Форум на Musicals.Ru - Женщина в белом

Итак, первые отзывы критики. Как и ожидалось, смешанные....но я не ожидала, что НАСТОЛЬКО! Вернее, я недооценила знаменитый снобизм британских критиков

Почему-то я ожидала, что наибольшую волну критики вызовут виртуальные декорации, и бть может, отсутствие музыкальных хитов в партитуре, но все оказалось иначе. Больше всего нападают на либретто, то есть на ту самую "вольную адаптацию". Для пуристов английской классической литературы она оказалась слишком уж "вольной"! Кажется, что многие кртики просто не в состоянии взглянуть на мюзикл сам по себе, не воспринимая его только как постановку романа Коллинза. В остальном мнения разделились. Кто-то считает, что Уэббер исписался и занялся плагиатом у самого себя. Кто-то наоборот, отмечает, что WIW - это новый шаг в развитиии его творчества и несомненный успех композитора. Для кого-то музыка слишком.... попсовая и "уэбберовская", для других - наиболее оперная и элитарная ихз всего, что Эндрю написал за всю свою карьеру... Сумасшедший дом, вобщем!

Что касатся Майкла (мое больное место, естественно!) Я специально привела здесь рецензию "Таймс" для объективности - хуже не написал пока никто. Тот критик считает, что роман безнадежно испорчен и как яркий пример приводит Фоско, который в мюзикле выглядит глупо, как и спектакль в целом. Но это, конечно же, крайний взгляд. Большинство критиков отмечают, что выступление Майкла - это наиболее зрелищная часть мюзикла и отдают должное его комическому таланту, который наряду с потрясающими вокальными данными Марии Фридман, и делает шоу. В целом, именно Майкл и Мария получили наилучшие обзоры к данному моменту. Также отмечают и Мартина Кревза, в то же время, как и следовало ожидать, критикуют Дадли (Персиваль)за серость...

Вобщем, у меня создалось мнение, что такой неординарный спектакль и не мог вызвать однозначную оценку - тут слишком много зависит от личных вкусов. Решающее слово будет, как всегда, за зрителем, который голосует рублем, вернее, фунтом стерлингов. Вспомним, что и РОТО получал смешанные обзоры, а Мизерабли вначале были почти уничтожены критикой! Конечно же, времена нынче не те, и никто не ждет, что WIW повторит судьбу Cats и будет идти на Вест Энде десятилетия... но я думаю, что этот спектакль ожидает гораздо более славное будущее, чем две предыдущие работы Уэббера. И конечно же, с нетерпением жду выхода альбома Original cast, который был обещан сразу после премьеры.

The Daily Express review:

Michael's big fat success of a musical

Sheridan Morley

"Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait" was, in the view of Wilkie Collins, the secret of great thriller-writing and he was the man to ask if only because he effectively invented the form.

A mid-Victorian friend of Charles Dickens, who was also to supply the West End and Broadway with a musical or two, Collins had largely disappeared from sight despite frequent TV adaptations of The Woman in White and The Moonstone, which also laid out the playing field for just about every contemporary detective story on television.

Nor is it surprising that Andrew Lloyd Webber should have rediscovered Collins with such glee: his period, his gothic ambition, his passion for secrets and surprises.

So Webber and Collins are a marriage made in Victorian heaven, perhaps an even better match than Webber and Rice: the feeling of Woman In White is that its composer, after the Bible, South America, Hollywood, etc, has finally come home to the local period landscape he most loves - and though this show may not last the 15 years or more of Les Miserables, its predecessor at the Palace, it is, I think set to be a dazzling white hit.

But no one has ever liked Lloyd Webber except the public, and this one too, may run into a stormy press: like Ivor Novello 60 or so years ago, Webber has the talent for writing soaring, romantic hits which tap straight into the heart while avoiding the head and somehow irritates those of us brought up on the other side of the Atlantic with the rather more demanding scores of Stephen Sondheim.

