IS LOVE NEVER DIES COMING TO BROADWAY?????- Page 2

[Mister Matt]

Posted: 9/15/14 at 2:20pm

Didn't she say Lloyd Webber hates women?

Not until after Sunset Boulevard.

[rob_hanson1979]

Posted: 9/16/14 at 7:05am

I saw Love Never Dies in Sydney, and it was actually pretty good. There are definitely some negatives, and sure ALW bastardizes most of the characters... but it's not THAT bad.
I think Till I Hear You Sing Once More is one of the more beautiful songs ALW has written.

[RENT_is_Wicked2]

Posted: 9/16/14 at 8:26am

I do agree it is a GOOD show. Nothing more than that. It's a show that I don't mind watching from the comfort of my home, but wouldn't pay the money to see it live.

[Justin D]

Posted: 9/16/14 at 2:48pm

Im still very mixed on the whole thing, I do love the look of the show (aussie version on DVD) but why wouldnt the average person just watch that rather than shell out big bucks to see it live.

Initially I was able to see bast the character changes, but the more I thought about it and how people behaved back then, the story with Gustave is just so not possible, and take away gustave you take away the plot, so no matter how much tinkering with the ending they do, it just wont work.

(but i guess the average person wont think about that, and think it totally natural that a young woman (virgin) back in 1900 would have no qualms what so ever with pre-marital sex in a dark hole somewhere with someone who recently held her love hostage and threatened to kill him, and not let that weigh on her thoughts every single day of her life)

[broadwayboy223]

Posted: 9/21/14 at 3:21pm

Will I get shot if I say I sorta liked LND? I mean it's for sure not as good as POTO but most of the music is very good (aside for a couple of weird spots) I think the lyrics could use a good rewrite. Book too. One Idea i had was instead of having Mdm Giry end the first act, re write it to wear meg sings something along the lines of "the phantom is mine blah i'm crazy and obsessed blah" If they wanted to keep that last firs act scene just have meg be the one overhearing and not her mother. Maybe they could use a darker version of the cut song "Only for you"? I know it was used in the early london version. That way (btw i'm basing this all of the Australian version) it would make meg's craziness more apparent and direct. Considering Sierra is a huge draw in the phantom world, if LND happened to come to new york I think it could sell IF she was attached. She needs a new show though tbh. I feel like all she's done has been phantom lol.

[Cuneas]

Posted: 9/22/14 at 5:04am

From what I've gathered, Webber fired LuPone because he didn't think she was as good in the part as Close (this is not a new thing...Webber has always valued the quality of the show over personal loyalty. Look at the tempest over the "Memory" lyric.)

And let's face it...he was right. Close was vocally overparted, but she perfectly captured both the tortured insanity and the genuine grandeur of Norma. Now, I love LuPone, but the entire reason she was so unforgettable in Evita was that she found the character, more so than anyone else ever did. She never found Norma. I've actually _listened_ to the OLC of Sunset Boulevard, and while she sings gloriously, she clearly has no idea what to do in the role other than pour on the voice to distract from her total lack of an actual interpretation of the character. I know a lot of people on this board have the standard-issue irrational hatred of Webber (some of them have even cropped up on this very thread), but we fans of his work don't really feel we're in a position to call him out for placing quality over personal friendships, given that we wind up the beneficiaries of those decisions. _Blaming_ him for making good shows at any cost would be downright ungrateful.

[HighFlyingAdored97]

Posted: 9/22/14 at 7:23am

^ If Webber valued quality shows, half of his musicals would have never been written.

[Phan#24601]

Posted: 9/22/14 at 11:56am

God I hope LOVE NEVER DIES never reaches Broadway. Here are a few major glaring issues that would have kept any of that awful story from even happening:

1) As mean as this sounds, Gustave should have been a child resulting from rape. I mean, there is no evidence of that in the musical, but in the 2004 film, even the director said that he meant the whole thing when Christine is wearing stockings during "Music of the Night" and after, when she wakes up for "I Remember", she is no longer wearing them to be suggestive. The only major issue with that is that she would be six months pregnant by act II in this case, and that would not work out so well.

