Buddy the Musical @ the king's

this blog is going to be revised, there's something here to be said that I want to do more succinctly but atm I just want to float it out there.

So I caught the Buddy musical yesterday at the King's.

I was feeling really disappointed because I remember seeing this as a kid and was really blown away,
If fact, I remember thinking when I saw We Will Rock You (oh god!) that Buddy should have been the model for it.

The first time I saw Buddy I thought the great success of it was that it told the story of Buddy Holly's career through his music, it was exciting, different and it captured those moments of inspiration that led to interesting features of songs such as the use of a celeste and slapping of knees on Every Day, use of a rhumba beat on another track, that moment when Buddy and the Critics showed up at the Appolo only to be told the venue had been expecting a band that was black etc. and I sort of had hopes that they would do the same with the Queen musical, tell the story of the band through their music.

This production actually failed to make any of those moments exciting. In this day of Juke-Box Musicals (We Will Rock You, Mamma Mia, Disco Inferno, et al) it is very normal, straght-forward, easy and acceptable to coin a cheesy storyline and fit songs that are already well loved around it but rather than set an example for the musicals of the future which are set around the best-loved songs of famous artists it descended down into Juke Box Musical territory like all the rest.