I watched the DVD of the London production and I had a couple of problems with bringing the show to the US. It mainly concerns the rise of the New Romantics in the UK during the 80s. This was a very specific and notable period in British pop culture, but not at all in the US, so it was going to be a hard sell over here from the beginning. Boy George is commonly known in the US for his gender-beding look and for a couple of hit songs, but he was not as big an icon here as in the UK. Leigh Bowery is only known by a very very small group in the US of mostly 20th century pop art cult fans or modern art history and fashion freaks. He was much more known in the UK, at least by reputation if not by his work.
Therefore, the show would have to accomplish two things:
1. Educate the audience as to who these people are and why they are important enough to spend $100 of our money and 2-3 hours of our time.
2. Magnify the universal core of the characters that allows the audience to identify them and empathize with at least one of them so that we can emotionally embrace the story.
Now, I never saw the Broadway production, but the London show did neither of these things. I learned that the New Romantic movement claimed to have something to do with "art", but it wasn't clear how it tied into the drugs and cross-dressing. It seemed that it was something of a second Bohemian movement, but without the idealism of basing its principles on emotional morality as a direct response of the intellectual coldness of society. And personally, I didn't care what happened to any of the characters. They were all either mean or stupid and did little to try and better the situations they bitched about. I had the same feeling (yet worse) when I saw Closer to Heaven, the Pet Shop Boys musical that paraded similar characters in a similar story, but set in the present. Add to that, an unfocused story that cannot decide whose story is being told or for what reason and a rather anticlimactic, tepid, and abrupt ending and I felt the show needed a triple bypass in order to attempt a commercial tourist Broadway audience. Apparently, the surgery was not a success.
"What can you expect from a bunch of seitan worshippers?" - Reginald Tresilian
could look at that and be like "they understand."
