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Cirque du Soleil "Paramour"
May. 22nd, 2016 02:57 pmWent to see Cirque du Soleil's new production "Paramour" last night, in which they tried to do a Broadway musical.
It was dreadful.
Oh, the circus bits were awesome. But they were few and far between. Most of the run time was a standard musical. Which was terrible. The music itself was ok, if nothing special, and the leads were good singers if not great actors. But the book and the lyrics were So. Bad. So bad. As a writer, I found it infuriating. It feels very much like they decided to do a musical and then just wrote it in house. Without actually having real writers on staff. "Writer? Lyricist? We don't need those! I totally tell stories to my grandkids all the time, and they like them!"
The plot was incredibly stereotypical and thin--movie director discovers a singer who's allegedly in love with a composer and allegedly falls in love with her. She has to choose between love and career. That's it. There are no twists. Well, there's a "twist"--she chooses the composer, the movie director sics a bunch of tabloid reporters on them for Reasons, he yells at her, and she falls to her death from a roof for no good reason at all. As soon as they got to the roof, I knew exactly what was going to happen.
Going back to those alledgedly--there is no characterization here. At no point do you actually see any party fall in love with anyone else. They aren't and then they declare they are, for no reason. Actually, we aren't shown anything at all. We're just told everything. It's the worst telling instead of showing I remember ever seeing. It would have been excusable if this had been a thin interstitial plot between a lot of acrobatics. But it really was three quarters of the show and they still couldn't manage a scene that believably sold a single emotion. Probably because people narrated instead of having dialogue, and basically every word spoken was at the level you'd expect from a freshman fanfic writer. Utterly lacking in voice, nuance, or, well, character.
And the sexism is completely ridiculous. The thing opens as the director accepts a "Best Director" award and goes into a monologue that reminded me of a really, really bad imitation of the opening of Moulin Rouge in which he tells us that the movie is about a woman he loved who got away. At the end, he finishes the speech, talking about how much she inspired him and how it hurts him to have lost her. A. You didn't lose her, SHE DIED. B. IT'S DIRECTLY YOUR FAULT THAT SHE DIED. C. He makes the entire thing about the impact on him! As opposed to, you know, the tragedy of her dying! They try to make this a love triangle. What it actually is is a horrible case of workplace sexual harrassment leading to the death of the victim. The protagonist of this thing is an evil villain, and the show seems to be completely unaware of that.
(Also, he rewrites the end of the movie so she ends up with the composer, and seems very proud of himself for so generously giving her what she wanted. No, dude. Your goons pushed her to her death while you berated her. You did not give her what she wanted.)
In conclusion GAAAAH.
It was dreadful.
Oh, the circus bits were awesome. But they were few and far between. Most of the run time was a standard musical. Which was terrible. The music itself was ok, if nothing special, and the leads were good singers if not great actors. But the book and the lyrics were So. Bad. So bad. As a writer, I found it infuriating. It feels very much like they decided to do a musical and then just wrote it in house. Without actually having real writers on staff. "Writer? Lyricist? We don't need those! I totally tell stories to my grandkids all the time, and they like them!"
The plot was incredibly stereotypical and thin--movie director discovers a singer who's allegedly in love with a composer and allegedly falls in love with her. She has to choose between love and career. That's it. There are no twists. Well, there's a "twist"--she chooses the composer, the movie director sics a bunch of tabloid reporters on them for Reasons, he yells at her, and she falls to her death from a roof for no good reason at all. As soon as they got to the roof, I knew exactly what was going to happen.
Going back to those alledgedly--there is no characterization here. At no point do you actually see any party fall in love with anyone else. They aren't and then they declare they are, for no reason. Actually, we aren't shown anything at all. We're just told everything. It's the worst telling instead of showing I remember ever seeing. It would have been excusable if this had been a thin interstitial plot between a lot of acrobatics. But it really was three quarters of the show and they still couldn't manage a scene that believably sold a single emotion. Probably because people narrated instead of having dialogue, and basically every word spoken was at the level you'd expect from a freshman fanfic writer. Utterly lacking in voice, nuance, or, well, character.
And the sexism is completely ridiculous. The thing opens as the director accepts a "Best Director" award and goes into a monologue that reminded me of a really, really bad imitation of the opening of Moulin Rouge in which he tells us that the movie is about a woman he loved who got away. At the end, he finishes the speech, talking about how much she inspired him and how it hurts him to have lost her. A. You didn't lose her, SHE DIED. B. IT'S DIRECTLY YOUR FAULT THAT SHE DIED. C. He makes the entire thing about the impact on him! As opposed to, you know, the tragedy of her dying! They try to make this a love triangle. What it actually is is a horrible case of workplace sexual harrassment leading to the death of the victim. The protagonist of this thing is an evil villain, and the show seems to be completely unaware of that.
(Also, he rewrites the end of the movie so she ends up with the composer, and seems very proud of himself for so generously giving her what she wanted. No, dude. Your goons pushed her to her death while you berated her. You did not give her what she wanted.)
In conclusion GAAAAH.
