solitary_summer | (no subject)

Wherein I have nothing interesting to say & therefore will aimlessly ramble about the slightly new but not really improved version of Elisabeth on dvd...

Still fond of the musical, not so fond of the changes they made since 199something when I went through my Elisabeth binge.

Maybe I just have a hard time adjusting - I never saw this version on stage - and fail to see it for what it is rather than a IMO superfluous change of something I loved, but the impression I get is that with all those little additions and rewrites here and there they lost much of the original coherency, dynamic and - comparative - radicality. Attempting to give Franz Joseph more of a personality is perhaps a valiant effort, but - considering the result - also a vain one. Ditto, humanising Sophie. Granted, painting her the bad guy may not be fair and politically correct and whatnot, but in the end, it's a musical, not a history lesson. No point in forcibly and unnecessarily splitting the emotional focus like that. It's distracting. It made sense in that it emphasised the point the authors were trying to make about Elisabeth's egoism, love for freedom and self-search, for her to be the only fully fleshed out character and everyone else only being seen refracted through her eyes, or in connection with her. I'm not so sure if giving the other characters a life of their own in the scenes between Franz Joseph and Rudolf and Franz Joseph and his mother is such a good idea. (From a musical point of view this repetition and dragging out of themes for what amounts to filler scenes is rather annoyingly, well, repetitive, too.)

On the same note, the extended historical expositions are irritating. People got what was going on before, and if they didn't, they looked into the program. Or, god forbid, a history book when they went home. One doesn't need to be told, at longer length than before, where we are, who's who and what's happening at the beginning of every scene. ::yawn:: I can see, kind of, why they put them into the German (as opposed to the original Viennese) version, but there really was no need to retain them here. (Das sinkende Schiff is a prime example. I doubt at this point anyone wants or needs to know how these rather randomly mentioned people were related to Eliabeth. The original was much more effectively brutal.) The earlier version was more intelligent, this one has a touch of Elisabeth for dummies, leaving nothing up to the audience, taking no chances and explaining everything over and over again.

What also bothers me is the change in Elisabeth's relationship with Death. I'm not exactly sure what the problem is - perhaps that Máté Kamarás is the most annoying Death I've seen so far [ETA: I'm sorta kinda taking that back. I think. The problem is the interpretation more than the person. I think.] - he makes me almost nostalgic for the guy who replaced Paul Kribbe back in the day, whom I wasn't particularly fond of then. Is it a lack of chemistry between him and Maya? Or is it a more fundamental change? The original version had this implicit, unspoken but understood Viennese morbidity, a fascination with death, personified by a beautiful blond Death, and even while Elisabeth was rejecting him, there always this seductive, sexual element. it wasn't addressed, but it was there, and it was a great part of what made the musical the success it became. Now... I can't quite pinpoint it. This version's Death is much harder, there's a distinct sense that this being in love with death isn't healthy, there are negative connotations that I don't think were there before, there is more antagonism in their relationship (the new 'Wenn ich tanzen will'), and Elisabeth's refusals are much more pronounced, too. It makes no sense that at the same time they wrote in this part where the young Sisi, instead of simply wanting to be free - like a man, like her father - rather than doing princess-y things and getting married, in full emo goth mode suddenly professes her yearning for death, complete with dark prince metaphors. And then we never see this supposed love at all, almost until the end, where, again, he final, and very tender, Der Schleier fällt seems almost odd and out of place.

Or perhaps my perception has changed over the last ten years?

::sigh::

Still a damned good musical, though.