Profile for chrishuyen

g.d.e.l.g.i. said: "To your first couple of points, the reason it feels like a jukebox musical is partly that a lot of the song slots were arbitrary. From the start of this incarnation, there was an ongoing push to fit in and strongly emphasize as many hits as possible, rather than prioritize plot function. For someone versed in how the show is more or less supposed to work, it would not be terribly difficult to make the songs fit more organically (including either reverting to the C

g.d.e.l.g.i. said: "Well, when you're a Jim Steinman fan aware that the plot was supposed to be the whole point, that this show was the culmination of a 50-year dream of putting this particular story onstage so that the songs were finally presentedin the context for which they were originally intended, it's a bit of a letdown that the current producers feel they can leave so much of it by the wayside."

I'm sympathetic to this as it seems like something th

This might be a hot take but I found this version of the book to be far superior to the original version that toured City Center (which I know was already cut down a bit).  If they just paired it with a bit more spectacle, I think they'd have the right idea--minimal book just to get us through the vague ideas of plot points but with all the focus being on the songs and enough spectacle to wow the audience into forgetting there's a plot to pay attention to at all.  I didn'

I thought this was fascinating, enough that I begrudgingly downloaded the substack app just to keep reading it.  I thought it was lovely how people still enjoyed Les Mis and Phantom despite them feeling like a different era of musicals (which of course they are), but I did end up bristling a bit at the review for Hamilton.  I wonder how much of it is cultural differences with a British cast/audience, but while I could see how Hamilton feels dated in a way (overly optimistic about th

I'm firmly in the camp that the original West End book of Chess was mostly there and just needed a few tweaks, and most attempts to wholesale overhaul it just make it worse.  The story itself I find to be simple but it's the political atmosphere circling around them that make it more complex, which gives us richer characters (the current revival addressed that by having the narrator talk down to the audience but then made the characters laughably one dimensional).  I think i

Commercial off Broadway seems to have received a bit of a boom (Little Shop, Oh Mary, Titanique, New World Stages, Studio Seaview, some of the Minetta Lane stuff), and I think it helps that they seem more conscious of budget when it comes to production values and the small capacities help to generate buzz.  This is all anecdotal but that seems to be the case from what I can see.

It doesn't seem like the Kinky Boots transfer really worked out (though I suppose it came at a

Right, it's just another baffling choice in this production for me.  My friend described it as "everyone needs to get an 11 o'clock number so this is Florence's" and that explanation makes about as much sense as anything else you could come up with for why it's the penultimate number of the show.

When given to Florence, it ABSOLUTELY needs to be in act 1 and be about Freddie.  The original version had it come in the place of Nobody's Side (with N