| re: On The Twentieth Century 1978 vs 2015 - Thoughts? | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 06:27 pm EST 11/05/24 | |
| In reply to: re: On The Twentieth Century 1978 vs 2015 - Thoughts? - BroadwayTonyJ 12:08 pm EST 11/05/24 | |
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| Well, I was just trying to really understand what Comden and Green were really saying in those quotes from them that Wayman posted: ''We didn't want to do a pastiche of the 1930s-type score, so we finally decided that since we were writing a crazy, wild satire with characters who were larger than life, we'd go with comic opera.' Comden added: 'When some audiences say 'I like a musical that's reverted to the old-fashioned way,' it always surprises us because it isn't [operetta] and you can't point to another show like 'On the Twentieth Century.''' Neither of them said pastiche, but the music certainly has pastiche elements. In any case, I don't see much screwball comedy in Knickerbocker Holiday. That's why I wrote that I didn't think the books of the two shows had much in common. Admittedly, there is some very silly comedy in Knickerbocker Holiday, but I would say it's a subsidiary element. But even the silly comedy doesn't seem to me to be screwball. I did find Comden's comment that "you can't point to another show like 'On the Twentieth Century''' to be a bit surprising but when I thought about it, I couldn't really think of one. The closest I could think of is Candide, but that is more serious and darkly satirical when it is comic. (Meaning the original version.) Yeah, Little Mary Sunshine certainly has a pastiche score, although I otherwise don't see it as having much in common with On the Twentieth Century. Admittedly, with four different versions now of the On the Twentieth Century, it gets confusing, although I think only two of those versions have ever been licensed. The London version had extensive rewriting in the book seemingly intended in part to allow audiences to take the Lily-Oscar relationship more seriously, but that gave the show a bit of an identity crisis. Other harmful changes were made. I'm glad that version has, as far as I know, never been seen again. |
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