Gil Hates Everything

I think this came from the library. Man, they have some unexpected shit in that library. I have them to thank for “Madison Avenue” too.

The tale of Abelard and Heloise is one of these great-love-tragedy things which we’re all supposed to know about but of which I know nothing beyond their names and the fact that it’s all very tragic. The wiki page is incredibly difficult to follow so I’d recommend this much more concise summary – http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/aah/index.htm – which conveniently also includes the letters exchanged by this couple. What happened to them is extremely tragic, by the way, so take a look if you aren’t up to speed.

How about the show? Well you can’t accuse it of stinting on musical styles. We have some light and some enthusiastic orchestrations, back-to-back with horrible soft-rock tripe, choral stuff, shifting time signatures… there’s comedy and tragedy (servants bragging about looking through keyholes, etc)… if not for the insistence of the composer’s website that he’s done three other shows, I’d be inclined to suspect he’d just thrown every song he’d ever written into this to increase his chances of a hit. But sadly, there are very few hits in here. The big romantic songs are all syrupy soft-rock dross – the 12th century apparently had a fair number of electric organs as well as church ones. They give me flashbacks to the horrors of Catherine Zeta Jones singing in “Spartacus”. Maybe it’s that the lead singers aren’t up to the task of bringing such identikit songs to fiery life, but you shouldn’t give them such bad songs in the first place. Meanwhile, the musical mashup continues. Towards the end, with tracks such as “Zero Hour”, it sounds like Hall & Oates trying to write an opera. (I’ll stick around in the comments to see who first claims that this sounds like a good idea.)

Unfortunately, even when the music is mood-appropriate, the words aren’t all that great. You’d think that with these much-vaunted ultra-romantic letters to hand, the guy would have managed to generate better lyrics. Here’s some examples: http://www.rageoftheheart.com/lyrics.php. The problem is, in a lot of places they just don’t sound like what people would really say; they sound like song lyrics, and they ring false at the core. Real people say surprising things and don’t talk entirely in parallel structure, to give two examples of my sad pandaness concerning them. Glancing through Heloise’s letters, you can see that she had a lot to say, and it’s a pity that here she has to sing such Diane Warren-esque songs to attempt to express herself. It’s particularly irritating because this is based on a real-life and supposedly sui generis epistolary love affair. For the average show, eh, bad lyrics = bad lyrics, but here, it provokes the rage of the panda ;)

I was pretty glad to get to the end of this, to be honest. I’m inclined to file it as a bit of a creative misfire, seeing as how it would be harsh to use words like “monotonous idiocy” based on the one listen I’m prepared to give it.

Random Panda awards this four out of ten pieces of bamboo, mostly because it’s not often you get to hear a song about someone being castrated.

(originally posted 2009)