I had really high hopes for the new Fox show Glee this fall. I really loved the show “Fame” when I was a kid, and I hoped that this would have some of the same things I loved about that. I was a performing arts student myself in both high school and at the beginning of college.
The show is a comedy, and a very campy one. I don’t mind that at all. I enjoy silly humor and find some of the over-the-top stuff to be hilarious. The characters are, for the most part, interesting and generally well acted.
Where it starts to fall apart for me is the music. The show is about a high school glee club. I expect the music to sound like… a high school glee club. My high school didn’t have a “glee club” per se, but it had several choirs and I went to their performances and they were excellent. So I’m not saying that I think they should sound bad or anything… but when, for example, they are handed sheet music and told “let’s try this out” I expect it to sound unrehearsed, experimental, tentative even. At the very least I expect it to sound like a live performance. On “Glee” instead what happens is the kids are handed a new song for the first time, told to try it out, and then the audio switches to a studio recording of a professional arrangement of the song, which they all begin to lip-sync to while they dance around, not even looking at the music (they don’t even have it in their hands anymore).
Now, I understand musical theater and so I could give them a pass on the whole “we suddenly know a choreographed group dance number to this song we’ve never done before” part, but I really can’t excuse the totally over-produced sound. Even for their performances, it should sound more like the performances on “American Idol” than like a music video.
I’m really trying to like this show, and for the most part, I do. I hope that the music gets better soon, though, because right now I cringe every time they start a new song.
—oh, and what was up with this week’s episode, where Will is supposed to be teaching Emma to dance, but instead he just dances all around her while she just stands there, and then trips over her dress and knocks her over? How is that a dance lesson, exactly?
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