Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief Book Review New York Times
Review : 'The Lightning Thief,' a Far Cry From Olympus
A musical adaptation of the pop fantasy novel comes to Broadway and goes to Hades.
- The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical
- Broadway, Musical
- 2 hrs. and 5 min.
- Closing Date:
- Longacre Theater, 220 Westward. 48th St.
- 212-239-6200
Hither'southward an idea for a Broadway musical: An awkward boy with an absent-minded father and an overwhelmed mother gets involved with friends in a dubious scheme that spins out of command and nigh undoes him.
Is information technology "Dearest Evan Hansen"?
If only.
Alas, "The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical" is a stake patch on the earlier evidence and a failed attempt to board the teenage fantasy-angst railroad train. (Meet also: "Be More than Chill" and, more than successfully, "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child." ) Based on the popular 2005 novel past Rick Riordan, it is both overblown and underproduced, filled with sentiments it can't support and effects information technology tin can't pull off.
Information technology needn't have been that style. When first mounted past TheaterWorks in 2014, "The Lightning Thief" was by most accounts charming: a low-tech, lx-minute romp for preteens. Its minimal production values, and matching ticket prices, suited a tale that was, at heart, a lighthearted fable almost the "half-blood" son of the sea god Poseidon and a mortal woman. Translated from aboriginal Hellenic republic to gimmicky New York, the tale drew its dry sense of humour from the contrast.
The current version, which opened at the Longacre Theater on Wednesday after a seven-calendar month national tour before this yr, has all the amuse of a tension headache. To disguise its inaptness for Broadway, the original creative squad — Joe Tracz (book), Rob Rokicki (music and lyrics) and Stephen Brackett (direction) — has doubled its length, added a clutch of unnecessary songs and generally inflated the material so hard that it explodes whatever mild pleasures made the book worth adapting in the first place.
The authors accept also, significantly if silently, upped the characters' ages. In the book, Percy is 12 when he is brought to Camp Half-Blood, a training footing and refuge for immature demigods. (They demand to acquire skills that volition protect them from the jealous monsters of Greek mythology.) In the musical, as in the reviled 2010 film adaptation, Percy appears to be xvi or so; at any rate, Chris McCarrell, the role player who plays him onstage, is 28.
Up-a ging allows the authors to attempt social significance by hammering themes of parental fail and teenage rebellion . At showtime, this is amusing, every bit when the opening number explains that, for half-bloods, the gods "you learned near / merely weren't paying attention to / well, they don't pay attention to y'all, either." Or when Annabeth (Kristin Stokes) describes her inattentive mother, Athena, in a dandy triple rhyme: "She'south smart and she's wise / She'southward sworn off gluten and she'south sworn off guys / But if she came to campsite it'd be a surprise."
That song — "The Campfire Song" — is ane of the few whose music and lyrics hang together long enough to brand precipitous points. In one case the plot requires Percy to continue a picaresque quest to call back the titular lightning commodities, with Annabeth and a satyr named Grover (Jorrel Javier) in tow, the storytelling and songwriting get hectic and monotonous. Reduced to highlights and stripped of distinction, Percy'due south adventures with Furies, oracles, Medusa, Ares and Hades chop-chop pall.
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Vivid staging — as in "Harry Potter" or "Hadestown," another mythological mash-up — might have fabricated up for that. But "The Lightning Thief" is stranded in the contradictions of its ambition. Effects that might have looked crafty and imaginative in the original production expect cheesy and anticlimactic in this one. Lee Barbarous'south set consists more often than not of marbleized plywood scaffolding; the ring, sitting atop that scaffolding, numbers just v. And why is Zeus's lightning bolt, when it finally appears, about as crawly as a fluorescent Shake Weight?
Information technology's symptomatic of the illogical workarounds that the scene in which Percy's supernatural powers are first manifested at Camp Half-Blood — a scene that, in the book, involves an exploding toilet — must make do with toilet paper instead, as if he weren't the son of Poseidon merely Charmin.
Perhaps at this point I should have off my Scrooge glasses and meet the show as a family might — admitting a family paying as much every bit $199 per ticket. A kid might in fact bask the fusillade of toilet newspaper. Parents might enjoy McCarrell'south by and large laid back, tossed-off operation; underplaying is definitely the mode to stand out in this production. And everyone might root for the cast of unknowns, all but McCarrell making Broadway debuts. It's true that they give it their overamplified all.
But — glasses back on — I have to ask: What exercise nosotros want musicals for young people and their families to exist? Serious and urgent like "Dear Evan Hansen"? Certain, though that show is too exceptional to serve as a feasible model. Moral tales sugared with spectacle similar annihilation Disney? I tin live with that. (Well, perchance not "Tarzan.")
Information technology's the musicals lost somewhere in between I find myself unable to countenance. Not but are they often most whiny teenagers; they seem to be written by them as well .
Shows of this ilk — not but "The Lightning Thief" but also "Be More Arctic," "School of Rock" and, despite its terrific score, "13" — normalize the idea that really quite privileged youngsters are victims of social or parental neglect. They bellow their rebellion in catchy songs; they get on kittenish quests to merits their maturity.
"The Lightning Thief" doubles down on that agenda . Its finale, an anthem called "Bring On the Monsters," would exist laughably banal if it weren't and so aggressively false. "The battle's just begun!" the characters instruct the audience.
What battle? The one with the parents who ponied up the big bucks to bring you to a show featuring flashlights and sock puppets? Better to count your blessings and find another fantasy.
The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical
Tickets Through January. 5, 2020 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, lightningthiefmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes .
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/theater/review-the-lightning-thief-broadway.html
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