before i brutally tear apart other people's hard work, i should come clean: i don't really like musicals
sure, i've seen classics like west side story, singing in the rain, but i've never seen any andrew lloyd webber, glee, or highschools musical. i've also made a concerted effort to avoid learning anything about hamilton.
i have speech processing issues, especially with music. when people start singing, the bit of my brain that handles words takes a little nap. for the most part, it isn't an issue. suffice to say, i am not the target market for musicals, rock-operas, or family guy specials.
with that said and done: here's my review of the musical adaptation "your lie in april" :
remember "team america: world police"? it opens up with a parody of Rent, with an over the top song and dance number, one that seems completely out of place for the topic at hand. as far as i can make out, this is how all musicals are in the year of our lord, 2024
(spoilers ahead)
your lie in april, if you've never seen it, is a tragic highschool story. a gifted child pianist turned shut-in is bullied into living again by someone who only has days remaining to live. it's a great anime, lovely comic, and it's a real tear jerker.
the musical, on the other hand, seems to be about the comic foil character. he gets all the best lines, all the best audience reactions, and even has a whole song and dance number about how much he likes "football" against a backdrop of a baseball field.
i say "football" in quotes because i'm not actually sure which sport was being referenced. the song carefully avoids mentioning anything specific about the game in question, hoping that americans and brits will fill in the gaps without the other being any wiser. i'm reminded of chic's "le freak", a song about a dance craze that doesn't actually say what the dance is.
alas, other parts of the show didn't receive the same care and nuance, unfortunately.
things just feel sloppy.
for example: there's a character who has been hiding their illness. it's a big part of who this character is, or it was a big part of the original media. in the musical, she hides her cane at the beginning of a sentence, only to brandish it at the end. it was if i'd blinked and missed three episodes of a twelve part series.
i totally understand why the writers did this, they wanted to reference some other earlier part of the work. it just came at the expense of the main character of the show.
another example is perhaps more obvious: the show opens with a bombastic ballad, where the main character laments "he can't hear the music" and how he longs to return to who he was. the show then opens to the main character doing everything he can to distance himself from who he once was, finding no joy in it whatsoever, and having to be bullied, tricked, and cajoled into even considering trying things again. even then, he never yearns for the past.
i don't want to be one of those "media literacy is dead" types but i did find myself asking "did we watch the same source material" over and over again.
now i could pull a bunch more examples out of my ass, not really link them together, and pretend it's a unified whole, but that's really my problem with this adaptation to begin with.
it's kinda incoherent.
i wasn't the only one who struggled to follow the play. both of the people I was with said things like "i'd have been lost without seeing the original". i thought it was my old dissociating brain skipping over words, but no, the play doesn't really hold together on its own merits, sadly.
there were moments.
the actor playing the dad, a complete bit part, almost demolished me in a few words. there's a moment where he confronts the daughter about gambling away her life, hoping an experimental treatment will save her.
a few seconds later, a big band appeared and drowned out the emotions. this repeated itself over and over again, as yet another disney-by-numbers song arrived, replete with people dancing on chairs, singing bright and happy lyrics over major keys, about ptsd and facing mortality. it was like someone downloaded a skin pack for high school musical. every time the orchestra swelled i fell further and further into dissociation.
don't get me wrong, the actors did well, the musicians did well, the set designers did well. the writing was terrible.
someone else was kinder, explaining "i can't see how you'd cut down twelve episodes without losing something." me, i'm not so sure.
i think the show could have worked a lot better, well, been a little more coherent, if they'd retold it from the dying girl's point of view. i don't want to recap the entire plot here, but it does make for an easier story to tell. i don't know if i'm right, but i did shut up the person who said "you think you can do better? huh?!".
anyway, that's my review. a well executed performance of incoherent garbage, stapled to a worn out disney songbook. they didn't even play "morning of the slag ravine."
then again, they didn't really do "your life in april" so it's hard to be mad about it.
