TheatreFan4 said: "RichieRSRich said: "Why did he change the whole thing? I love the movie & could be a fantastic musical but I hate what he’s doneto it. No thanks."
What exactly has he done besides gender swap most of the gangs? From what I recall of the movie and the concept album, the story is largely untouched?"
The story largely tracks, but there are some pretty significant changes regarding Cleon and Fox: In the movie, Fox is the one who sees Luther kill Cyrus, Cleon is attacked by the Riffs and you never see him again, and Fox is hit by the train at 96th St. In the concept album, Cleon is the one who sees Luther kill Cyrus, Cleon is captured but remains a part of the story until the end, and Fox is hit by the train at Union Square (much later in the story).
But most of these changes are just cleaning up some messiness in the movie that resulted from off-screen issues. The actor who played Fox was supposed to be the main character (which is why he's the one who witnesses Cyrus's murder), but his relationship with the director got so bad that he was fired midway through shooting the movie and they had to quickly come up with a way to kill off the character. When you watch the movie, you think Fox is the main character, and then he dies suddenly pretty early on, and then the focus switches to Swan as the main character, with hardly another word said about Fox. Long way of saying that the changes LLM and Davis were justified and improved the story significantly in my opinion.
