Auggie27 said: "Yesterday, watching Camelot strain to reach creative heights that are not in its DNA, I recognized how obvious it is that the show isn’t in the grand tradition of prior LCT revivals. The quest for a book that might solve its problems sidesteps the unfixable reality: the songs are not the ideal places for the story to sing, and revisiting the text around them exacerbates rather than solves the problem. Adam Feldman addressed this in his review - worth a read - but it proves that Sorkin was doomed. Today, Arthur would (co-)drive the show musically, not interrupt his ideological rumination to fret about handling a female partner. Those songs are lodged in the storytelling, and no updating resets the places where the characters express themselves in song and why."
Yes, this is the issue a lot of us realized when seeing this production. And at that point you either need to write new lyrics to some Loewe trunk melodies (like was done with UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN, not successfully) or start from scratch. This production was further hampered by using the original orchestrations & arrangements, which sound wonderful divorced from this book
To me it felt like Sorkin & Sher would have preferred to do a nonmusical play about King Arthur.
Updated On: 6/29/23 at 09:37 PM