It's A Lemon: In My Life Reviews - Brantley's Included! — Page 2

This show deserves every pan that it gets. I honestly hope someone points out how annoying the little girl is because someone needs to let it be known.

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Anyone else finding it HILARIOUS that Brantley is comparing this to SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER from The Producers. Too funny.

Brantley must read BWW. He stole my signature line!

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DRACULA: the musical didn't fare very well with the critics, either!

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The only reason to see *this* show is because all of the things that the critics are saying are absolutely true. Hard as it is to process, the show lives up to the reviews.

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I liked Christopher J. Hanke in FAME and I liked Jason Wooten on the demo CD so I am going to check it out.

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The Brantley review proves what has been floating through the Shubert Alley ether: this isn't the new CARRIE, because you can't want to be CARRIE to be CARRIE. It has to happen accidentally, like all freaks of nature. Or complex, flawed art.

CARRIE took risks and at its core it was daring. And primal. And because for all its ludicrous style and bizarre tone mistakes, it had a relationship -- the marginalized, damaged Carrie and the abusive, frightened, clingy Margaret -- that was specific and universal, true of all teens and their controlling mothers. The authors found something profound, disturbing, and for the ages in that small story. No amount of camp sensibility about teen angst and getting laid at the drive-in could fully upstage the inherent integrity in the operatic sequences created for the symbiosis between mom/daughter. IN MY LIFE doesn't have that core integrity -- truth -- and yet tries to pretend, from the outset, that it's present. The chasm between the shows remains huge -- one is an unforgettable wildly miscalculated flop that harbored the spark of true genius; one is a forgettable overproduced mis-fire that mistakenly assumed CARRIE-like exccess and earnestness would earn it a cult follwing, in real time. Won't happen.

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Updated On: 10/20/05 at 11:00 PM

You know what I say to people that trash a show without seeing it for themselves? GO SUCK A LEMON!

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Talkin Broadway is up, as an open letter to Joseph Brooks, whose new musical In My Life just opened at the Music Box.

http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/InMyLife.html

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Updated On: 10/20/05 at 11:08 PM

Can not wait to see what FB will do to it.

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"very nice reviews so far"

um. where?

Now, it might just me, but Brantley's review doesn't read like a straight pan. It reads like more of a "i don't know how to review this show so I'll just tell you about the bizarrity of it" review.

also "Mr. Turner, whose Winston would have fitted right into 'Taboo'" Is that grammatically incorrect?

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From Variety:

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117928627?categoryid=1265&cs=1

(Makes Ben Brantley's look like a rave)