Broadway-attentive over the past year), and it's mixed, for reasons I can totally accept:
The Producers: The Musical is a 50% an absolute joy and 50% a disappointment. When the musical feels right shot as though it was on stage, it's terrific. . . .

The trouble comes when Stroman is called upon to act like a film director and not a stage director. Most of the time that is the case, she fails. And one gets the impression that boss man Mel Brooks wasn't in a big rush to keep her from simply recreating a lot of his handiwork from the original film as well as from the show. . . . [T]here was the question of how Ms. Stroman would handle Max's soliloquy, "Betrayed." Would this be the showstopper that it was on stage? And the answer was that she did a decent job, but no, it doesn't have the power on film that it does on stage. Part of that is the natural subtext of watching a movie and knowing that the singing's been prerecorded. And part of it, again, was that there was no real invention in the sequence. The filmmaking needed to match the magic of the song and it was lacking.

I told y'all: it should've been Pacino.

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