| Back to the Future in London, and the possible erosion of long-running shows | |
| Posted by: Showtunegal 12:39 pm EDT 10/28/24 | |
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| In the midst of a more, well, high brow London theater trip, which I'll write about later when I've seen everything, I went to the Back to the Future matinee yesterday (Sunday). I sat in the upper circle for 39 pounds. The show has been running here for a little over 3 years, since September 2021. I had never seen this show before, although I live in NYC and was planning to get to it before it closes. But with a free Sunday afternoon in London, I saw it here instead. Here is my question/thought. I remember Jackie Hoffman saying in her act at Joe's Pub, the one she did on her 50th birthday when she was playing in The Addams Family, "I've learned that for the first few months of a Broadway show you play to gays and smart people, then you erode to tourists and dumb asses." I'm not saying I was sitting amongst dumb asses, not at all, but there were a lot of jokes that didn't land. I wondered what it was like to do them in the show and get no response. In addition, the show felt tired, and flat. These days on Broadway, as you know, there's a lot of cheering, so I'm used to a more high energy audience at these big musicals, and there was still some cheering here at the top of the show, and when the car was first revealed or did any major tricks. But...boy, did the show feel tired. There was also that problem I've had in London before where the miking is so strong it gives the impression everyone is just mouthing their lines while a soundtrack is projected. In a big dance number in the first act, "Gotta Start Somewhere" the audience was completely unresponsive, although I enjoyed it. I have good hearing and listened carefully, but I couldn't understand maybe 30% of the lyrics. But also, the audience...this is a show that has a lot of explication at the beginning and I wonder if the story is a little tricky if you're either not a native English speaker or a kid that's too young to follow a lot of the plot? The show picked up in the second act and the house was full, athough I had gotten my ticket at the TKTS booth (if that's what it's called here). But this show won the OIivier in 2022 and I couldn't really see a trace of anything much that would have led to that--I saw Groundhog Day in London and that time, it was easy to see why it won. So that was a long winded post for my question. Do shows and audiences erode over time, as Jackie Hoffman said? Which shows keep the energy alive? We don't have as many long running musicals in NYC as they do in London, so are we more immune to this? What are your own experiences? |
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| Previous: | re: Ethel Merman in GYPSY, the pretend footage - Chromolume 01:54 pm EDT 10/28/24 |
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