The Beautiful Game
The Beautiful Game is a musical by Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber . The text is by Ben Elton (translated into German by Anja Hauptmann ).
content
Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber once wanted to write a musical in which women do not drag their husbands, but vice versa. With “The Beautiful Game”, the ultimate musical about the most beautiful thing in the world - football - he wanted to achieve this ambitious goal and lure seasoned men to the theater. But it was not the doping or drug scandal that should spice things up on the stage, but the Northern Ireland conflict . As a copywriter, Ben Elton was hired, who had this topic on his heart for a long time. The result is something like a modern West Side Story on the football field, with it on the stage in Londonfrom the end of September 2000 a football ballet with echoes of Riverdance could be seen. After the premiere, the critics judged inconsistently between a trivial love story and a political topic, which should not be played on a musical stage.
The year is 1969 . The teenagers of a Catholic football team in Northern Ireland dream of a great career. But even though they win the final, the first dark clouds of prejudice and intolerance of the denominational dispute in Belfast are already gathering at the following party . And so in the life stories of John, Thomas and Del, violence, the military , prison and the IRA creep into their lives . Conclusion of the dark story: a disabled man, two emigrants and two dead.
music
Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber fills this story with deeply emotional melodies. His work is divided into two parts: it lives on the one hand through soulful ballads , which escalate into true hymns through strong female voices, and on the other hand through the hard percussion- synthesizer arrangements of the political conflicts in the male world. The contradiction of feelings becomes particularly clear when the couples are just floating in the violin-like Seventh Heaven (the song “Let Us Love In Peace” runs like a red thread through the piece) and then the boys briefly cripple someone who thinks differently ( “The Craig” or “I'd Rather Die On My Feet Than Live On My Knees”, in which the strongly rhythmic melody of the overture is repeated).
In addition to these main themes love for Ireland is heard repeatedly in reprises -stärksten song of the show "God's Own Country". The pubescent “Don't Like You” finally turns into a wedding with “The Happiest Day”, the ceremony “To Have And To Hold”, which is very reminiscent of the love promise “One Hand, One Heart” from the West Side Story, and the amusing wedding night with the first sex. The smash hit of the show “Our Kind Of Love”, in which the Catholic Christine expresses her love for the Protestant Del, impresses with its dramatic structure and is only surpassed by Mary's hymn “If This Is What We're Fighting For” , in which two stanzas are intoned a cappella, then the orchestra begins cautiously before it swells to a storm of pathetic feelings to the furious finale. After the premiere on September 28, 2000 at the Cambridge Theater in London's West End, even the critics praised Webber's new work, even if they saw the book by Ben Elton and its texts for too superficial and clichéd for the sensitive topic.
Web links
- The Beautiful Game (Official Website)
Individual evidence
- ^ The Web Kitchen: The Beautiful Game. Retrieved January 27, 2020 (UK English).