2) Christine would have been pyshcologically scarred from basically everything that happened during original PHANTOM. She spent the whole of that time being scared for her own life, watching people she knew be killed at the Phantom's hands, and almost watching her fiancée die in that same way. She would have suffered from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder for the rest of her life, after that, and never wanted to have anything to do with the Phantom again.

3) If the Phantom really felt as bad as he describes in the only halfway-decent song from LOVE NEVER DIES, "'Til I Hear You Sing", he probably would have offed himself a long time before 10 years had actually passed.

[jimmycurry01]

Posted: 9/22/14 at 1:35pm

The book simply does not work. It is a nice score, both productions looked lavish, the casts of both production sang and acted well, but none of that makes up for a bad book that makes little to no sense as a sequel to the original. Unless it gets a complete rewrite, it will never see the lights of a Broadway stage.

[Mister Matt]

Posted: 9/22/14 at 1:50pm

1) As mean as this sounds, Gustave should have been a child resulting from rape.

"Should have been"?!?! That's not a glaring omission, but an entirely new plot point you have created. A directorial choice in the film saying something is "suggestive" doesn't support a notion that a major plot element exists when it never has.

2) Christine would have been pyshcologically scarred from basically everything that happened during original PHANTOM.

Or not. She's an entirely fictional character in a hugely fantastical story. You'd have to apply modern psychological theories to every event in the story along the way rather than just after the events of the musical. Otherwise, you're trying to apply a logical supposition of reality to a character that never behaves logically in a melodramatic fantasy.

3) If the Phantom really felt as bad as he describes in the only halfway-decent song from LOVE NEVER DIES, "'Til I Hear You Sing", he probably would have offed himself a long time before 10 years had actually passed.

Isn't the point of the song and the plot that he's been driven by the ambition of bringing her back to him?

I agree, it's a terrible book, but the argument that it's not logical or realistic is just silly. SPOILER ALERT: Real cats don't wear legwarmers.

Updated On: 9/22/14 at 01:50 PM

[CATSNYrevival]

Posted: 9/22/14 at 2:57pm

...but none of that makes up for a bad book that makes little to no sense as a sequel to the original. Unless it gets a complete rewrite, it will never see the lights of a Broadway stage.

You say that like there is some kind of Broadway quality police deeming shows worthy of the boards. Any show can be on Broadway no matter how "bad" the book is as long as someone pays for it. The fact that Webber hasn't produced the show in NY with his Really Useful Company speaks volumes on his opinion of the show he wrote. He probably knows it would be a financial disaster.

[jimmycurry01]

Posted: 9/22/14 at 10:57pm

I would say yes, there are show police that deem what is show worthy. These are the producers. Like real police, they sometimes have a lapse in judgement. ALW would be the producer in this case, and knows his show is not worthy of being on Broadway, at least not as is. So, kudos to him for t h at.

[Sutton Ross]

Posted: 9/22/14 at 11:03pm

But it was worthy of the West End? Also, when did the Phantom and Christine bone?

[mjohnson2]

Posted: 9/22/14 at 11:28pm

It's just not a good show. The original is my theatrical guilty pleasure, but it really wraps up the story at the end and there is just no need for a sequel, which is what really goes wrong with the piece.

[chewy5000]

Posted: 9/22/14 at 11:30pm

The night before her wedding, would you believe. The more you think about it, it really is just terrible fan-fiction.

[Sutton Ross]

Posted: 9/22/14 at 11:40pm

That's.....f*cked up.

[jimmycurry01]

Posted: 9/22/14 at 11:46pm

But it was worthy of the West End?

Hence the lapse in judgement.

[AEA AGMA SM]

Posted: 9/22/14 at 11:53pm

"The night before her wedding, would you believe."

I believe that it happened. After all, they sing about it in a song that goes on for nearly eight minutes.

[Pootie2]

Posted: 9/23/14 at 8:07am

I keep thinking Bruce Willis and Jet Li should bust onto the scene with a title like that...

Err, carry on.

[The Distinctive Baritone]

Posted: 9/23/14 at 11:09pm

After reading this entire thread, I have these two statements to make:

1. Based on my viewing of the DVD of the Australian production, Love Never Dies, despite a few good songs, is a terrible show that never should have been written in the first place. If it comes to Broadway, it will bomb, especially since anyone who wants to see it can get it on friggin Netflix in as good a production as it's ever going to get.

