I was just thinking about how I hadn’t written a piece for this blog for a bit so here we go. With this post, I’ll mainly be talking about some musicals that I recently saw after some near misses of almost going to watch it or had heard about a lot about it before going to watch it. The first one that I’m going to talk about is ‘The Lion King’, and, as it’s often more associated with being primarily aimed at kids, it doesn’t really help my case about people presuming that I’m a child with my height and appearance and is also why I have conflicting feelings about stuff that is typically aimed at kids but that’s for another time…
I was originally due to see ‘The Lion King’ back in 2020 but being 2020, that didn’t exactly go ahead. I then had to cancel my planned trip to see it last summer so it became something of a running joke about how I’d never end up seeing it. However, as this post suggests, I was fortunate enough to see it at last earlier this year and even tied it in with a trip to visit two of my cousins in Manchester and we had a nice catch up and a little weekend break together so that was good too. As for the show itself, it was really well done with some great visuals and numbers. I’ve never disliked ‘The Lion King’ but it was never my favourite, number 1 show either despite the wait to finally see it but that was actually probably a good thing as it meant that I could still enjoy it but wouldn’t have been too disappointed if I didn’t love it as it was never my favourite. This goes for the 1994 Disney film too (which was very loosely inspired by ‘Hamlet’ and only came out three years before the first performances of the stage musical).
Now, the next show is one that I saw even more recently but similarly to ‘The Lion King’, it was already a very famous story and had already been established as a stage musical as it’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate factory’. This story, as many will already know, was based on the 1964 Roald Dahl novel and was adapted twice for the big screen (in 1971 and 2005), before being adapted again into a stage musical, which premiered in 2013. Out of all the Roald Dahl stories, which aren’t my favourite now but I did like them as a kid, ‘Matilda’ was probably my favourite but I did end up liking ‘Charlie’ quite a lot (mainly but not only because of my fondness for chocolate). I’ve actually only seen the famous 1971 film a couple of times as while my Dad’s always enjoyed it, it didn’t have the same kind of meaning, significance or nostalgia for me. Although, I do like the ‘Pure Imagination’ song, which was one of the two songs from the Gene Wilder version that appear in the stage musical (the other being ‘Candyman’). The 2005 version is one that I know a lot better as it was a childhood/teenage fave of mine and somewhat of a guilty pleasure during my Tim Burton phase (and a long-time running joke with my lovely best friend). Although, the 2005 film was actually closer to the original book than the 1971 film or the stage musical and it has some original songs that don’t appear in any other version and use real lyrics from Dahl himself.
As for the stage musical, which I’d heard about for a long time before we went to see it, it was pretty good. The cast were very talented, the visuals, design and world-building worked well and there was generally a lot to like especially because of the ways that it had been made more inclusive with the addition of Mrs Bucket using sign language while delivering her lines and two trans actors to play Mike and Augustus. It's also been updated with Charlie as Charlie isn’t always played by a boy or a white actor in this production. However, while there was a lot of good, I wouldn’t say that it was amazing or especially memorable with regard to the new songs but I’m still glad that we saw it (and that’s about as negative as I’ll get for now). Hope you have a good week. :)
