NY musical 'Lennon' imagines life without Beatles
Aug 15, 2005 — By Claudia Parsons
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A new Broadway musical about John Lennon was greeted with mixed reviews on Monday and is likely to disappoint Beatles fans, but the former Beatle's widow Yoko Ono said he would have enjoyed it.
"I think he would be jumping up and down, I think he would have loved it," said Ono, who was closely involved in the production since she controls the rights to his songs.
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"My role was to protect John's music," she told Reuters after "Lennon" opened on Sunday.
Several critics disliked what The New York Times called the musical's "Ono-centric" view of Lennon's life.
The show skips through the early years of his musical career, when the Beatles revolutionized popular music, and gives little weight to his first marriage and son before he met Ono, and then quit the Beatles in 1970. It also glosses over a later affair when he and Ono lived apart for more than a year.
"Imagine there's no Beatles, imagine no iconic movies, no White Album, no poetry books, no drawings," Newsday's Linda Winer wrote. "Then imagine there's no son before Sean, no mistress named May Pang, no deep depression, nothing really serious with drugs."
Beatles fans also may be disappointed that the musical includes very few of the group's songs — not least for copyright reasons — and when the "Fab Four" are seen singing on stage, they are played by the four women in the cast.
"This is John Lennon, the legend, as filtered through the protective, selective, up-with-people, later-life self-interest of Yoko Ono Lennon," Newsday wrote.
In an interview before the opening, director Don Scardino who wrote the show by trawling through interviews, notes and tapes and using Lennon's own words for the entire script, said the show presented Lennon's own view of his life.
"Looking back on his life you get to a certain point in the story and there is no story of John without Yoko," he said.
"He was hurt when people didn't either embrace Yoko or his love for Yoko, but finally he didn't care," Scardino said.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A new Broadway musical about John Lennon was greeted with mixed reviews on Monday and is likely to disappoint Beatles fans, but the former Beatle's widow Yoko Ono said he would have enjoyed it.
"I think he would be jumping up and down, I think he would have loved it," said Ono, who was closely involved in the production since she controls the rights to his songs.
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"My role was to protect John's music," she told Reuters after "Lennon" opened on Sunday.
Several critics disliked what The New York Times called the musical's "Ono-centric" view of Lennon's life.
The show skips through the early years of his musical career, when the Beatles revolutionized popular music, and gives little weight to his first marriage and son before he met Ono, and then quit the Beatles in 1970. It also glosses over a later affair when he and Ono lived apart for more than a year.
"Imagine there's no Beatles, imagine no iconic movies, no White Album, no poetry books, no drawings," Newsday's Linda Winer wrote. "Then imagine there's no son before Sean, no mistress named May Pang, no deep depression, nothing really serious with drugs."
Beatles fans also may be disappointed that the musical includes very few of the group's songs — not least for copyright reasons — and when the "Fab Four" are seen singing on stage, they are played by the four women in the cast.
"This is John Lennon, the legend, as filtered through the protective, selective, up-with-people, later-life self-interest of Yoko Ono Lennon," Newsday wrote.
In an interview before the opening, director Don Scardino who wrote the show by trawling through interviews, notes and tapes and using Lennon's own words for the entire script, said the show presented Lennon's own view of his life.
"Looking back on his life you get to a certain point in the story and there is no story of John without Yoko," he said.
"He was hurt when people didn't either embrace Yoko or his love for Yoko, but finally he didn't care," Scardino said.
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