A Cry for Creativity

Rating: 8/10 (21 June 2014)

It isn't that the music in the (20 years and counting) run of musical anthologies is that great, although the ABBA collection in "Mamma Mia" which started it all comes close, and it isn't even the nostalgia; it's the lack of inspiration in song writing that's able to make it past the gauntlet of suits who think music is rehashing a sound that semi-worked....once. You need go no further than the pitti-pat music in the otherwise excellent previews that accompanied this movie. This is a cry not for Frankie Valli, but for music with a spark of something, anything, but the same ol' same ol'. Nowhere is musical creative cowardice more evident than Broadway with it's assembly-line approach to boiler-plating the musical, substituting Novocaine for its claim-to-fame lifeblood. "Frozen" has been very popular, but only because most of the audiences haven't been numbed by the Broadway rut. Why else this major resurrection of 50 year old pop music? This is of course is a back-handed complement for this well done Eastwood production, which only makes me long all the more for some modern Euterpian creativity, especially from Broadway and Hollywood. Certainly these characters weren't heroes, mostly just Jersey punks, except maybe for Bob Gaudio, the song writer...as irony would have it