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Dec. 8th, 2013 02:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsFor December 8th, evewithanapple asked me about my least favorite playwright/composers and why!
. . . I don't actually have a lot of least favorites, because when it comes to musical theater, I really love things that are terrible . . . so I am going to seize the opportunity to do the exact opposite and talk instead about my FAVORITE terrible playwright/composer, ~*~*~Frank Wildhorn~*~*~*~.
Frank Wildhorn, y'all. FRANK WILDHORN. Frank Wildhorn is an extremely prolific writer of amazingly cheesy musicals. All of his work is committed to being as spectacularly over-the-top as possible and none of it is at all committed to sounding any different from his previous work. I have experienced nowhere near all of his oeuvre, but I am COMMITTED to expanding my knowledge whenever I get a chance. Wildhorn musicals with which I am familiar (and which I have picspammed previously on my DW) include:
The Scarlet Pimpernel, which I actually love completely unironically in all of its over-the-top glory. This musical was my formative Scarlet Pimpernel iteration. ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES.
Jekyll and Hyde, which I watched whenever it came over PBS when I was a kid, and will still watch whenever I have the opportunity, and which is HILARIOUSLY TERRIBLE. Or at least the version with which I am familiar with, starring DAVID HASSELHOFF, is hilariously terrible. Jekyll's inexplicable daddy issues! Lucy the Sexy Prostitute and Emma the Pure Fiancee and the absolute textbook virgin/whore dichotomy! "Confrontation," in which the Hoff wears HALF A WIG and flings his hair back and forth like he just don't care before ripping open his shirt in a rage-driven frenzy! Oh, Jekyll and Hyde. What an amazing piece of musical theater.
Wonderland, a musically derivative but visually spectacular musical in which our heroine -- having had her marriage founder because she is the sole breadwinner -- dreams about her estranged husband rescuing her from her dark side, who wants to take over the kingdom of Wonderland from her mother-in-law. Then this saves her marriage. THANKS, FRANK WILDHORN.
I am also a little bit familiar with The Count of Monte Cristo because of that half a kdrama I watched which was about a production of Wildhorn's Count of Monte Cristo, but seeing that show in full is absolutely on my bucket list because over-the-top Dumasian revenge is EXACTLY the kind of thing Wildhorn is best suited for.
Frank Wildhorn's current projects include a musical about Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, which I feel confident will include a lot of really dramatically angsty power ballads and a lot of sentimental and hugely problematic tropes about mental illness, and Excalibur, which is a Frank Wildhorn musical ABOUT KING ARTHUR oh my god it's going to be so bad, I'M SO THERE.
But let's be real, when it comes to Frank Wildhorn, I am always there. It is a beautiful hatemance for the ages. No matter how much bad his stuff gets, no matter how I may be seething with rage 3/4 of the way through the show, I SWEAR TO YOU, I WILL BE THERE!
evewithanapple asked me about my least favorite playwright/composers and why! . . . I don't actually have a lot of least favorites, because when it comes to musical theater, I really love things that are terrible . . . so I am going to seize the opportunity to do the exact opposite and talk instead about my FAVORITE terrible playwright/composer, ~*~*~Frank Wildhorn~*~*~*~.
Frank Wildhorn, y'all. FRANK WILDHORN. Frank Wildhorn is an extremely prolific writer of amazingly cheesy musicals. All of his work is committed to being as spectacularly over-the-top as possible and none of it is at all committed to sounding any different from his previous work. I have experienced nowhere near all of his oeuvre, but I am COMMITTED to expanding my knowledge whenever I get a chance. Wildhorn musicals with which I am familiar (and which I have picspammed previously on my DW) include:
The Scarlet Pimpernel, which I actually love completely unironically in all of its over-the-top glory. This musical was my formative Scarlet Pimpernel iteration. ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES.
Jekyll and Hyde, which I watched whenever it came over PBS when I was a kid, and will still watch whenever I have the opportunity, and which is HILARIOUSLY TERRIBLE. Or at least the version with which I am familiar with, starring DAVID HASSELHOFF, is hilariously terrible. Jekyll's inexplicable daddy issues! Lucy the Sexy Prostitute and Emma the Pure Fiancee and the absolute textbook virgin/whore dichotomy! "Confrontation," in which the Hoff wears HALF A WIG and flings his hair back and forth like he just don't care before ripping open his shirt in a rage-driven frenzy! Oh, Jekyll and Hyde. What an amazing piece of musical theater.
Wonderland, a musically derivative but visually spectacular musical in which our heroine -- having had her marriage founder because she is the sole breadwinner -- dreams about her estranged husband rescuing her from her dark side, who wants to take over the kingdom of Wonderland from her mother-in-law. Then this saves her marriage. THANKS, FRANK WILDHORN.
I am also a little bit familiar with The Count of Monte Cristo because of that half a kdrama I watched which was about a production of Wildhorn's Count of Monte Cristo, but seeing that show in full is absolutely on my bucket list because over-the-top Dumasian revenge is EXACTLY the kind of thing Wildhorn is best suited for.
Frank Wildhorn's current projects include a musical about Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, which I feel confident will include a lot of really dramatically angsty power ballads and a lot of sentimental and hugely problematic tropes about mental illness, and Excalibur, which is a Frank Wildhorn musical ABOUT KING ARTHUR oh my god it's going to be so bad, I'M SO THERE.
