How Can Anyone Who Loves Music Enjoy Musicals — Page 2

hermajesty, why do you always use "gay" as a pejorative?

---

Overall the piece itself is perfectly respectable as it explains why he doesn't like musicals and opera (and many people don't). It's the headline that's objectionable because it is completely unpersuasive and insulting to those who disagree with him (and many people do).

Thank you, Joey. I too would find Mr. Sexton's argument more compelling if he seemed even vaguely aware that the "non-musical" is a mere blip on the timeline of theater history.

Or if he acknowledged that only European cultures split up music, dance and drama and sent them to separate buildings.

Or even if he noted that all art is based on conventions, even Naturalism. (No, Mr. Sexton, people in real life don't live their lives always facing the same wall or movie camera. You're just used to that convention.)

Or that Verdi and Puccini wrote the popular musicals of their eras.

Or that more contemporary opera composers (Bernstein, Weill) also wrote for the popular stage and yearned for Broadway hits.

Updated On: 1/12/13 at 06:51 PM

Among the hit European poperettas of the past 30 years, LES MIZ is my favorite. But that may be faint praise and disliking it is a matter of personal preference.

Complaining that actors sing and dance is just ignorant.

It's a breathtakingly stupid article. Stupid and poorly written--a master class in begging the question. "This art form I don't like is inferior because the ones I like are superior."

What's great music? Classical? Jazz? Baroque? R&B? Let's guess classical. So Salieri is inherently better than Gershwin? What's great drama? Anything wherein no one sings? So "Star-Spangled Girl" is automatically better than "Gypsy"?

And hermajesty, I know you say you're gay, but are you truly unaware that you attempted to use it now as an insult?

It's a breathtakingly stupid article. Stupid and poorly written--a master class in begging the question. "This art form I don't like is inferior because the ones I like are superior."

Indeed, and how interesting that Sexton compares LES MIZ to grand opera! Has he listened to Top 40 radio lately?

"People who love musicals — and we have to confront the gruesome fact that there are such people, 60 million of them having paid to see Les Misérables on stage around the world — don’t care so much. They just want to be pumped up with emotion by any means, lacking perhaps any interior life of their own."

Pfft, those plebes and their wanting music to inspire "emotion" in them. That's not what music is for!

---

Updated On: 1/13/13 at 12:30 AM

There are some very stupid, self-satisfied, opinionated people out there and some of them are critics.

Those of us who don't like musicals deserve a better, less condescending voice.

Ladies and gentlemen, name-calling takes a lot of time and bandwidth that could be better used for calling third parties names, such as the critic who wrote the article under discussion. [JUST KIDDING AROUND.] For the record, I don't think "gay" should have pejorative connotations, but, unfortunately, some people use it that way. As far as calling someone a "troll," I'm not sure that anyone who seriously wants to discuss theater is really a troll, even if they try to rile people up. I tend to think of "trolls" as people who hang around boards to which they have no connection or interest for the sole purpose of insulting or annoying people --for example, calling people "libtards" on a left-oriented site or hurling anti-Semitic epithets on a Jewish board. Just my two cents.

---