Why hasn't WE WILL ROCK YOU played Broadway? — Page 2

This show strikes me as the ultimate Broadway show.

This is a show you feel epitomizes Broadway? How?

The Toronto run was helped in no small way by the performances of the two leads but this was not a Broadway caliber production. The New York critics would crucify it. Let it tour where it can get in and out of town before people catch on to how bad it is, then let it go to dinner theatres where it belongs.

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Adam said that that phase of performing in musicals is over for him and he doesn't plan to return. This was either just before the Top 13 or around then.
http://www.vh1.com/artists/news/1606063/20090227/index.jhtml :
"I'm not going for a Broadway sound. But the cool thing is that this is finally allowing me to be myself. I mean, I don't listen to show tunes in my spare time, I can assure you. ... The musical thing was kind of the way that I was paying the bills. I mean, we all gotta have a job right? [Laughs.] But now I get to finally sing the kind of music I like to listen to."

and there was another article that he says hes "done with theatre" but i can only find the message response to it and not the original article.

and i was just thinking after he said he's done with theatre... does he realize most Idols seem to live on On broadway? (Fantasia, Clay, Constantine, Diane Degarmo, Frenchie, Ruben, etc. etc. etc.)

Not that I would want him to suffer through performing in WWRY. That's just MEAN.

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How does it epitomize Broadway? Big, flashy, commercial.

Actually, no it isn't all that big or flashy, especially as it is currently being played. There's big and flashy and there's overproduced and when it played at the Canon theatre, WWRY was clearly in the latter category. I attended the opening night of WWRY in Toronto. This was not a show worthy of Broadway.

Yvon Pednault and Erika Peck are fantastic performers, and I would love to see them in something more worthy of their talents. The story of WWRY is insultingly stupid (it is by Ben Elton who also wrote THE BEAUTIFUUL GAME/THE BOYS IN THE PHOTOGRAPH.

Frankly I am very much against pieces like this trying to get to Broadway mainly so they can go out on tour bearing the claim "direct from Braodway." There is little thought to this show beyond the crassly commercial idea of building a show around the music of Queen to make a lot of money. It has been argued that shows like this (and MAMMA MIA, JERSEY BOYS and others) attract an audience from a generation NOT raised on theatre music... people 30-50 with the hope that if they enjoy these shows they will explore others.

Whether that works or not it will probably take another generation to determine. I am not convinced that Queen fans and Kiss fans will suddenly become fans of Jason Robert Brown and Adam Guettel. If they do, great but I suspect that what they want are nore shows using the music they are familiar with, the music they grew up listening to. Look at what MAMMA MIA (a perfectly fun show) yielded: ALL SHOOK UP, GOOD VIBRATIONS, & LENNON.

If these jukebox shows were as well written and put together as JERSEY BOYS I would have less concern, but the idea that producers can coast on the familiarity of the songs by welding then to stupid storylines does not serve the musical theatre and denies new talent the chancne to have their songs and stories heard.

I am much happier that NEXT TO NORMAL is on Broadway than I am that ROCK OF AGES is playing down the street.

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Brown and Guettel - and their pieces - are astonishingly overrated.