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Camelots
A few weeks ago, I watched Camelot on Broadway. I grew up listening to the original cast recording. Seriously—grew up listening to it. I had tapes with this, My Fair Lady, and Man of La Mancha on them. Aside from being Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, and Robert Goulet, the Camelot score is dense with word play that I did not understand at the time, so I always have a double understanding—the actual lyrics and what eight-year-old me thought the lyrics were. (My mom once caught my brother and I singing “the musty month of May” and did not correct us. It’s lusty.)
I therefore was going to see the Broadway production no matter what it was, just for a chance to see this on stage. The original musical had a famously bad book (for those not in on the jargon, that means all the dialogue that’s not a song). At one point it was four hours long, what one reviewer called “a Gotterdammerung-esque bladder buster.” Therefore, having a new book was not in itself a bad idea. Having a new book by Aaron Sorkin, though, kind of was.
Last night I rewatched the film. I’d seen this as a kid and hated it. Now rewatching it—it’s okay. If it were an hour shorter (it’s three hours long) and had a different actor as Lancelot (he’s both awful and has a thick Italian accent), I could see really digging it. As it is, it can be enjoyed for the hats alone.
The original musical—or at least the film adaptation by Lerner himself—was flawed. The new version is a train wreck.
(I should preface by saying I know it’s based on Once and Future King which I tried to read and didn’t get past the first part of, so I can’t speak to how either version are as an adaption.)
The 1967 film stars Richard Harris as King Arthur and Vanessa Redgrave as Guinevere (Richard Burton and Julie Andrews both turned it down). Harris plays Arthur as somewhat childish—excitable, but always wondering What Would Merlin Do, even when he’s canonically almost forty. Guinevere is a fucker. I mean. “Then You May Take Me to the Fair,” is her delighting in riling up the knights against her husband’s new best friend because she finds him insufferable. (When Arthur sings Lancelot’s praises, she says, “it must be lost in translation.”)
All of the character motivations are completely coherent and motivated by the songs. Arthur’s an idealist who loves Guinevere and Lancelot and is kind of naïve about the capacity of people to be self-interested and self-destructive. Guinevere clearly loves Arthur (and the film makes clear that yes, they fuck), but it was also an arranged marriage and being great companions with a decent sex life isn’t the same as overwhelming passion—the thing she explicitly wanted in her I Want song, “Simple Joys of Maidenhood.” Lancelot is a self-important meathead with a god complex. But he’s also very hot. Guinevere sleeping with him makes perfect sense, and also doesn’t negate what she feels for Arthur.
Arthur has a speech at the end of Act I when he realizes that Guinevere and Lancelot have betrayed him, in their hearts if not yet in deed, and expresses his desire for revenge as a man. But he’s not a man—he’s a king. And as a king he values the continuation of the government he’s built over his own emotions.
Therefore, the second act starts years later, when Guinevere and Lancelot have been carrying on for a long time and are an open secret to the court. Knights keep accusing Guinevere of infidelity, which causes Lancelot to challenge them and kick their asses in combat. They’ve lost seven knights to banishment over these accusations, but since Lancelot will always win in combat, the outcome is preordained.
Guinevere is convinced that Arthur doesn’t know because he wouldn’t allow his knights to be driven off. Meanwhile, Arthur is putting into place a court system with trial by jury rather than trial by combat, specifically as a way to handle these accusations. He’s of course hoping the two won’t be complete morons about it and will never allow there to be evidence that could be brought.
They are, of course, complete morons about it.
Also, Mordred here is Arthur’s fully adult bastard son who has been cut off from the line of succession even though Arthur has no legitimate heirs. This makes the fall of Camelot less about Guinevere’s infidelity and more about Mordred’s ability to manipulate the situation to discredit his father.
There are a lot of really beautiful moments over the climax of the film—when Lancelot and Guinevere are caught, Lancelot flips out and slaughters a bunch of knights on his way to escape. As he rides out of the castle, you see him pass Arthur on his way back from his “hunting trip” and have a moment where he stops in anguish, as if everything before was instinct and he only just internalized how royally he fucked everything up.
