chitty chitty bang bang
Last night I went to see the touring production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. I enjoyed it immensely, having always been a fan of the movie and of the early automobile. As much as I liked it I kept feeling like something was missing. Now, after doing some digging online, it looks like nearly 20 minutes of the original West End/Broadway show has been cut to make the show come in at 2 hrs. and 20 minutes. This would be fine, except one of the things that apprently the West End/Broadway show sets up is why the Baron and Baroness want the wreck of a car that is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Apparently in the non-touring shows there’s a prologue explaining how Chitty wound up on the scrap heap and shows that the baron and baroness were there on the day of hte race and that Vulgaria was responsible for sabotaging the car.The touring show skips all of this, covering Chitty’s racing history with a simple “She was a great race car” throw away line. Also the child catcher’s song got completely cut, as did a few others from the show, which would have expanded the roles a little better. I felt that the major change between the film and the show, which is that Vulgaria exists and it easy a story made certain things feel very forced. Really if they’d kept the prologue from the non-touring shows, the touring version would’ve made more sense from the beginning and not made the show feel quite so rushed.
It depresses me also that touring shows have completely cut the string section out of their budgets in the orchestra and replace w/ cheesy synthesizers and more annoying is how orchestrations for these shows is changing so that they can travel w/ just a synthesizer and woodwinds.
Tags: theater
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