Martin Guerre and Artistic Honesty

Back in 1999, the musical Martin Guerre played at the Guthrie. I was really excited to see it. It's by the same team as Les Miserables, a musical that I really, really, really love, for all sorts of reasons that I'm not going to enumerate here. Suffice it to say that I think that Les Miserables is genuinely good in an artistic sense; it functions on multiple levels, and the music, lyrics, and staging all work together to support the thematic stuff that's going on. It's what Cats and Phantom and lots of other musicals should be but mostly aren't.

So anyway, I was really excited to go see Martin Guerre, and Ed and I got tickets and went. And... it was really not impressive. Well, when they set fire to the set at the end, that was impressive, but in a "boy, that was almost -- though not quite -- as cool as a huge crashing chandelier!" kind of way, rather than a "what an amazing musical" kind of way.

The thing is, I think the musical suffered from a lack of artistic honesty on the part of the writing team.

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