When Guinevere and Lancelot come to Arthur in the dawn before battle, this is the final exchange:
Guinevere: So often in the past, Arthur, I would look in your eyes, and I would find there forgiveness. Perhaps, one day in the future, it shall be there again. But now I won’t be with you—I won’t see it.
Arthur: Goodbye, my love.
That’s kind of beautiful. He doesn’t say he forgives her. And her main source of pain is not the forgiveness itself but the separation. Arthur in this whole scene is accepting that the die has been cast and he has to now play it out, and what he feels about anything no longer matters. Which is the perfect continuation from his choice at the end of Act I that he must react to a personal betrayal as a king rather than a man.
The movie as a whole is also both very expensive and very cheap looking. There are a bajillion extras (and seriously, the hats), and S and I were joking that they paid a pigeon wrangler so goddammit there are going to be pigeons in every scene (there are some where you can tell someone off screen is just chucking birds into frame). But the armor looks like plastic, and the “chain mail” is clearly knitwear.
What I’m saying is, I think the 1967 film hits a kind of enjoyable melodramatic camp. If only it were an hour shorter.
My three sentence review of the new adaptation is:
1. Aaron Sorkin does not know how to write a musical.
2. Aaron Sorkin does not know how to write a love story.
3. Aaron Sorkin seems to hate the source material.
In reading some interviews that he’s given about the project, it seems that Sorkin was drawn to the work for two reasons. One, it has strong themes of the creation of democracy. Two, it’s associated with the Kennedy administration. If you’ve ever heard the Kennedy administration called Camelot, it’s referring to this musical in particular. Specifically, one of the final lines in the show, that after the JFK assassination would prompt a showstopping wail of grief from the audience: “Don’t let it be forgot/That once there was a spot/For one brief, shining moment/That was known as Camelot.”
The thing is—while those things are true—Camelot is not mainly a political piece. It’s mostly a love story. And the love story has to work for anything else to work. If you look across the vast breadth of Sorkin’s writing, though, there are few or no love stories, and the one’s I can put a finger on come in long-running TV series with collaborators (like West Wing).
It seems like Sorkin made a couple of choices up front about how he was adapting this, and then all of the text of the show is a justification exercise for how those pieces fit with the pre-existing musical numbers. There is more lamp-shading and exposition than anything else. From what I can tell, these choices are:
1. There is no magic. This meant Nimueh got axed, Merlin is just a dude, and Morgana is a scientist, a fact that gets explained AT LENGTH repeatedly. It also means that in order to justify some of the songs having lyrics about dragon slaying, Arthur has to explicitly say that his subjects are idiots for thinking dragons are real. In the single most WTF moment of the show, Arthur goes to see Morgana and she gives a long speech about SCIENCE. In it, she references specific scientific inventions in the future as if she has foresight, despite the fact that the show has made a big fucking deal out of the fact that Merlin definitely couldn’t see the future because seeing the future is definitely not real. So having Morgana suddenly talking about the Apollo missions makes no fucking sense at all. It’s like one of Sorkin’s big court room speeches except I don’t know what point he was even trying to make.
2. Arthur is young by the final actions of the play—the exposition puts him at 29 in the final action. The original show spans about twelve years, so it’s a trick to compress it that much. That means that Arthur explicitly says that he fathered Mordred when he was 15 (no word on how old Morgana was at the time—yikes) and that Mordred is 14 when he shows up in court, which makes him more a shit stirrer than a legitimate rival for the throne. It also means from Guinevere arriving to the end of the play is only two years, and I think only that long because the song “If Ever I Would Leave You” references all four seasons and therefore must occur after Lancelot’s been there for at least a year. This also means that the Round Table and the ideal egalitarian society existed for two years tops. As opposed to the original show, where, going by the lyrics in “Fie on Goodness,” it existed for eight years, with at least four years of Arthur and Guinevere’s marriage before that.
3. Guinevere was never in love with Lancelot. The emotional arc Sorkin decided on is that Guinevere and Arthur really do love each other, but Arthur never SAYS that he loves her, so she sleeps with Lancelot as a hate fuck basically, to make Arthur jealous. It comes out of nowhere, and I honestly thought we were going to go in the direction that she was never actually unfaithful and it was all a set up by Mordred.
