In Broadway’s ongoing insistence on making stage musicals out of 1980s movies (Footloose, The Little Mermaid, Hairspray) comes — finally — a remake from the ’90s: Ghost: The Musical, the sentimental tearjerker about Sam, a man whose soul can’t go to heaven until he says goodbye to (and saves the life of) his earthly girlfriend, Molly. The film was mawkish, heavyhanded and a huge hit, even among cynics — largely because Whoopi Goldberg added a jolt of comic outrageousness to her role as fake psychic Oda Mae Brown, who turns out to be real (she won an Oscar for it).
Ghost the film was laden with special effects, so just how Tony Award-winning director Matthew Warchus planned to transform those scenes into stagecraft was a genuine appeal of seeing the musical adaptation, now at Fair Park Music Hall. For the first 25 minutes or so, you actually wrestle with your opinion: Is the production’s reliance on cinematic legerdemain genius or impossibly kitschy? As it turns out, a bit of both. Scenes where Sam walks through walls and rides on subways trains and in elevators inventively employ digital tech and light effects, but they soon seem excessive. And then you realize: The entire show is excessive — excessively loud, excessively overplayed, excessively long.
Nowhere are the weaknesses more apparent than in the scenes with Oda Mae (Carla R. Stewart, pictured above left), who channels Sam (Steven Grant Douglas, right) so that he can communicate with Molly (Katie Postotnik). But instead of Whoopi’s whipcrack underplaying, Warchus allows Stewart to ham it up for the balcony, shouting and adding so much chatter and noise that all humor is lost. Indeed, despite a second act that’s stronger and more focused, the entire show is noisy, from the opening number (which also uses blinding light effects) to the score co-written by Glen Ballard and Eurythmics’ founder Dave Stewart. Sorry, guys, but sweet dreams are definitively not made of this. (DallasSummerMusicals.org.)
Ghost stands in stark contrast to the lackadaisical pacing of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, now playing at WaterTower Theatre. This comparatively new stage adaptation of Mark Twain’s novel about rascally Missouri tween Tom (Andrews Cope) and his shiftless buddy Huckleberry Finn (Garret Storms) has the gentle style of children’s theater, but the savvy casting of age-inappropriate adults in all the roles, including the kids. (Sometimes, there’s even genderbending, when Storms doubles as one of Tom’s female classmates, pictured left, with a sassy attitude that lets him steal scenes away from the main players.)
That keeps with the book’s appeal. Tom Sawyer was, for boyhood readers who grew up with it, a more enjoyable read than Twain’s Huck Finn — a story of a clever 13-year-old who saved the day and found pirate treasure. But as adults, we know Finn is the better book. That’s sort of how it is with this show: Likable for its target audience, even if you know it’s not a true classic. (WaterTowerTheatre.org.)
— David Taffet and Arnold Wayne Jones
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition January 31, 2014.
