It was a blast.
My appreciation of it today is delayed in a couple senses.
For starters, I should have written about this the very next morning. But the very next morning was my fantasy baseball draft, and once it's baseball time of year, my mind gets paralyzed to all outside influences. I've been working on getting a second fantasy league off the ground again for 2024 -- which involves a lot of entering of information in a spreadsheet -- and even though I haven't gone two nights in a row without watching a movie, writing about anything here has been another story.
And then there's the fact that this show first opened in 2016, so any thoughts shared on it would not be "new." I thought it might only just be premiering because I had never heard about its existence until a few months ago, and because the music and lyrics are by Australian Tim Minchin. But no, when it opened earlier this year (perhaps in time for Groundhog Day), that made Melbourne the third location to get the show, after a 2016 premiere in London (and a 2023 revival) and a Broadway run in 2017. We did get the same star of those shows in Andy Karl, who must be feeling exponential deja vu by now, playing the same show over and over about a day being played over and over.
But just because Groundhog Day is only "new to me" wouldn't prevent me from writing about it here, of course. If it did, I'd only ever discuss movies released within the past two weeks.
Going to the show was our Christmas present to my sister-in-law, which became quite the expensive present when you consider that we also procured tickets for my wife and me and our two kids. This was the first time to see a live, professional musical like this for either of my kids, although my younger son reminded me that he did see a staging of Charlotte's Web (likely intended for children), and my older son reminded me that he and I went next door to see the all-girls high school perform The Wizard of Oz when he was maybe six or seven. Obviously neither of them had ever experienced anything like this, and given the generally shoddy production of The Wizard of Oz (I wasn't there Charlotte's Web so I can't comment on that one), my 13-year-old did not have high hopes for this particular experience, but came along gamely enough.
I'd say it still probably wasn't totally his bag -- he's an athlete and at the moment has little appreciation for the dramatic arts -- but I could tell he was also really impressed with the scope and quality of this performance, especially in contrast to The Wizard of Oz. He made a number of unprompted comments about the quality after the fact. The younger one obviously really appreciated it but he's a bit of an easier target than his brother. His later comments were mostly about the plot and some callbacks to some funny lines or song lyrics.
Me, I thought it was one of the best live shows I'd ever seen. It's probably about 15 minutes too long, with my wife pointing out that there might be one too many interchangeable songs about the hopes for love or fulfillment of various characters, but the production design was indeed magnificent, and after a slow start in the humor department, I caught up and was laughing very regularly for the rest of the time. The Book of Morman is my favorite live musical performance of all time -- not my favorite musical but my favorite staging of a musical -- but this was easily in the top five, maybe as high as the top three. That's high praise. (Incidentally, you could make a top three almost exclusively out of things I've seen in the past ten years since coming to Australia, since Come From Away was also way up there.)
Of course, I wouldn't be writing about this here at all if this weren't an adaptation of a movie, so I thought I should spend the rest of this piece comparing and contrasting with the seminal Harold Ramis comedy from 1993.
For starters we should probably talk about Karl. My wife said she thought he was too handsome to play Phil Connors, but I thought he was just right in every aspect of a demanding and arduous role that requires him to be on stage almost the whole time, and it was interesting to see him do little things with his face or his voice that were an intentional quotation of Bill Murray. The performance is not so indebted to Murray that it doesn't stand on its own, but it does make reference to the icon whose shoes he is inhabiting, which I thought was right.
Elise McCann as Rita is also a bit of a quotation of Andie MacDowell, but more in terms of them having similar frizzy hair. She's adorable in this, and given my feelings on MacDowell, McCann would have been a better choice for the movie if she hadn't been an infant at the time it was made. I did almost wonder, in these times, if we might see a Rita with a different skin tone, but nope, two white leads. There were some minority faces in the larger ensemble, who appeared to be Maoris.
As you might expect from a stage show, many of the cast, other than the two leads, played multiple roles, jumping in and out of different costumes all night (all afternoon actually) as they have to assume different characters multiple times in separate iterations of the same day. With sets moving in and out and down from the rafters all night, it was a whirlwind of activity, executed flawlessly. But I'm drifting away from comparisons to the movie again.
One of the most creative sequences in the show is the number that accompanies Phil's suicide montage. In a movie that sequence is easy, because you just film it and edit it together. Without belaboring each setup on stage, though, and keeping it all within one song, they pulled off this truly nifty trick -- which I thought approached the quality of a good stage magician -- in which Karl is continuing to sing the song while disappearing off stage to be hit by a car, electrocuted by a toaster in a bathtub, and dropped from the top of a water tower. Each time he appears again in the bed set in the middle of the stage, as if by magic, starting a new day to get to the next time he tries to off himself. Even when I caught on to what they were doing, I still found it hard to always identify how Karl was disappearing and then reappearing somewhere he should have no physical ability to be. Obviously a double was used but it was so seamless that it was truly a master class on sleight of hand, if you will.
One way the material gets updated from 30 years ago is that although Phil does repeatedly stare at the ass of a beautiful local girl in Punxatawney -- which I assume was taken from the movie, though I haven't seen it since 2010 so I can't say for sure -- she gets some agency here in terms of a song. We have just enough time to be uncomfortable with Phil reducing her to an object, before she unexpectedly starts Act 2 with a song about wanting to be more than her physical attributes. I thought that was nice, even though it's probably one of those things that made the show 15 to 30 minutes longer than the tightest version of itself would have been.
Okay, back to my regularly scheduled aimless mental preparations for the beginning of the baseball season.
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