The problem is, you can’t just do that because there are THREE love songs between the two of them. That means the book has to dance around why there would be love songs without a love story, and lands on making everything awkward and weird. First one—“Before I Gaze at You Again,” a song Guinevere sings asking Lancelot to back off until she can get her feels under control and not cheat on her husband. Guinevere still sings this here, but alone on stage rather than to Lancelot. But since all we’ve seen from her is that she hates him, it’s odd.
Then “If Ever I Would Leave You,” the big show stopper. In the original context, Guinevere and Lancelot have been banging for years but it’s becoming more and more obvious that everyone knows, so they’re having a conversation about how Lancelot really needs to leave and they really need to stop this. In that context, then singing about why he can’t leave her makes perfect sense. In Sorkin’s book, the scene is this: Lancelot is guarding the queen, a thing he says all the knights take turns doing, and makes explicit that he has been doing for a year. She tells him to take his creepy self someplace else and leave her the fuck alone. He then sings “If Ever I Would Leave You,” making it a stalker song? They also stage it with him clasping his hands behind his back and sort of chasing her around the stage?
Then there’s, “I Loved You Once in Silence,” the song that Guinevere sings as they are saying good-bye to each other for the last time, lamenting that by engaging in their love affair they’ve made everything worse. This gets sung by Lancelot instead, after Guinevere hate fucks him, making him even more of a creepy stalker.
There’s this problem for all of the songs. In the original, the songs are outgrowths of the character arcs and the surrounding scenes. In the new version, Sorkin wants to write fundamentally different characters and character arcs, and therefore every song has to be backed into.
In the opening scene, Guinevere has been rewritten to be a girl boss—very Cinderella in Into the Woods vibes, and oh look! That was Phillipa Soo’s last role. That means she sings “Simple Joys of Maidenhood” directly to Arthur, rather than him eavesdropping (I guess Sorkin thought the eavesdropping is creepy?). Arthur interposes repeatedly about how problematic her wishes are. Then she asks him to help her escape. This also happens in the original, but in the original, the vibes are very much, oh, you must be stuck too, why don’t we help each other. In this, she’s like, I’ll give you money to help me get away, and if you don’t want to help, stop wasting my time. So then in the Sorkin version, to get into “Camelot,” Arthur has to make an awkward reference to the weather, and the whole time he’s singing, Guinevere is making snide “why won’t this peasant shut up” comments. This is the title song of the show! It’s what gets reprised at the end. Sorkin seems to hate it. In the original, it is very clearly Arthur flirting. He’s been established as someone so afraid to talk to girls that he hid up a tree, and now he’s telling her absurd things about the weather to make her laugh. In the Sorkin version, best he can do is have Arthur call it a metaphor and have Guinevere call him an idiot. WHAT CHEMISTRY.
The direction of the Sorkin version seems to have no faith that people will understand the lyrics of the original songs, which are incredibly dense with word play. Rather than trust the audience will be amused by lyrics like, “It’s May/The month of yes you may/When every maiden prays that her lad/will be a cad,” Guinevere twerks in the middle of that song. Lancelot literally walks away from the audience while saying, “A French Prometheus unbound.” Guinevere does some weird boob referencing gesture when singing, “When they’re beset and besieged/the folks not noblesse-ly obliged.”
From the interviews, Sorkin also wanted to cut some of the songs but the producers told him keeping all the songs would sell tickets (which was true). So he keeps all the songs (save the Nimueh number, “Follow Me”), but the ones he doesn’t like, he murders. He prefaces “What Would the Simple Folk Do” by having a line about how people don’t like being called simple, and then leaves off the last verse. He has “Fie on Goodness,” but makes sure you definitely don’t pick up that it’s an anthem in favor of rape and murder by cutting between the knights singing and other scenes. He makes absolutely sure you don’t hear the line, “Stroking someone’s bonny” by having the singer hold an absurdly long note so everyone’s clapping over the end of the phrase.
