I am reprinting this from the thread of Whistle Gets A Second Wind, so that standing by itself one could see what began this fury of today. I wonder, what was terrible about this post?
It is at http://jimsteinman.com/messageboard/d.php?id=15230
I italicize the only reference made to Jim Cypherd.
One of Jim Cypherd's phrases spoken to me which I remember well, (I love some of his phrases) applies to a situation such as this..."Life changes, things change". Since its inception, it has been experiencing evolutions, as life gives evolutions. I think of WDTW like this: it has a message, that one could not make assumptions, that assumptions can easily be made; it has another message, that mass insanity is a phenomenon that can both originate from and be brought to children, with rebellions on either side. It also shows how one very unethical man can mislead a group of people to his benefit, which upsets the order of everything in their lives, and hurts all involved. The play revolves around a ruse set from a misunderstanding, which is not corrected. The absence of correction, is the very thread that pulls the elements together of the entire story.
However this story gets told, and whoever would heed its messages is bound to love the music, and be enchanted by the children on the stage. If the adults are cast well, I would be glad to see it, and I do not know what could be "disneyfied" of it, when Disney themselves put the atrocity of Anastasia on the screen. I ran into one of the men of Disney's heyday yesterday and listened to him talk, and he discussed the ways that Disney was in the forties, and does not consider the Disney of today to be the same. One thing he said was, "They talk too much. In the old Disney, not the Corporate Disney, which they are now, the characters talked just as much as they had to, not all the time. I see Disney things now and say to myself, that there is much, too much talking and noise. It's nothing like Disney used to be." I paraphrase, but this is what he said and I wasn't able to catch his name, as I was eavesdropping on a conversation he was having in public with someone else.
I don't like "Anastasia" because it should never have been made, and as made, has elements which are highly misleading, things that are too accurate for my comfort, mixed together in a story about swindlers accidentally stumbling on the genuine article. In it, Rasputin is depicted as a would-be murderer, when his nature was the exact opposite, and whose death brought by the success of several sequential murder attempts, is the single most important element that brought the Russian Revolution to the fore. Vilifying Rasputin in this Disney production, is horrifyingly political, and horrifying at all, because this man had a large family who must bear the burden of false information about their ancestor.
Whistle Down The Wind stands on its own without such analogies, and if a cast is made which supports the story, it should be as successful and wonderful as anticipated.
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