Thanks, but on a quick check it's actually got slightly less detail (stage directions etc.) than the printed libretto in my record insert -- e.g. the libretto specifies (No reply) from the Phantom in between Christine's lines "Have you gorged yourself, at last, in your lust for blood?" and "Am I now to be prey to your lust for flesh?", indicating that the character waits for an answer that doesn't come before upping the ante still further...
I remember getting caught out by relying on a dialogue transcript on a Blake's 7 episode once, though I don't remember which one -- only the trauma of the discovery! The lines are spoken exactly as given in the fan transcript, but when I rewatched the video of the episode in question, there was a whole lot of body language that basically put a very different interpretation on them from what I'd thought. Of course this sort of thing is what happens every time a director puts on a new production of an existing play/opera, which is why it's objectively absurd that POTO fans get so much up in arms at the idea of a 'restaged' production changing things around to reinterpret the characters -- the musical has been in existence long enough now to undergo the sort of creative re-reading that 'classic' works undergo all the time. (How long before someone 'updates' it to a modern-dress or WW2 production? ;-p)
But when the reinterpretation consists of trying to make it more consistent with the Really Bad Idea bits of "Love Never Dies", it does stick in the craw. If you're going to write a sequel that tramples all over beloved characters' motivation (and human gestation periods) the way to fix it is generally not to go back and trample over the successful material in the hopes of evening things out :-(
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2020-10-09 04:55 pm (UTC)Thanks, but on a quick check it's actually got slightly less detail (stage directions etc.) than the printed libretto in my record insert -- e.g. the libretto specifies (No reply) from the Phantom in between Christine's lines "Have you gorged yourself, at last, in your lust for blood?" and "Am I now to be prey to your lust for flesh?", indicating that the character waits for an answer that doesn't come before upping the ante still further...
I remember getting caught out by relying on a dialogue transcript on a Blake's 7 episode once, though I don't remember which one -- only the trauma of the discovery! The lines are spoken exactly as given in the fan transcript, but when I rewatched the video of the episode in question, there was a whole lot of body language that basically put a very different interpretation on them from what I'd thought.
Of course this sort of thing is what happens every time a director puts on a new production of an existing play/opera, which is why it's objectively absurd that POTO fans get so much up in arms at the idea of a 'restaged' production changing things around to reinterpret the characters -- the musical has been in existence long enough now to undergo the sort of creative re-reading that 'classic' works undergo all the time. (How long before someone 'updates' it to a modern-dress or WW2 production? ;-p)
But when the reinterpretation consists of trying to make it more consistent with the Really Bad Idea bits of "Love Never Dies", it does stick in the craw. If you're going to write a sequel that tramples all over beloved characters' motivation (and human gestation periods) the way to fix it is generally not to go back and trample over the successful material in the hopes of evening things out :-(