The song “Guinevere” was used in the original to summarize the exciting climax rather than staging it, which isn’t great. The revival both doesn’t stage it either, but also doesn’t trust the song to do the job, and chops up “Guinevere” with little scenes that depict what the song just said, (“Here’s the verdict, sir!”)
Sorkin substitutes the humor of the original lyrics with his usual glibness in the dialogue. As my companion pointed out, it’s Arthur by way of Josh Lyman. For the first act, my reaction was, the book and the songs are completely different shows with completely different characters in them, but I kind of dig both.
The entire second act collapses like a flan.
The choices made about the timeline and romance remove the major plot-driving element of the second act. There is no affair, so there is no rising tension in the court, there are no duels, so Arthur is not trying to create trial by jury. Instead something something Guinevere is jealous of Morgana something something the end.
The emotional arc of the second act is Arthur being torn between wanting to uphold the law, even as applied to himself and his queen, wanting to protect Guinevere and Lancelot because he loves them, and wanting to hurt them because they hurt him. You remove the affair, the whole ending has no resonance.
In trying to explain this to others, I brought up the Problem of Guinevere. Arthurian legend is very old. If you go back to Morte d’Arthur, Guinevere is a hateful misogynist’s depiction of a woman: manipulative, vain, man-eating. She’s the woman in that awful film “The Room.” What many men through the ages have seen women as. And her infidelity drives the downfall of Camelot. So you end up with a real problem in modern adaptations of trying to tell the story without making Guinevere a harpy. The 1960 show tried to deal with this by making her both kind of a fucker and someone overwhelmed by unanticipated passion. Sorkin tries to girl boss her, but that makes it worse. If there’s no passion driving her self-destructive affair, having it be simple misunderstanding is so much worse (Oh! If only you’d told me you loved me I wouldn’t have slept with the knight I hate given that, as the queen, I know infidelity will definitely get me executed!).
Yeah, so that’s Camelot. A show that never really worked and still doesn’t. Um, I liked the sword fighting? Lancelot’s performance of “C’est moi” was fantastic. Maybe there’s a way to write a new book around the existing songs that would be good actually, but I doubt it’s going to get any new treatment again. It took sixty years to come back around to Broadway this time. Sometimes works are just flawed and that’s what it is.
I therefore was going to see the Broadway production no matter what it was, just for a chance to see this on stage. The original musical had a famously bad book (for those not in on the jargon, that means all the dialogue that’s not a song). At one point it was four hours long, what one reviewer called “a Gotterdammerung-esque bladder buster.” Therefore, having a new book was not in itself a bad idea. Having a new book by Aaron Sorkin, though, kind of was.
Last night I rewatched the film. I’d seen this as a kid and hated it. Now rewatching it—it’s okay. If it were an hour shorter (it’s three hours long) and had a different actor as Lancelot (he’s both awful and has a thick Italian accent), I could see really digging it. As it is, it can be enjoyed for the hats alone.
The original musical—or at least the film adaptation by Lerner himself—was flawed. The new version is a train wreck.
(I should preface by saying I know it’s based on Once and Future King which I tried to read and didn’t get past the first part of, so I can’t speak to how either version are as an adaption.)
The 1967 film stars Richard Harris as King Arthur and Vanessa Redgrave as Guinevere (Richard Burton and Julie Andrews both turned it down). Harris plays Arthur as somewhat childish—excitable, but always wondering What Would Merlin Do, even when he’s canonically almost forty. Guinevere is a fucker. I mean. “Then You May Take Me to the Fair,” is her delighting in riling up the knights against her husband’s new best friend because she finds him insufferable. (When Arthur sings Lancelot’s praises, she says, “it must be lost in translation.”)
All of the character motivations are completely coherent and motivated by the songs. Arthur’s an idealist who loves Guinevere and Lancelot and is kind of naïve about the capacity of people to be self-interested and self-destructive. Guinevere clearly loves Arthur (and the film makes clear that yes, they fuck), but it was also an arranged marriage and being great companions with a decent sex life isn’t the same as overwhelming passion—the thing she explicitly wanted in her I Want song, “Simple Joys of Maidenhood.” Lancelot is a self-important meathead with a god complex. But he’s also very hot. Guinevere sleeping with him makes perfect sense, and also doesn’t negate what she feels for Arthur.
