Broadway Grosses: Week Ending 2/14/16 — Page 2

Considering the high percentage of successful musicals that are garbage, taking umbrage that something you consider organically bad borders on delusional. The sole purpose of a Broadway musical (not counting the nfp's) is to make money. Most shows that are considered "good" artistically are flops. Which is why Hamilton is so extraordinary.

@PThespian liking a show and being literate don't really have a great deal to do with one another. I am probably as literate as any soul who posts here, but that doesn't preclude me from liking something that is not literate at all. Sometimes we just get a hoot out of something that's dumb. It's allowed. The "problem" is that some people like to sniff that they are culturally literate 24/7, and of course also there is the standard clique here who like to pretend their taste is "correct" which just proves how truly "illiterate" they are.

Mike66 said: "My huge problem with Neverland is that it's telling a story which is demonstrably untrue. I don't have a problem with fiction -- but it's very different when you tell the public that you are telling history. JM Barrie was a real person, and the "liberties" taken with what happened during his life (and to the other very real people in the show) are way over the top."

But that has no direct correlation with the quality of the show, or how much one can enjoy it. I can understand that something like that can leave a bitter dramaturgical taste in your mouth, but taking liberties with a true story is a practice as old as storytelling itself, and it is often a method of improving the storytelling. I don't personally know much about Barrie's life, but it's quite likely that some of the elements of his true story that were changed, would not have made for a very good story onstage (of course, many people feel that it didn't end up being a good story onstage anyway, but that's not my point). People don't go to Finding Neverland to learn about J.M Barrie's life. They have Wikipedia for that. They go to be entertained. You can have an amazing show that takes lots of liberties with the true story it's based on. Sometimes I see shows (the recent musical "Invisible Thread" comes to mind) which are based on true stories that really could have used MORE changes from what actually happened, because the real sequence of events just don't always work onstage.

"People who go see a show about a real person or a real story should be able to assume that the bulk of what is being told actually happened. And for Neverland, that's not the case."

Don't you think that's a bit of an exaggeration? I mean, sure they took LOTS of liberties, but the "bulk" of what is being told is how J.M Barrie was stuck for inspiration, met the family, grew close to them, felt inspired by them and wrote Peter Pan which was a big success. Isn't that pretty much what actually happened? It's not like they're claiming he wrote Moby Dick.

TD;DR - basically, being historically inaccurate doesn't automatically make it bad.

Updated On: 2/18/16 at 05:57 PM

it is a euphemism for ignorant