Memphis (original production on Broadway in 2009)
Starring Chad Kimball and Montego Glover
Original Broadway Direction by Christopher Ashley
Music and Lyrics by Joe DiPietro and David Bryan
***This film is currently streaming on Netflix***
The "theater" is a form of art that holds that unique notion that the audience is watching something that no one will see in the exact same way ever again. Sure, the direction and script may stay awfully similar from performance to performance, but the fact that it's live means that this form of art is always different from one night to the next. Within the past couple years, I watched the musical Passing Strange that was filmed for HBO and found it to be quite a pleasant show that had an electricity that I wouldn't have minded seeing onstage. The Tony-winning Best Musical Memphis, on the other hand, is darn awful and it's a shame that a musical like this gets the film treatment while other better shows get ignored.
Memphis is like a non-funny version of the much better Hairspray. Race relations come to a head in the 1960s, this time in the title town as opposed to Baltimore. Both plays involve a romantic mixed race relationship. Both plays involve a musical television show that attempts to integrate the races. Both plays involve corporate television station owners who want the integration to fail. Unfortunately, those similarities don't do Memphis any favors. Instead, the comparison to the amusing and pleasant Hairspray just makes Memphis look pitiful.
Filled with some godawful childish lyrics that are much too simplistic to be taken seriously as the writers would like us to, Memphis simply fails as a musical which, to this theatergoer anyway, is a pretty big problem. If you're gonna write a musical, I better enjoy the music and/or feel that the music is advancing the story. If not, why make a musical? Musicals already force you to suspend your disbelief, so you should at least have decent music with which to help suspend that disbelief. Ugh...Memphis just bombs in that department.
It also doesn't help that there's really no chemistry permitted between the two leads Chad Kimball and Montego Glover as the script doesn't allow any time for their relationship to grow, blossom, and mean anything to the audience. They're just two people -- one aspiring black singer and one kooky, corny white DJ -- who nearly immediately fall in love and are never even given musical moment (or non-musical moment, for that matter) to express their love for one another. It certainly doesn't help that Kimball infuses his character with one of the weirdest and unappealing accents I've ever heard...and that we're forced to listen to it for 130 minutes is mind-numbing.
In terms of a transfer to video, the director Don Roy King does a fairly good job of capturing the full stage experience (the fact that there was no unique staging by Broadway director Christopher Ashley probably helped King pinpoint where to put his camera). In the end, it's probably a good thing that theatrical productions are being filmed and getting released in movie theaters nationwide, but there has got to be better things to record for posterity than this disappointing musical.
The RyMickey Rating: D
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