Arthur has a speech at the end of Act I when he realizes that Guinevere and Lancelot have betrayed him, in their hearts if not yet in deed, and expresses his desire for revenge as a man. But he’s not a man—he’s a king. And as a king he values the continuation of the government he’s built over his own emotions.
Therefore, the second act starts years later, when Guinevere and Lancelot have been carrying on for a long time and are an open secret to the court. Knights keep accusing Guinevere of infidelity, which causes Lancelot to challenge them and kick their asses in combat. They’ve lost seven knights to banishment over these accusations, but since Lancelot will always win in combat, the outcome is preordained.
Guinevere is convinced that Arthur doesn’t know because he wouldn’t allow his knights to be driven off. Meanwhile, Arthur is putting into place a court system with trial by jury rather than trial by combat, specifically as a way to handle these accusations. He’s of course hoping the two won’t be complete morons about it and will never allow there to be evidence that could be brought.
They are, of course, complete morons about it.
Also, Mordred here is Arthur’s fully adult bastard son who has been cut off from the line of succession even though Arthur has no legitimate heirs. This makes the fall of Camelot less about Guinevere’s infidelity and more about Mordred’s ability to manipulate the situation to discredit his father.
There are a lot of really beautiful moments over the climax of the film—when Lancelot and Guinevere are caught, Lancelot flips out and slaughters a bunch of knights on his way to escape. As he rides out of the castle, you see him pass Arthur on his way back from his “hunting trip” and have a moment where he stops in anguish, as if everything before was instinct and he only just internalized how royally he fucked everything up.
When Guinevere and Lancelot come to Arthur in the dawn before battle, this is the final exchange:
Guinevere: So often in the past, Arthur, I would look in your eyes, and I would find there forgiveness. Perhaps, one day in the future, it shall be there again. But now I won’t be with you—I won’t see it.
Arthur: Goodbye, my love.
That’s kind of beautiful. He doesn’t say he forgives her. And her main source of pain is not the forgiveness itself but the separation. Arthur in this whole scene is accepting that the die has been cast and he has to now play it out, and what he feels about anything no longer matters. Which is the perfect continuation from his choice at the end of Act I that he must react to a personal betrayal as a king rather than a man.
The movie as a whole is also both very expensive and very cheap looking. There are a bajillion extras (and seriously, the hats), and S and I were joking that they paid a pigeon wrangler so goddammit there are going to be pigeons in every scene (there are some where you can tell someone off screen is just chucking birds into frame). But the armor looks like plastic, and the “chain mail” is clearly knitwear.
What I’m saying is, I think the 1967 film hits a kind of enjoyable melodramatic camp. If only it were an hour shorter.
My three sentence review of the new adaptation is:
1. Aaron Sorkin does not know how to write a musical.
2. Aaron Sorkin does not know how to write a love story.
3. Aaron Sorkin seems to hate the source material.
In reading some interviews that he’s given about the project, it seems that Sorkin was drawn to the work for two reasons. One, it has strong themes of the creation of democracy. Two, it’s associated with the Kennedy administration. If you’ve ever heard the Kennedy administration called Camelot, it’s referring to this musical in particular. Specifically, one of the final lines in the show, that after the JFK assassination would prompt a showstopping wail of grief from the audience: “Don’t let it be forgot/That once there was a spot/For one brief, shining moment/That was known as Camelot.”
The thing is—while those things are true—Camelot is not mainly a political piece. It’s mostly a love story. And the love story has to work for anything else to work. If you look across the vast breadth of Sorkin’s writing, though, there are few or no love stories, and the one’s I can put a finger on come in long-running TV series with collaborators (like West Wing).
