Gil Hates Everything

In which Andrew Lloyd Webber is afflicted with envy that he didn’t get to write “Footloose”. So he decides what would be awesome would be to take a 1948 novel / 1961 movie set in the North of England about kids believing that a runaway criminal is Jesus Christ, and move it to the Okie dustbowl in the 1930s – an obvious move, given his previously-demonstrated uncanny grasp upon the gamut of cultural milieux and speech patterns in this world – and asks Jim Steinman to write some songs, you know, like he does for Meat Loaf. And the moral is, and the moral is, oh god, please don’t do this to me again, what did I ever fucking do to deserve this?

The plot, yeah, as I say it’s basically kids in a traditionally restrictive community who find an escaped convict hiding in their barn, and his first words – “Jesus Christ!” – convince them that he’s Jesus. The ensuing story is a subtle transcription of the Gospels, except here, when it’s something akin to someone saying “You know, what the Gospels really need is electric guitars, grumpy teenagers, and some orchestral shit which sounds like a six-year-old composed it.”

The core problem with adaptations, as I am about to mention in greater detail for “Wicked” tomorrow, is that it’s a bit fucking cheeky to pass off an adaptation’s failure to ruin the original work as some kind of towering achievement for the adapting medium. In this case, there was a perfectly functional novel and movie. I suppose after hijacking “Sunset Boulevard” from its innocent repose in 1950, stepping forward to 1961 for your next theft indicates some kind of evolution, I’m just not sure what kind. And furthermore, ALW can’t even claim that he’s failed to ruin this story. Seriously, who the fuck thought that Jim Steinman would be a good tonal fit for this? Sometimes material cries out for a certain touch – here it cries out at that touch, and the Meat Loafy songs here are just gruesomely ridiculous.

I suppose it makes the point more obvious (that kids listen very carefully to what adults say, and you’d better be really careful what you explain as a story and what you claim to be true) to bolt a Fundamentalist Christian aspect onto this story, but the result is that a delicately-done-and-all-the-more-powerful-for-it story has been transmogrified into a shambling giant beast that hits you over the head with hammers labelled SYMBOLISM like it’s a John Boorman movie or something. Worse: if you want to hear good Meat Loafy songs, you should get a couple of Meat Loaf albums, and if you like “Footloose”, it has a better soundtrack. All this hydra-assed fusion of material can do is stagger into the nearest wall and repeatedly bang its head against it in the hope that it’ll die soon – oh, no, my mistake, that’s me.

There aren’t any good songs on here, despite Jim Steinman’s presence. ALW’s usual trick of “well at least he does one thing right even if it’s just a two-bar keyboard theme” deserts him, with the result that the soundtrack sprawls across two CDs like a dying elephant without even an inch of ivory you can steal for your collection. Even elephants would strive to forget this grindingly terrible thing; I certainly plan to, but it’s gonna take some work.

This is one of the first musicals I’ve listened to where I seriously considered stopping at the halfway point. Since the whole point of GHM is to listen to the soundtrack to figure out whether I would want to leave a live performance halfway through (or ideally to know not to go in the first place) this is a disastrous result for the creators – who, if they’re reading, should try to do better next time, you useless fuckwheels.

Random Panda awards “Whistle Down The Wind” zero out of ten pieces of bamboo. Run, save yourselves.

(originally posted 2009)