Theatre is about suspending disbelief.
Musical theatre is about suspending your disbelief by a knotted rope and pushing it off a ten foot drop.
Ghost The Musical demands that you terminate your disbelief with extreme prejudice. The only way you can watch Ghost The Musical is if you’d taken out a contract on your disbelief and hired a hitman to gun the rational, skeptical, questioning bastard down in cold blood in the shadows of a quiet back alley. Ghost The Musical is possibly the pottiest thing I’ve seen in ages. (See what I did there? Pottiest … well, it made me chuckle.)
For a start, ghosts. They don’t exist. And neither do heaven and hell. Even if those fictions had any purchase on reality – which they positively do not – then they way they are portrayed as operating in Ghost The Musical completely contradicts two thousand years of theological theorizing. It’s quite a feat to make the unbelievable, unbelievable to the Nth degree, but that’s just what this show does, impeccably.
Ghost The Musical asks us to consider the possibility that a banker could have a heart, a moral code, and a soul. Which, I think we’d all agree, is strictly beyond belief.
Ghost The Musical requires us to accept that a person baking glorified mud pies is an artist. No. I refuse to believe it. The correct term is craftsperson. Pottery is a craft. Anybody muttering about Grayson Perry can come to the pub later and we shall slug it out.
And Ghost The Musical wants us to accept the patently ridiculous idea that English people can do American accents. No. That seriously beggars belief. (Alfred Molina, Bob Hoskins, Hugh Laurie, Daniel Day Lewis … all miming! It’s patently a conspiracy, you fools.)
Ghost The Musical is from start to finish one big fibbing, fallacious, farrago of falsehoods and foolishness … and as brilliantly entertaining an evening of theatre I’ve been to in ages and one hell of an amazing spectacle.
When I tweeted I was going to The Grand to see Ghost the response was mostly along the lines of “you’ll hate it, it’s totally vacuous”. I can’t disagree with the vacuous – there’s not one redeeming credible idea or valuable insight into the present crisis of global capitalism in the whole thing – but so what? I happened to enjoy the frankly absurd and over-the-top silliness of it all. If I wanted intellectually deep and currently relevant critique I’d probably go to a library – I go to the theatre to enjoy myself and have a laugh. And laugh I certainly did (though not always at the appropriate moments, sorry!)
I didn’t see the film when it first came out – I was far too busy being a morose Marxist malcontent to bother with trashy Hollywood frivolities; I only watched films that exhibited the correct ideological line on the question of the organic composition of capital during the second Five Year Plan – so I didn’t know anything about the story. I haven’t a clue if the musical is faithful to the original or not. Does that matter? I suppose it would add layers to the experience of the show, but I don’t think it’s necessary to know the film in order to enjoy the show.
I have to admit that two days after seeing the musical I can’t recall a single bar of music or phrase from any of the songs – I couldn’t remotely hum even a chorus if my life depended on it. It’s probably the least musical musical I’ve been to (but then I never was that big a fan of Dave Stewart). But the visual impact will stay with me for a long time.
From the first few minutes of the show, when the stage seems to transform into a huge video screen and we are flying over a dark city Superman style, to the last where our hero ascends to heaven, the visual drama is absolutely stunning. It would be hard to single out a single image that impressed me most – you really have to see it to believe just how bloody impressive it is – but the bit where the baddies get dragged off to hell is beautifully done, and genuinely shocking. The scene where the hero disappears through the closed door is proper magic – I’m still trying to work out how it was done, it was very clever. And the fight scene with the subway ghost is (literally) indescribable; scary, visceral, breathtakingly violent. (In fact, anyone who thinks Ghost The Musical is simply “vacuous” should go just for that scene. I’ll be having nightmares about the subway ghost for quite some time.)
If you are looking for a couple of hours of pure escapism, where the only thought you are likely to have is trying to work out how do they do that, then Ghost The Musical is well worth the ticket price. It may be vacuous, it certainly is beyond unbelievable, and the dance routines may be inexplicable (well, I didn’t get the dancing, can someone explain?) but if you don’t leave The Grand giggling and talking about it for days then you are probably best saving your brass and going to the library and checking out the latest Owen Jones instead.