Can somone tell me where I belong
This week I’ve chosen a musical that I got a chance to watch back in Puerto Rico near the end of my senior year. I went into this musical not really sure how I would feel about it but hoping for the best since a couple of my friends were involved in it. Originally, I was surprised that it even was a stage musical but then I realized that Disney creates are stage musicals for basically all of their works. Why would Tarzan be any different?
Tarzan the Musical as most of you know is based on the Disney film Tarzan, which in turned was adapted on the 1913 novel from Edgar Rice Burroughs. There have been multiple movies and works based on the story and even a new one is set to come out soon. Tony-award winner, David Hwang did the book or script for the stage version while the wonderful songs were written by rock legend, Phil Collins. He had written five songs from the original Disney film but actually wrote nine new songs for the stage versions. So thank you, Phil Collins.
The original Broadway opened up in 2006 and ran for about 485 performances. Since then many around the world have done the stage version. No major awards were won by this work, which in my opinion is not surprising. Reviews about this musical slightly varied. While many thought it was a good musical that depicts human emotion and truly the meaning of behind the story of Tarzan, others thought it was bland and generic.
I’ll just do a quick rundown of Tarzan’s plot. The story surrounds a character named Tarzan, a man that is raised by gorillas since he was a baby after being shipwrecked off the coast of Africa with his parents, who sadly were killed by a mean leopard. The musical shows us Tarzan’s struggles to fit in into the tribe of gorillas as he grows up from a helpless baby to young kid trying to get acceptance from his ape father. Everything changes when an expedition comes to the territory and he meets for the first time people like him, and, of course, falls in love with one of them, Jane. But not everyone in the expedition means well towards Tarzan and his ape family, so Tarzan struggles to protect his family and learning so much more about himself in the process.
Although a story about a boy being raised by gorillas may sound silly. It has a lot of depth in it. One of my favorite parts from the musical is when she sang “You’ll be in my heart.”Kala the mate of Tershak, the head of the ape tribe and Tarzan’s ape father, was the one that really raised Tarzan. And we see how much she really loves him and it’s so cute. They’re different freaking species and she’s telling them that even if they look different, underneath the skin, they’re still the same.
Phil Collins makes really and beautiful theater songs but he didn’t receive great reviews for them. Allmusic gave the album a rating of 3 out of 5 stars, stating: “Collins seems to understand that theater lyrics, perhaps even more than pop-song lyrics, need to be concise to get dramatic points across quickly and clearly. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that that doesn’t mean they should be little more than a string of platitudes, clichés, and contemporary slang. … It’s a shame; his words are as bad as his music is good”
But I think the music is good. Although, it’s not as dramatic as other musicals, in my opinion it doesn’t necessarily have to be. But drama makes it more interesting. My father literally fell asleep throughout the whole musical, mostly because he got bored. The musical has a sort of monotonous feel to it. You see, many of the songs sounded alike to me. And although I liked some of them, a musical shouldn’t feel like one huge song that never ends. There’s I like ups and downs the audience has to go through. At the end of the performance, I did like the musical but I just didn’t love it. It’s an enjoyable show that leaves you content but not sobbing your heart out. But it was filled with awesome stunts and dance number so they did a good job in that. It actually did looked like there were gorillas on stage.
Bruce Beckman says
I saw the Disney musical of Tarzan in Disney World when I was like 5. It was very good from the little I remember, my mother loves Tarzan, and every time we went back to Disney World we would see it again. Well, until it was replaced with a Finding Nemo musical the last time I went to Disney World when I was like 13
Kayla Gordon says
Tarzan is one of my favorite disney movies because it’s so unique and tackles an important issue such as hunting animals for sport. I would love to see this musical.