KevinUK, on 24 January 2013 - 10:41 PM, said:
I agree for the most part. Whilst the actual story isn't exactly riveting, it's interesting enough - it just needs to be developed more. Personally I'd be very happy for them to cut most of the Camden barge scenes, and have the show set more or less entirely at the TV studio: one of my biggest gripes was that it didn't feel like they were contestants on a TV show - where was the excitement? I don't even remember there being a winner.
However I still think the biggest problem is the delivery of the songs. People know these songs inside out (whether they want to admit to it or not!) and sometimes I died a little bit inside knowing that the songs sounded terrible. I can't help but think that just because they're the written and performed by the Spice Girls, that someone decided no attention was really needed and the actors were to just do the best they could.
For this reason, there's next to no musical standouts. The best song is 'Viva Forever' purely because someone thought about how that song should sound (and failing to let Viva reply with 'Love Thing' is a big mistake!). Stop is good because *finally* they sound good singing together. But for the most part no one harmonizes or think about how to make the vocals sound good - especially in the mess that is Mama/Goodbye.
its arguably all dictated by the starting question of whether you want to make a musical about the Spice Girls music sound like the Spice Girls or let a really strong group of actresses loose on it and make it sound even stronger. They seem to have decided to avoid either solution, and decided, seemingly at stage one, to avoid having the group singing the songs, to avoid experienced younger leads, and, even where there were stronger singers, to have them singing solos. There's obvious issues putting in 5 tracks where there were more or less only 4 people singing before. and they end up not even using 4. Similarly, would they want a group of 4 to sound better than the original group of 5 - and the comparisons that would create? I think you end up being driven by the requirement to make a musical about the Spice Girl's Music, that doesn't raise any issues about the Spice Girls or sound like them - which is a bit suspect as concepts go. You end up with the songs neither sounding like the Spice Girls with distinctive individual vocals and harmonies, or being presented as strongly as the numbers in WWRY or Mamma Mia. The answer was probably to stick more to the idea of the group in the X factor environment, to use the potential for that setting more and to avoid bringing in other ab fab episodes to confuse things, and to give the judges , particularly Tamara, and a stronger Sharon and Simon, more to do. You could also cast people who could sound more like the Spice Girls but add a bit more wow factor still. That wouldn't have been difficult - you could easily name a super WE Spice Girts group of top established singers, or you could have just found a brilliant cast from among the recent WE/Tour casts of WWRY, Dorothy finalists, and experienced early twenty year olds. The problem there may have been would they want to do it, and the cost.
Basically there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of a Spice Girls Musical - when it works even Viva shows that. Lots of classic, established and new work has even thinner plots. What you do need though is more wow factor and probably more Spice.
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