Honestly, if I were a producer of musicals I’d ban theatre critics. They are a stick in the mud crowd who might have fun elsewhere, but the minute you seat them in an auditorium with a proscenium arch and a three-hour running time, they suddenly have expectations. One really struggles to explain to them how entertaining The Full Monty is, but let’s try.
The characters are cardboard cutouts, they cry. But it’s a musical, dear. They go on and on that no matter how much dripping sentimental schlock you add, it doesn’t create depth of character. But it’s a musical, silly. They find the dialogue riddled with clichés, old jokes, unexamined attitudes and empty phrases. But they are snobs. They complain that every aspect of the plot is predictable after the first twenty minutes. But it’s a musical and everyone has seen the film anyway, stupid.
As for the film, they maintain it was charming; it had something to say about the way society constructs sexual roles in a particular class. The musical though, they tut-tut, has taken a perfectly good British movie and cut it off at the roots, then applied a commercial formula, diminished all content and inflated it with mawkish, redundant songs. This is the worst form of Americanization. Why do we import such mediocrity? Because they invented musicals and have a factory making them.
As for the story, the critics say it’s a big fuss about a group of regular joes who manage to lure a near hysterical audience by the childish promise of dropping their pants and showing the world their weenies, something that comes naturally to central Europeans wherever the sun shines and nobody blinks an eye.