Lloyd Webber and his new collaborators (lyrics: David Zippel, book: Charlotte Jones) have gone for a determinedly lightweight and simplified version of an infinitely complex novel. The director, Trevor Nunn - still trading on the many lessons he learnt in Nicholas Nickelby - keeps the story moving on the grand scale with a cast of 30 and with nearly 20 songs to sing in less than three hours, there is not likely to be time for much fine-tuning. We do however get one enjoyable little mystery: Michael Crawford is given star billing but is he actually on stage?

Well, look very closely and you'll see that underneath the gargantuan frame of the superbly evil Count Fosco is, indeed, an actor who spends as much time on make up as he does on characterisation. Maria Friedman has the best of the music, and is suitably feisty as the half-sister who leads the avenging women.

Webber and Nunn have delivered exactly what the West End always needs - a soaring, lyrical, romantic drama whose every scene lends itself as if by magic to precisely the kind of music that Lloyd Webber writes best.

И - абсолютно противоположное мнение:

Times:This lady is too pale and plump for thrills

Benedict Nightingale

ON PAPER, or even off it, it’s a terrific idea. Andrew Lloyd Webber has the sort of rich musical talent that suits phantoms of the opera and other such dramatic yet romantic beings; Wilkie Collins wrote a novel that’s not only dramatic, not only romantic, but Britain’s first serious thriller; and Trevor Nunn can direct anything big, lavish and entertaining. Why, then, doesn’t The Woman in White leap from the stage of the smartly refurbished Palace with the panache I’d hoped?

Maybe it’s a mistake to know the original book. Charlotte Jones, the librettist, has kept faith with most of the original story and, at least at first, compressed it with skill. Yet after immersing oneself in Collins’s superb prose and fine human portraiture, it’s a come-down to be confronted with David Zippel’s often clunky rhymes and the weak characterisation inevitable in a three-hour show. And nowhere, I fear, is this more the case than with Collins’s great villain, Count Fosco.

It’s he who organises disaster for Laura, innocent young wife of the spuriously charming, impecunious and callous Sir Percival Glyde. And, as played by Michael Crawford, Glyde’s chum Fosco combines urbanity, superficial kindness and a body so overblown that I thought the actor had blown himself up with a stirrup pump, then attached an inverted rhino’s nose to his hippo’s face and topped it with fur shaved from a big black poodle. The effect is silly and, at the end, so is the performance.

A Nietzschean narcissist described by Collins as exuding “voracious vanity” has become a lovelorn laughing-stock with a far less sinister demeanour (and a less important role to play) than he surely should have.

There have been other changes, too. Maria Friedman, playing Laura’s selfless half- sister Marian, has been given a big contemporary dose of sexual jealousy. Martin Crewes, the glamorous art-teacher Laura loves, has been similarly modernised, this time by temporarily becoming a drunk. And don’t expect any burnings-to-death in any church. In fact, don’t expect Glyde’s dark secret to involve illegitimacy, as it does in the book, but something which, though again more modern, brings the evening to an ending almost more improbable than Collins’s admittedly unsatisfactory dénouement.

His was, of course, a Victorian novel, and so Nunn may be excused for passages that seem a bit slow and stilted. And William Dudley’s use of computer imaging on curved, moving walls means that the scene can shift effortlessly from bucolic fields and streams to great mansions and their innards. True, characters have to trot on the spot when they’re climbing stairs. True, they sometimes get plastered with projected bars or stripes, making them momentarily look like zebras. But the decor justifies itself in a pretty, Merchant-Ivory way. Pity Lloyd Webber, who must put to music some dismal recitative: “you’re all that I know, someone I can’t let go”, “life is so unfair, such a cross to bear” and so on. But he overcomes a lyric that predictably rhymes voice, choice, you, true, everything bar love and dove, to produce a beautiful love-song, I Believe In You.

And though his major-key melodies could have their more dissonant moments (Laura’s fateful wedding and Marian’s dream sequences are exceptions) you can’t expect Puccini suddenly to become Schönberg. And when Friedman in particular is on song, the score soars.

[Times:This lady is too pale and plump for thrills