| re: Bill Condon on his "Spider Woman" film. | |
| Last Edit: Chazwaza 04:30 pm EST 01/26/25 | |
| Posted by: Chazwaza 04:21 pm EST 01/26/25 | |
| In reply to: re: Bill Condon on his "Spider Woman" film. - Erik_Haagensen 03:56 pm EST 01/26/25 | |
|
|
|
| Just goes to show how comparatively un-esstential most of the songs they cut were. I love every song in Chicago, but of those cut 6, the only ones I miss are My Own Best Friend, Me and My Baby, and Class. And none of the cut songs are necessary for plot or character development or emotion (not something Chicago is big on anyway). This is absolutely untrue of the songs cut from Kiss of the Spider Woman, as I'm sure you'll find. KOTS has 31 songs, if you count everything. Some of those we can collapse into each other as larger numbers or sections, so let's call it 28. Chicago has 19. KOTS has 1/3 more songs than Chicago, and the movie after cuts is left with less score than the Chicago movie has, substantially fewer songs. But the bigger point, or potential issue, is that this concept put onto KOTS necessitates a lot of the score cut... and not just a lot, but i think what amounts to at least half of the songs. This is not true of Chicago. Chicago cut 6 songs, but I think only 1 or 2 of them were cut because Marshall & Condon couldn't see how they could be reconcieved into existing as a performance in Roxie's mind/view/filter of the world. They COULD have done all of those songs as performances Roxie was seeing play out, but the movie has quite a bit more dialogue than the stage show, and moves at a fast pace, and in a movie there's less patience for unnecessary songs that don't give us new information or emotion. I actually think they could have included Class and found a creative way for it to fit the "through Roxie's eyes" filter/concept, and I think the musical is less good without that song, but the others I am quite confident were not cut specifically because they couldn't be justified in the concept. The KOTSW songs *were* cut largely because they couldn't be justified in the concept (a concept which we're learning had a lot to do with getting the movie made at all, because filming 35 min of big lavish musical numbers is a lot cheaper and more achievable in today's movie business reality than filming 100 minutes of both lavish musical numbers and non-lavish book songs... but whatever the practical and/or financial reasoning for the concept, the concept has to stand on its own inside the movie without any footnotes about why it was utilized/relied on). Also, that may be the original original approach of the writers and Hal, but they learned very clearly that it wasn't right, and re-conceived and almost entirely rewrote their show and came out of that process with an absolutely incredible piece of musical theater, that was also an audience hit and swept the Tonys. I'm not saying this concept doesn't work, or work brilliantly, for this movie musical. It actually does. I'm saying that what they did NOT do is adapt the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman into a movie. They really just made another movie of Kiss of the Spider Woman but decided that Aurora was a star of movie musicals that Molina loved and used to escape the dark reality of prison/life, rather than non-musical film, and for the songs they took the Aurora and some Spider Woman songs from the stage musical that had the same concept. I'm not saying they can't or shouldn't have done that, but I genuinely wish there could just be a movie of the musical. K&E weren't just padding the stage show with, what, 10-20 songs that were not Aurora's movie musical production numbers? (I can't remember with certainly exactly all of the songs they cut, or how and which Spider Woman songs were kept and done as movie songs (in the show the Spider Woman is a character Aurora does as well, so I am sure they did many of Spider Woman's songs as Molina's memories/fantasies of those scenes in the movie Aurora played the Spider Woman). Unlike Chicago... KOTSW movie is knowingly choosing to lose a massive amount of the musical score, of how the thoughts, conversations, feelings, themes, concepts are played out and expressed via song. Chicago is a unique musical that doesn't rely on those things the same way as most, including KOTSW, so it wasn't the same internal battle or sacrifice. I'm sure the KOTSW movie finds ways to achieve the same stuff without the songs that the stage musical used... I'm not worried about it working to tell the story, I'm worried/sad that they decided that had to be done without the 10-20 brilliant and exciting and moving songs that were written to do that for the stage musical. |
|
| reply | |
|
|
|
| Previous: | re: Bill Condon on his "Spider Woman" film. - Erik_Haagensen 03:56 pm EST 01/26/25 |
| Next: | re: Bill Condon on his "Spider Woman" film. - AnyaS 04:11 pm EST 01/26/25 |
| Thread: | |
Time to render: 0.028249 seconds.