dramamama611 said: "Or maybe we watched it and couldn't see any entertainment or artisticvalue in it.
And to clarify; I find MOST people here keep an open mind and readily agree when their initial considerations were off base."
The main thing that I've been considering after seeing it is that there is something that almost works in its use of comedy and camp. I love the idea of a Diana musical capitalizing on the juicy tabloid side and then turning around and saying "well, you were entertained, weren't you?" after she's killed by the paparazzi, because that's just as pertinent today as it was then. In that regards, it could come closer to Evita's sudden turn at the very end, when her corpse is stolen and the audience is left with just the universal hush of death after a provocative, lively evening.
On the other hand, Evita has consistency (and quality) - you're always aware of where the show stands, particularly with regards to Evita's relationship between the performative and the diagetic, mostly in the sense that we are highly conscious of how Evita, the character in the story, views and manipulates media attention because of how the show presents itself. Diana's brief glimpses of a similar (psuedo-)Brechtian trick feel accidental and fleeting, so it wavers weirdly back and forth.
The end of the first act is a perfect example. Dramatically, it's fine, even if the lyrics are pretty flimsy, like "the stories girls are taught to believe are not the stories that a girl should believe" (why not taught to/ought to?). But you also have the image of Diana's car being pulped in a tunnel lingering over the whole evening, so when the first act goes out on a triumphant slam of her wearing a sexy dress, it's kind of like...what?
It's those inconsistencies that pushed the whole show over for me, though even if they fixed those tonal issues, you would still have the lousy lyrics to deal with (that cello recital song will haunt me).
