Don't tell anyone you don't own "Blonde on Blonde". It's gonna be okay.
When I first heard that there was to be a musical version of High Fidelity, my response, after the initial shock, was “why”. The book was really quite good, the movie was infinitely better than it had any right to be – why not leave well enough alone?
What alternate universe do the people behind such an endeavor live in, that they thought there was any possible way that the show wouldn’t suck so hard as to create a rift in the fabric of space/time? Three of the main characters (Rob, Barry, and Dick) are music snobs, rock & roll geeks of the first water, the sort of guys who would never in their entire lives have any use at all for musical theater, except as a target for scorn and derision. This fact alone did not bode well for a show in which those very same characters would have to sing material they would have mocked mercilessly, in that Broadway style that has absolutely zip to do with rock. If ever a show was set up to fail, this was it.
Now, you might be thinking that I’m not being entirely fair here, since there’s no way I could have seen the show. Fair enough. Even if I were in NYC, wild horses could not have dragged me into that theater. I have heard one of the numbers from the show, however, and now you can too.
On the basis of that clip alone, I say with a clear conscience that hangin’s too good for ‘em.