It seems like Sorkin made a couple of choices up front about how he was adapting this, and then all of the text of the show is a justification exercise for how those pieces fit with the pre-existing musical numbers. There is more lamp-shading and exposition than anything else. From what I can tell, these choices are:
1. There is no magic. This meant Nimueh got axed, Merlin is just a dude, and Morgana is a scientist, a fact that gets explained AT LENGTH repeatedly. It also means that in order to justify some of the songs having lyrics about dragon slaying, Arthur has to explicitly say that his subjects are idiots for thinking dragons are real. In the single most WTF moment of the show, Arthur goes to see Morgana and she gives a long speech about SCIENCE. In it, she references specific scientific inventions in the future as if she has foresight, despite the fact that the show has made a big fucking deal out of the fact that Merlin definitely couldn’t see the future because seeing the future is definitely not real. So having Morgana suddenly talking about the Apollo missions makes no fucking sense at all. It’s like one of Sorkin’s big court room speeches except I don’t know what point he was even trying to make.
2. Arthur is young by the final actions of the play—the exposition puts him at 29 in the final action. The original show spans about twelve years, so it’s a trick to compress it that much. That means that Arthur explicitly says that he fathered Mordred when he was 15 (no word on how old Morgana was at the time—yikes) and that Mordred is 14 when he shows up in court, which makes him more a shit stirrer than a legitimate rival for the throne. It also means from Guinevere arriving to the end of the play is only two years, and I think only that long because the song “If Ever I Would Leave You” references all four seasons and therefore must occur after Lancelot’s been there for at least a year. This also means that the Round Table and the ideal egalitarian society existed for two years tops. As opposed to the original show, where, going by the lyrics in “Fie on Goodness,” it existed for eight years, with at least four years of Arthur and Guinevere’s marriage before that.
3. Guinevere was never in love with Lancelot. The emotional arc Sorkin decided on is that Guinevere and Arthur really do love each other, but Arthur never SAYS that he loves her, so she sleeps with Lancelot as a hate fuck basically, to make Arthur jealous. It comes out of nowhere, and I honestly thought we were going to go in the direction that she was never actually unfaithful and it was all a set up by Mordred.
The problem is, you can’t just do that because there are THREE love songs between the two of them. That means the book has to dance around why there would be love songs without a love story, and lands on making everything awkward and weird. First one—“Before I Gaze at You Again,” a song Guinevere sings asking Lancelot to back off until she can get her feels under control and not cheat on her husband. Guinevere still sings this here, but alone on stage rather than to Lancelot. But since all we’ve seen from her is that she hates him, it’s odd.
Then “If Ever I Would Leave You,” the big show stopper. In the original context, Guinevere and Lancelot have been banging for years but it’s becoming more and more obvious that everyone knows, so they’re having a conversation about how Lancelot really needs to leave and they really need to stop this. In that context, then singing about why he can’t leave her makes perfect sense. In Sorkin’s book, the scene is this: Lancelot is guarding the queen, a thing he says all the knights take turns doing, and makes explicit that he has been doing for a year. She tells him to take his creepy self someplace else and leave her the fuck alone. He then sings “If Ever I Would Leave You,” making it a stalker song? They also stage it with him clasping his hands behind his back and sort of chasing her around the stage?
Then there’s, “I Loved You Once in Silence,” the song that Guinevere sings as they are saying good-bye to each other for the last time, lamenting that by engaging in their love affair they’ve made everything worse. This gets sung by Lancelot instead, after Guinevere hate fucks him, making him even more of a creepy stalker.
There’s this problem for all of the songs. In the original, the songs are outgrowths of the character arcs and the surrounding scenes. In the new version, Sorkin wants to write fundamentally different characters and character arcs, and therefore every song has to be backed into.
