Ben Shapiro got mad about the Wicked adaptation and how it broke up the song Defying Gravity which stripped it of all its momentum and I've never agreed with him like this before. Ben, quit your day job and go become a musical theater critic.
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Someone long ago pointed out that he’s actually got a nice voice, and that there’s some universe out there where he’s just a mostly harmless theater twink, and I think about that a lot
It's sort of the really odd thing about the whole movie is that you can sort of see them trying so hard to have "make it your own" moments where it deviates from the musical and just every single time they did that it was a mistake
it turns out that the writing, pacing, and script integration of one of the few megahit musicals of the recent past were hard to improve upon. Imagine! How could that possibly be the case!
I think the mistake is that it /is/ improvable, but that musicals *self improve*. They do minor changes to reconfigure and repace it each season and after a while they get a really fantastically lean and well-paced story, and it's hard to improve on it!
right - broadway is a very old and efficient pop culture machine, among them the power of multi-season iteration on one single script. We probably shouldn't discount that capacity.
And tbf the film does some things just really well that the stage production could never do. Like the aesthetics of What Is This Feeling being able to shift scenes around the school, or the giant clock wheels in Dancing Through Life
The giant clock wheels were fun but also took me out a little bit because I kept wondering why a structure like that would exist within a library. It was fun though! Rule of fun/cool I guess.
The other problem musical adaptations run into too is that "musical theatre voice" is a really specific thing that requires a lot of training. You *can* use popular singers to do it, but the performance won't carry quite as well. If you use non-singers in singing roles, prepare to be underwhelmed
I found it so strange that the changes they made to beef up/adjust characterization were all improvements (Fiyero and Dr. Dillamond, in particular), but instead of leaning into that more (giving Nessa more development, showing more of Glinda and Elphie as friends), they made the songs twice as long.
Which is even shorter than Act I, so the "destroy the pacing of every song to add length" issue will almost certainly get worse, not better. (Although I've always thought that Act II feels underdeveloped and rushed compared to Act I, so expanding on it *some* could be an improvement.)
His sister is a good singer. He's cousins with Mara Wilson. I feel like Ben is so angry and became the cranky asshole he is because he sounds like he was born in a helium tank and can't modulate his voice to save his life.
both Ben Shapiro and the rest of society would be happier if we had put him in a remedial screenwriting class rather than getting him in to right wing politics
It’s fine to make a modest living being mediocre — that’s what most of us do, statistically! Especially better than the alternative for Benny Shaps, which is carrying water for fascists.
He's also quite accomplished on the violin. And still he's petulant, bitter and arrogant, living large on resentment and hate. Guess he gets off being righteous. Even though he isn't.
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Ben, go.