Środa 1 Kwi 2009, 12:13

Sun 29 Mar – THRILLER Live - A Broadway Musical

I know. You'll call me an unsatisfied old fart. You'll call me an unappreciative loser. But I barely won with my instinct to get the hell out of this crappy play after just a couple of minutes. It did get slightly better with time, but nevertheless, I "escaped" at the end.

What I would expect of a musical, that calls itself "A Broadway Musical", is quality. Not crappity. I would definitely say, that Broadway viewers must have high expectations, and this dance-something-whatever would receive a huge load of rotten apples flying its way, if it was truly shown on Broadway.

But to cut this review short, I must say that spending a relatively huge amount of money I would expect some kind of a story. A story of Michael's life. A fictional story based on the Thriller original clip. Or at least some story. Not a never-ending series of Michael's covers, sang by people who definitely should not be singing Michael's songs (because they can't sing at all…), accompanied by a bunch of second-best dancers trying to immitate Michael's moves, and terribly failing.

The show consisted of something like two dozen songs played by a mediocre orchestra, and sang by four different vocalists. One of them (the black guy with longer hair) could actually sing. A little. The chubby blonde who tried to look sexy was screaming her lungs out like young Shania Twain (the louder, the better), and attempted to add her own vocal impressions to the original songs (and failed terribly). The second black dude might have been good, if he wasn't selected to sing Michael's songs (his voice scale was not good enough), and the white dude (with nice outfits though, I'd kill to have a coat like he had!) should simply avoid singing alltogether.

The dancing company was stiff as hell. The moves did not look natural. One girl (the one who danced to "Dirty Diana") tried her best to look sexy by exposing her chest and shaking her long hair. She failed. Actually, out of the whole show, I enjoyed looking at only two dancers (but I would prefer to look at them dancing to original Michael's tunes, not these terrinble covers). One was a short-haired, dark-haired girl who had it in her. She knew how to dance, did not look artificial (like all the others), and was loosened up. She simply had fun, and wasn't just following the moves. The other was the tallest guy in the group (who definitely remininded me of Vanilla Ice!) – he was the only one who succeeded in immitating Michael's moves.

To sum it all up, it was three hours of pure torture. My girlfriend shared the same opinion as I did. We would have left earlier, if not for all the money we spent on the show, and if not for two friends who went with us and weren't so terribly dissapointed (we didn't want to leave them there). I would not recommend this show to anybody, as the only show I have ever seen that was worse than this was Residents at Sala Kongresowa about ten years back or so (when they simply bounced around in their masks, with their videos played on a big screen in the background…).

If you want to spend all that money on entertainment related to Michael, better just buy his discography, and play it at home. I guarantee you'll have a much better time.

PS. I've been a fan of Michael since 1984, when my folks got me the original Thriller on cassette. I still have it. So it hurts me to see something that crappy compared to the original, which was truly something.