Gil Hates Everything

You know, the longer I do this GHM thing, the more Frank Wildhorn comes across as the closest thing America has to Andrew Lloyd Webber. As with ALW he works with a range of lyricists and apparently prefers to constrain them with his melodies (“dancing in chains” as his lyricist here put it). The problem is, Wildhorn lacks ALW’s range – and that’s true whether or not you think ALW actually has a range. Take this show, which is based on the lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. No doubt Wildhorn had big dreams for the show, and perhaps he even thinks it’s a fusion of Sunset Boulevard and Ragtime with the delicate touch of Cole Porter and the hard-hitting art-analysis of Sunday In The Park With George. Unfortunately this show isn’t fit to lick the boots of any of the above. It’s just… oh god, it’s so fucking clod-hopping, it makes me wonder whether Wildhorn (and his lyricist Jack Murphy) actually did any research, actually thought about it all, actually gave a shit about anything except banging out a show which sounds exactly like Jekyll & Hyde was taking place in the Jazz Age. The more time passes the more I have to ask how The Scarlet Pimpernel somehow rose above Wildhorn’s inept balladeering.

This show is really more about Zelda than her husband; after a bunch of opening songs which focus on Zelda’s Southern heritage – which is never mentioned again – there’s a bunch of stuff about F. Scott’s rise to writing stardom with his first novel and his critical decline with his subsequent novels, but since Wildhorn’s trying to make everything sound like “You’re The Top” it’s very difficult to see how this would actually persuade anyone that Fitzgerald was a major writer, let alone why. Anyway, we then cut to Zelda in the sanitarium, and despite being insane she manages to keep remarkably cogent in discussing her story with a reporter, while her husband goes off to Hollywood and then dies. Cue Zelda singing, unusually, a big ballad about something or other. The End.

The core problem is that Frank Wildhorn is completely the wrong man to tackle this story. His secondary problem – which is that he’s completely the wrong man to tackle most stories – is dwarfed by the awfulness of watching him trying to get a handle on the complicated life and love story of the Fitzgeralds, failing, and deciding to tell his own story instead, which is much simpler and nicer and has more ballads where men and women bellow generic shit in each other’s faces. Sometimes, Frank, a story is just tragic, and needs to be presented as such – e.g. “Grey Gardens”. Or this. Wildhorn’s ‘strengths’, as such, are in overblown melodrama; he’s so at sea here I felt a desperate urge to call the coastguard, and his reflex – which is to turn it into overblown melodrama – is fatally ill-judged.

Add to this the awful rhyming (“your stories amaze me / your body sautes me” is the worst lyric I’ve heard in years, plus there are attempts to rhyme “married”/”varied” and “Einstein”/”White Star Line”, and this is just in the first few songs)… oh god. It’s very difficult to listen to, which is strange considering how deliberately pleasant the music is. There’s a couple of tolerable numbers in the second act, where Wildhorn usually falls off even by his standards: the “Hollywood” sequence is alright, and “Losing The Light” is actually actively good. But everything else, every single other fucking song in this show, is a gruesome ballad-shaped piece of crap which needs to die, die, DIE before it spreads to your ears.

Frankly (ahem) you should go find “Bright Lights, Big City”, which comes to mind as a far better show about someone’s life falling apart… or, failing that, you should go watch any other musical except this. It’s artless crap which gives musicals a bad name. I’m so glad it hasn’t been produced; the recording I have appears to be a reasonably good live recording of a probably illegal nature, and the fact that a live stage recording still doesn’t make it work is highly indicative. (Although, it must be said, we can also lay some of the blame for that at the feet of the Zelda we hear so much from, who I think is Lauren Kennedy; whoever she is, she’s not even remotely great, and doesn’t inject any real performing life into the bland eleven o’clock numbers – of which there are more than in Ragtime.)

Random Panda thought this was one of the worst shows he’s heard in the entire alphabet, and two pieces of bamboo out of ten is a more than generous score.

(originally posted 2009)