quizking101 said: "Just wrapping intermission, but this is so far feels like an indulgent maximalist nightmare - this is PARADISE SQUARE, peppered with THE COLOR PURPLE and CINDERELLA.
I’m my damndest to follow what’s going on, but it’s hard to understand the cast when they are all SAAAAAAAANGING!
Not everything is bad, but Act II has yet to come. I’ll post my full thoughts later"
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I apologize if my thoughts are a bit disorganized. My brain probably needs 3-5 business days to process this entire show. (FYI: It will be frozen by 10/11).
MIDNIGHT
Okay, wow. That’s was…quite an epic.
I gotta give Todrick points for having the sheer audacity to pull something like this off. However, that does not mean that it’s a slam dunk - far from it actually. This may be the largest scale production I’ve ever seen in an off-Broadway theatre and the design certainly cries out for a larger space; specifically the sound design, which reminded me of when ROCK OF AGES moved to the Hayes for its latter years and the music felt exponentially louder.
From the jump of this three hour show (start was 7:35, end was 10:35), it is pretty much nonstop singing, dancing, and introducing characters that may be relevant or may just be part of the background events. It is here where you start to see the PARADISE SQUARE/HAMILTON influence, which then goes into a CINDERELLA-esque story informed by THE COLOR PURPLE for all 1:30 of Act I. Unfortunately, Todrick opts to triple down on the overindulgence and that becomes his worst enemy in setting up the love story. There is definitely something profound (which is never a word I associate with his usual work) buried in there, but he mired it under the musical equivalent of a 10-car pile up. When I referred back to my Playbill, I found a not-negligible amount of the score tried to say a ton without actually saying anything at all. Act I becomes very hard to follow when everything is being sung at you with the full volume of what feels like stadium speakers. Every song is competing to feel like a Tony performance.
Act II - oh, boy - I can’t even begin to describe what a baffling mind bender that was. The twist at the top of the act that set up the rest of the show felt so unnecessary. Why not just continue the story as is and let it play out? Let us root for the protagonists and become invested in their journey to embrace love in the face of a world that threatens it on multiple fronts? By the end, I think I just stopped caring altogether. And just when you thought the show was wrapping up with an epilogue about black and queer history and how long it would take for “a love like theirs” to become acceptable, there is something like a “post-credits scene” and then a song at curtain call. It was the epitome of gilding the lily.
All that being said, that cast is MASSIVELY talented and constantly firing on every single cylinder. Todrick is in great voice and does land some good jokes. Ayana George should be a much bigger star - she is ALL pipes, like her own church choir. Autumn Hurlbert, Sidney DuPont, and Jeremy Beloate all turn in strong performances that hold the material down to earth when it threatens to go completely off the rails, and the ensemble is really one of the strongest collectives of dancers I’ve seen in quite some time.
All this to say, there is something there, but it would require a mass execution of his darlings in order to bring this unwieldy and bombastic spectacle under control. And considering Todrick seems hellbent on this being his magnum opus that finally makes him into a respectable (and formidable) force in musical theatre, that won’t happen.
Bring your earplugs - you’re in for a long night.
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