#but unless a show is actively offensive i think being boring is a worse sin than being bad when it comes to a musical

[supercantaloupe]

wait i need to hear your thoughts on titanic the musical bc while i’ve never seen it my friends say they think i would like it

titanic the musical is the most boring show i've ever seen LOL

generally i am of the opinion that, for a musical to be Good, it has to have at least some decent music -- something you can recall later after you've left the theater. (this is not the only determining factor of a show's quality of course but it does contribute.) i can't recall a SINGLE phrase of music from that show, and i couldn't years ago when it was actually closer to when i watched the thing. the music is so unmemorable that my mom, with whom i went to see it, literally forgot it was a musical and remembered it as a straight play.

titanic the musical very much runs into the issue of Trying To Do Too Much At Once, and resultingly none of the individual things they're trying to do get enough time to develop enough to be interesting or satisfying. in some shows this is different plot lines or whatever; in titanic, there are way too many fucking characters to keep track of, let alone care about any of them. the only character i can remotely remember enough to distinguish from the crowd is the telegraph operator -- i remember he had a decent number (not that i remember what it sounded like...) -- but he's like one of four or five different "main" characters or groups of main characters we're supposed to pay attention to and care about and it's just a confusing mess.

similarly, because it's about the sinking of the fucking titanic, you know that the boat is going to sink near the end and half the characters are probably gonna drown. so you really need to do something interesting with at least ONE of the characters/subplots to get us to care about them enough for the ending to mean something. i'm not gonna debate the ethics of writing a broadway show that capitalizes on a real world tragedy because i truly do not care to go down that rabbit hole (especially not for fucking titanic the musical...) BUT if you're going to do that you should actually use it to tell a meaningful story, which titanic the musical absolutely does not

like. just pick One Or Two Guys and make the story All About Them. make us care about them, give them more than a single song each, and when the boat sinks, make us hold our breath waiting to see if they live or die. i don't think the concept of "titanic the musical" is too fundamentally flawed to never work per se but gd this show missed the mark so badly

also the production i saw had some major sound issues but i'm not holding that against the show itself cause that's a tech thing. yeah it was technically a student production but it was also an allstate/honors theater group so the production quality was supposed to be (and usually was) pretty high. no points for the set which was easily the best thing about the show cause it was rented from a touring company.

anyway i truly do not know how this show won as many tonys as it did. i know the late 90s were a bit of a dry spell for broadway but tony award for best score are you FUCKING kidding me? BEST BOOK?

(*this rant is about the stone/yeston musical, not titanique, the celine dion jukebox musical based on the movie which i think is currently playing off broadway. i refuse to acknowledge the latter's existence)