I didn’t realize that it was even set to TS Eliot’s poems. Shame on me.
First of all Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Jesus Christ Superstar was great. Probably the best musical I ever saw. The man who played Judas singing a capella showed me what real talent was. I couldn’t believe that a man could just belt out a song like he did with no musical instruments and just sound so beautiful.
As for TS Eliot....”Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky “.... as a teenager with short attention span at the urging of an old Army artillery officer I read it and because of immaturity and stupidity refused to let it “take me” or “show me” anything. As I grew older and revisited it, it almost brings me to tears reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Some things just can’t be understood by the young.
I don’t like rap music. It’s just not my thing. Like I said I love almost all forms of music in Western Society including some nifty Norteno mexican music, Cool Jazz (Chet Baker and the west coast style), rock, folk, country etc...but I just think that Hamilton and a lot of the “hits” on Broadway remind me of the French farting geeks that were thought to be oh so amazing by the elites but were just a marker to be used to show which “class” of person you belong to.
I think that’s what Hamilton has turned out to be. I saw a video of some of the performance and once I saw the race, gender and music.... I must admit I was just thinking, “this is going to be a PC rewrite of the founding fathers”. Art is propaganda...long live art.
TS Elliot...OK
CATS version of him...not so great! LOL!
I suppose one could do a “musical” of Walt Whitman or Elizabeth Barret Browning as well, but that doesn’t guarantee success! LOL!
Personally, growing up my favorite show was A Chorus Line (Marvin Hamlisch/Michael Bennett), which won a Pulitzer. That was until I saw Les Miserables (in San Jose). That show is now my all-time favorite musical.
-PJ