But let's be real, when it comes to Frank Wildhorn, I am always there. It is a beautiful hatemance for the ages. No matter how much bad his stuff gets, no matter how I may be seething with rage 3/4 of the way through the show, I SWEAR TO YOU, I WILL BE THERE!
no subject
Date: 2013-12-10 05:13 pm (UTC)The music really is excellent! I'm fine with Marguerite and Chauvelin's backstory! The book had not figured out how to balance the humor of Percy's mask with the gravity of the real situation, so that the dramatic tension kept getting interrupted by glittering disco hat parties. It felt like something that should—and could—have been fixed in workshop. I'm genuinely not sure what happened that it wasn't, except I guess Frank Wildhorn doesn't work that way.
but I've recently been brainwashed into accepting the Leslie Howard into my mental canon because it's my roommates' favorite and they play it ALL THE TIME and gradually, inevitably it supercedes.
(Hell, it is no longer on Netflix; this makes the recommendation more difficult. I hope this copy three minutes' Googling has just turned up is good.) Now you must get them to watch Pimpernel Smith (1941), Leslie Howard's wartime update: it's his next-to-last starring film and it's brilliant. I posted about it a little when I discovered it, although I really did write mostly at Jeff VanderMeer's blog. Horatio Smith is an English classical archaeologist who under pretext of unearthing an ancient Aryan civilization in mid-Europe is secretly engaged in spiriting refugees out of Nazi Germany in 1939; Reichsminister von Graum knows a dangerous resistance leader exists, because artists and scientists and radicals and ordinary people who didn't deserve their fates keep disappearing from deportations, house arrests, sometimes even work camps, but no one has yet thought to connect him with the absent-minded professor who drifts around museums in his leather-patched tweeds, caustically interrupting tourists to correct their misapprehensions about classical art, and doesn't seem to have a political bone in his body. The Marguerite figure is the daughter of an imprisoned Polish dissident whose life will be forfeit if Ludmila can't ferret out the identity of the latter-day Pimpernel; one of the things I quite like about the film is that once this is understood by Smith, his prompt course of action is to mount a rescue of Ludmila's father from the concentration camp where he's being held, because then von Graum won't have anything to hold over her. He doesn't expect her to sacrifice her father for his cause and it's the sort of crazy-ass heroic thing he does anyway. The film went on to influence Raoul Wallenberg. I do not understand why it's not on DVD.
...also, omg, what! OF COURSE HE DID. That's amazing.
He gets an entire villain number about chessmastering everybody and pulling their strings! I ran into it in 2010 when I was reading online about the Mayerling affair! I had not expected it.
(I should not have been surprised, really, considering that the Mayerling affair is a historical-tragical vortex of batshit, fatal love, and conspiracy theories, but I still stared at it a lot.)
no subject
Date: 2013-12-11 02:56 am (UTC)Also: OMG THANK YOU FOR THIS LINK, I have been wanting to see Pimpernel Smith FOREVER, or at least ever since I found out about it! I'M SO EXCITED.
. .. but have you listened to the villain number? Is it good? Inquiring minds want to know!
no subject
Date: 2013-12-11 04:34 am (UTC)See, The Scarlet Pimpernel was my first exposure to Frank Wildhorn, so I didn't know to expect the sparkly Regency disco parties. I'd heard the original cast recording (and nothing from Jekyll & Hyde except for "This Is the Moment," because at some point every baritone on earth with a high extension auditions with it), but never seen a production. I was blindsided. You can't tell there's glitterballs from the music!
I'M SO EXCITED.
Enjoy! I love the movie—I'm just waiting for Criterion (or any qualified arthouse distributor, I'm not picky) to notice it exists!
. .. but have you listened to the villain number? Is it good? Inquiring minds want to know!
Well, I encountered it first as a vid for Kronprinz Rudolf (2006), which disoriented me immensely by casting as Eduard Graf Taaffe an actor who looked strikingly like my uncle Peter, but the YouTube link appears to have broken since 2010. A further minute on the internet seems to present me with the Viennese stage production, which aaaaaaaaaaaaagh.
(It has a menacing group tango.)
no subject
Date: 2013-12-12 01:34 am (UTC). . . oh my god. Clicking that link was the best choice I have made all day, I am sitting here with an expression of stunned delight on my face. WHAT AN AMAZING PERFORMANCE. WILDHORN! I KNEW YOU WOULD NOT DISAPPOINT.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-12 02:52 am (UTC)Yeah, see, on the radio it just sounds like fashion.
WHAT AN AMAZING PERFORMANCE. WILDHORN! I KNEW YOU WOULD NOT DISAPPOINT.
AUSTRIAN HISTORY CANNOT BE BLAMED FOR NOT FORESEEING THAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN TO IT. MITTELEUROPA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WORRIED ABOUT A LOT OF THINGS, BUT THE MENACING GROUP TANGO WITH THE STRATEGICALLY PLACED GALLOWS AND THE LITERAL BEDROOM ANTICS WAS NOT ONE OF THEM. I WOULDN'T HAVE SEEN IT COMING.