2. Patti LuPone sounds awful on the Sunset Blvd. London cast recording. I would have fired her too.

[Cuneas]

Posted: 9/24/14 at 2:40am

Like I said, standard irrational hatred.

Name one show that Webber did prior to The Woman in White that shows an actual lack of effort or quality control. He's had flops, granted, but even _Sondheim_ has had no shortage of flops, so that's not a very useful standard.

Okay, _maybe_ Starlight Express qualifies as Webber on autopilot, although songs like "Only He" and "There's Me" show that at least a little effort went into it. But Aspects of Love was a bad libretto with wonderful music, which describes most cult flops. Whistle Down the Wind was a weird but potentially interesting idea that stumbled in the execution. And The Beautiful Game was an ambitious and moving story with an uneven but sometimes lovely score that shuttered mostly because it wasn't what people expected from a Webber show. If he were just some crass commercial merchant who didn't care about quality, why would he have done that show in the first place? It certainly doesn't _look_ like anything that was potentially going to pay off.

That just leaves the Jeeves project. It's a disaster, I'll grant you, but you can tell, given the source material, why it looked like a good idea at the time (although I'll grant that his attempts to turn it into a hit after the fact seem motivated by little more than stubbornness. Hey, Sondheim spent ten years trying to turn the Bounce/Road Show franchise into a hit, so again, it happens to the best of them.)

And if you were actually suggesting that Webber's _hits_ are the result of a man who 'doesn't care about quality'...well, if we applied that to the production elements, it would be patently false even by theater-snob definitions of truth, so I'm assuming you're of the stripe who argue that Webber just makes spectacular theme-park shows with no compositional merit.

I don't know if you've ever had a conversation with a Webber fan that went beyond the name-calling phase, but pretty much all of us like the shows for their music. This isn't some evil conspiracy of liars paid off by Webber's production company trying to fool the world into thinking people actually like his music...we're telling the truth.

And if you're going to pull out the next standard argument your kind usually jump to and bring up the enormous amount of garbage that succeeds on the pop charts and start comparing Webber to Britney Spears, let me acquaint you with a little phenomenon known as 'the Test of Time'.

Yes, a lot of straight-up crap becomes a success as pop music, but the thing is, it usually doesn't last, and if it does, it's given the "Macarthur Park" treatment and reduced to camp status. That hasn't happened to "Memory", "Music of the Night" or any of Webber's other hits. Newsflash, sweetcheeks...it's been more than a generation since Phantom came out, and more than two since Superstar. If time was going to overrule the music and prove the snobs right about his inadequacy, _it would have happened by now_.

You want to personally hate Webber's shows in that black little theater-snob heart of yours, go ahead. I can't stop you, and frankly it's your loss. But pretending than those 'opinions' have any basis in the world outside your head or any relevance to any human beings that are not you is just making you look like you have your head up your ass. I don't care how many other people in your little theater-snob enclave you can find to agree with you, posterity has proved you wrong, and you don't get to change the rules for composers you don't like. In other words, kiss it.

And yes, I am aware of the irony of providing a blistering defense of Webber on a thread devoted to his worst show, but declining in quality late in your career is another thing that has happened to plenty of universally-acclaimed composers. Anyone remember Irving Berlin's 'Mr. President'?

I thought so. Updated On: 9/24/14 at 02:40 AM

[Owen22]

Posted: 9/24/14 at 8:32am

Who is this Cuneas person? And why do always agree with EVERYTHING he writes..? Which never happens on these boards...

[Sutton Ross]

Posted: 9/24/14 at 10:53am

If someone writes NINE PARAGRAPHS about anything on this board, especially about Love Never Dies, you probably shouldn't agree with them. About anything.

[Sutton Ross]

Posted: 9/24/14 at 10:54am

"SPOILER ALERT: Real cats don't wear legwarmers."

[Mister Matt]

Posted: 9/24/14 at 11:17am

I was actually a fan of Webber's work through Sunset Boulevard with Aspects of Love being my personal favorite. Post-Sunset Boulevard has been pretty hit-or-miss with some good songs and/or ideas on occasion, but it's been a steady decline, musically. His partners in lyrics in the last 15 years have almost all crashed and burned, with Love Never Dies and Stephen Ward being the two projects that just seem to be bad ideas from inception.