In the opening scene, Guinevere has been rewritten to be a girl boss—very Cinderella in Into the Woods vibes, and oh look! That was Phillipa Soo’s last role. That means she sings “Simple Joys of Maidenhood” directly to Arthur, rather than him eavesdropping (I guess Sorkin thought the eavesdropping is creepy?). Arthur interposes repeatedly about how problematic her wishes are. Then she asks him to help her escape. This also happens in the original, but in the original, the vibes are very much, oh, you must be stuck too, why don’t we help each other. In this, she’s like, I’ll give you money to help me get away, and if you don’t want to help, stop wasting my time. So then in the Sorkin version, to get into “Camelot,” Arthur has to make an awkward reference to the weather, and the whole time he’s singing, Guinevere is making snide “why won’t this peasant shut up” comments. This is the title song of the show! It’s what gets reprised at the end. Sorkin seems to hate it. In the original, it is very clearly Arthur flirting. He’s been established as someone so afraid to talk to girls that he hid up a tree, and now he’s telling her absurd things about the weather to make her laugh. In the Sorkin version, best he can do is have Arthur call it a metaphor and have Guinevere call him an idiot. WHAT CHEMISTRY.
The direction of the Sorkin version seems to have no faith that people will understand the lyrics of the original songs, which are incredibly dense with word play. Rather than trust the audience will be amused by lyrics like, “It’s May/The month of yes you may/When every maiden prays that her lad/will be a cad,” Guinevere twerks in the middle of that song. Lancelot literally walks away from the audience while saying, “A French Prometheus unbound.” Guinevere does some weird boob referencing gesture when singing, “When they’re beset and besieged/the folks not noblesse-ly obliged.”
From the interviews, Sorkin also wanted to cut some of the songs but the producers told him keeping all the songs would sell tickets (which was true). So he keeps all the songs (save the Nimueh number, “Follow Me”), but the ones he doesn’t like, he murders. He prefaces “What Would the Simple Folk Do” by having a line about how people don’t like being called simple, and then leaves off the last verse. He has “Fie on Goodness,” but makes sure you definitely don’t pick up that it’s an anthem in favor of rape and murder by cutting between the knights singing and other scenes. He makes absolutely sure you don’t hear the line, “Stroking someone’s bonny” by having the singer hold an absurdly long note so everyone’s clapping over the end of the phrase.
The song “Guinevere” was used in the original to summarize the exciting climax rather than staging it, which isn’t great. The revival both doesn’t stage it either, but also doesn’t trust the song to do the job, and chops up “Guinevere” with little scenes that depict what the song just said, (“Here’s the verdict, sir!”)
Sorkin substitutes the humor of the original lyrics with his usual glibness in the dialogue. As my companion pointed out, it’s Arthur by way of Josh Lyman. For the first act, my reaction was, the book and the songs are completely different shows with completely different characters in them, but I kind of dig both.
The entire second act collapses like a flan.
The choices made about the timeline and romance remove the major plot-driving element of the second act. There is no affair, so there is no rising tension in the court, there are no duels, so Arthur is not trying to create trial by jury. Instead something something Guinevere is jealous of Morgana something something the end.
The emotional arc of the second act is Arthur being torn between wanting to uphold the law, even as applied to himself and his queen, wanting to protect Guinevere and Lancelot because he loves them, and wanting to hurt them because they hurt him. You remove the affair, the whole ending has no resonance.
In trying to explain this to others, I brought up the Problem of Guinevere. Arthurian legend is very old. If you go back to Morte d’Arthur, Guinevere is a hateful misogynist’s depiction of a woman: manipulative, vain, man-eating. She’s the woman in that awful film “The Room.” What many men through the ages have seen women as. And her infidelity drives the downfall of Camelot. So you end up with a real problem in modern adaptations of trying to tell the story without making Guinevere a harpy. The 1960 show tried to deal with this by making her both kind of a fucker and someone overwhelmed by unanticipated passion. Sorkin tries to girl boss her, but that makes it worse. If there’s no passion driving her self-destructive affair, having it be simple misunderstanding is so much worse (Oh! If only you’d told me you loved me I wouldn’t have slept with the knight I hate given that, as the queen, I know infidelity will definitely get me executed!).
Yeah, so that’s Camelot. A show that never really worked and still doesn’t. Um, I liked the sword fighting? Lancelot’s performance of “C’est moi” was fantastic. Maybe there’s a way to write a new book around the existing songs that would be good actually, but I doubt it’s going to get any new treatment again. It took sixty years to come back around to Broadway this time. Sometimes works are just flawed and that’s what it is.
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