#1
Posted: 5/3/08 at 9:16pm
First, thank you to Jaystarr for the birthday gift, that was very sweet of you!!
It doesn't belong on Broadway. That's the problem with Glory Days. It's not nearly as bad as people on here have been saying it is (but that's been the theme lately, hasn't it?). But it just should not be on Broadway. That comes down to way more than a matter of quality, because fitting in on Broadway no longer means the best of the best, nor does it any longer mean big and elaborate. But Glory Days as it is now shouldn't be where it is. I was thinking last night how weird it is that the show seemed to sort of come of nowhere, and what I saw was the result of that.
It took me like half an hour to figure out whether the four friends had just graduated from college and were talking about their senior year of high school through their college years, or had just finished their freshman years at college and were talking about high school. Big problem number one. Did that confuse anybody else? They kept talking about "five years," but it took way too long for it to be clear which fives years they were talking about. On my way in, I kept hearing people say, "oh, it's about twenty-three year olds!" and so I think people are getting tripped up because it was written by twenty-three year olds. Anyway, they need to be clearer about that.
As far as the big plot twist, I hadn't read many spoilers, but I had read enough to know that one of the characters came out, and that many people felt it was too predictable. I actually had figured it would be Will, for what it's worth. But further, predictability with that "twist" is not the problem.
The premise of these four guys meeting up at their former high school's football field to set the timer so it will soak the football team is... pointless. Like one of them asks, why can't they just hang out? They're still angry that they weren't the cool kids in school -- the jocks who got all the hot girls. They talk about how they wish they had been "normal," by which they meant football playing pretty boys. Shouldn't they realize, a year out of high school, that that's not "normal," it's just superficially popular? For about the first half hour, I was wishing the show would actually focus on the rift that can occur between young people and their closest friends in that one particular year spent apart -- a far more poignant premise. Eventually it did, but it took a character revealing his sexuality to get there. That should have been the focus from the get-go. It doesn't need something so "major" to set it off. It's something I'm sure the vast majority of college students and recent grads will tell you they went through, issues of sexuality or not. A year goes by, and suddenly you turn around and you can barely hold a five minute conversation with someone who had been your best friend just mere months before. The core of the show lies in how sad, disappointing and scary that can be, but instead, it spends too much time presenting its characters as immature and... quite annoying. It takes too long for them to reveal reasons for us to care about them.
The music isn't bad. Fairly catchy, but lyrically, some of them feel like first drafts. The lyrics are often paced strangely, or feel too much like they were made to fit with the music, as opposed to finding the right meeting of word and song. The cast is talented; I think my preferences of some over others had more to do with the character than the performances. The staging is redundant; I got tired of the running up and down the bleachers very, very quickly. (Are those the Spelling Bee bleachers?) Not that there's much else to be done if you insist on having so much motion, but I think I would have preferred for them to be sitting or standing still than to be running and jumping like manic hamsters.
I'll be curious to see what happens to this one. The house wasn't very full, and there were a lot of older people in the audience (typical matinee crowd) who just didn't seem to get it at all. A lot of it is very funny, but, of course, a lot of the jokes are very generation-specific.
It's a shame, really, that there are so many kinks that the critics may not be so kind to -- because an improved, re-worked Glory Days could have a place on Broadway. But as it is now, it's going to be hard pressed to find one.
A work of art is an invitation to love.
It doesn't belong on Broadway. That's the problem with Glory Days. It's not nearly as bad as people on here have been saying it is (but that's been the theme lately, hasn't it?). But it just should not be on Broadway. That comes down to way more than a matter of quality, because fitting in on Broadway no longer means the best of the best, nor does it any longer mean big and elaborate. But Glory Days as it is now shouldn't be where it is. I was thinking last night how weird it is that the show seemed to sort of come of nowhere, and what I saw was the result of that.
It took me like half an hour to figure out whether the four friends had just graduated from college and were talking about their senior year of high school through their college years, or had just finished their freshman years at college and were talking about high school. Big problem number one. Did that confuse anybody else? They kept talking about "five years," but it took way too long for it to be clear which fives years they were talking about. On my way in, I kept hearing people say, "oh, it's about twenty-three year olds!" and so I think people are getting tripped up because it was written by twenty-three year olds. Anyway, they need to be clearer about that.
As far as the big plot twist, I hadn't read many spoilers, but I had read enough to know that one of the characters came out, and that many people felt it was too predictable. I actually had figured it would be Will, for what it's worth. But further, predictability with that "twist" is not the problem.
The premise of these four guys meeting up at their former high school's football field to set the timer so it will soak the football team is... pointless. Like one of them asks, why can't they just hang out? They're still angry that they weren't the cool kids in school -- the jocks who got all the hot girls. They talk about how they wish they had been "normal," by which they meant football playing pretty boys. Shouldn't they realize, a year out of high school, that that's not "normal," it's just superficially popular? For about the first half hour, I was wishing the show would actually focus on the rift that can occur between young people and their closest friends in that one particular year spent apart -- a far more poignant premise. Eventually it did, but it took a character revealing his sexuality to get there. That should have been the focus from the get-go. It doesn't need something so "major" to set it off. It's something I'm sure the vast majority of college students and recent grads will tell you they went through, issues of sexuality or not. A year goes by, and suddenly you turn around and you can barely hold a five minute conversation with someone who had been your best friend just mere months before. The core of the show lies in how sad, disappointing and scary that can be, but instead, it spends too much time presenting its characters as immature and... quite annoying. It takes too long for them to reveal reasons for us to care about them.
The music isn't bad. Fairly catchy, but lyrically, some of them feel like first drafts. The lyrics are often paced strangely, or feel too much like they were made to fit with the music, as opposed to finding the right meeting of word and song. The cast is talented; I think my preferences of some over others had more to do with the character than the performances. The staging is redundant; I got tired of the running up and down the bleachers very, very quickly. (Are those the Spelling Bee bleachers?) Not that there's much else to be done if you insist on having so much motion, but I think I would have preferred for them to be sitting or standing still than to be running and jumping like manic hamsters.
I'll be curious to see what happens to this one. The house wasn't very full, and there were a lot of older people in the audience (typical matinee crowd) who just didn't seem to get it at all. A lot of it is very funny, but, of course, a lot of the jokes are very generation-specific.
It's a shame, really, that there are so many kinks that the critics may not be so kind to -- because an improved, re-worked Glory Days could have a place on Broadway. But as it is now, it's going to be hard pressed to find one.
Updated On: 5/3/08 at 09:16 PM
