Re: What's up with Roger?

["L. Bird" <pkeets@hotmail.com>]

>Basically I found it stilted and overly symbolic.  It's a problem with 
>balance.  I'll give you an example.  Tommy is a well-balanced work in that 
>its "pretentious" ideas and format are perfectly balanced on the record by 
>its spare production and in the live show by the aggressive power of The 
>Who.  That's what makes it such a powerful work.

So the live musical was weaker because the pretentious story wasn't so 
powerfully presented?  I guess that was Roger and John's complaint.  They do 
tend to balance Pete well.


>Now imagine Tommy with lyrics that spell out every nuance of the story or 
>instrumentation that screams "this is art!"  The story unbalances. 
>Lifehouse '99 had that problem in the dialogue.  Basically it's a Twilight 
>Zone fantasy.  So the dialogue should be spare and evocative, just enough 
>to flesh out what's going on

Then you'd need more action to carry the story, or more in the way of 
events, which is difficult in a radio play.  I thought the extra space 
should have been filled with powerful music.  What did you think of the QUAD 
shows?  Better?  As you say, I liked the later ones with less script--just 
enough to flesh out what was going on and not enough to interfere with the 
flow.


>(and it certainly doesn't succeed on that level when you're listening to it 
>instead of reading the script) without embellishing what is already an 
>embellishment.  Realism is what you need to balance the story's unreality.  
>Instead we get dialogue better suited for a Stindberg symbolist play or 
>1920's-era Eugene O'Neill.  The only dialogue that really works are the 
>phone conversations between Ray and his wife that sound uncomfortably like 
>we're listening in on Pete and Karen's phone conversations.

It didn't work well when I was reading it, either.  I think we're saying 
similar things, though.

How do you think it ought to be staged?  Very spare and evocative again?  
Mostly lighting and a few background slides and some mist with a couple of 
stools onstage?  I had sort of envisioned that myself, with characters 
appearing out of the shadows to impart their wisdom to Ray.  That does put a 
lot of pressure on the cast to carry the play.  Did you see MASTER CLASS by 
any chance?


>I like the central idea and it does meld the original with a new vision 
>(Jumbo/Brick as the hero rather than the villain) and meshes well with 
>Pete's other faux-autobiographical work in the '90's.  It just needed more 
>polishing.  Call rewrite!

Call The Who, I think.  We need powerful (and scary) music!


keets
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