RE: Entwined: Tales of Good and Grimm (2012 to Present)
I'm home from my vacation, so I can finally offer my thoughts on Entwined. First however, I found this entry on the official park blog all about the renovations to the stage in Das Festhaus. Apparently, they put a lot of thought and effort into creating a performance space that has more flexability and possability with the intent of offering more elaborate shows than the traditional Octoberfest shows of the past. They talk about new lighting, sound, backstage areas, trap doors, larger stage area, etc, and they suggest that this is to bring the performance space up to a more theatrically appropriate level. It's worth reading here: http://www.buschgardensvablog.com/willkommen-new-stage-das-festhaus
I saw Entwined four times last week. On first viewing the show, I didn't hate it, but I thought it was not something the general public would take to. I found it to be a strange attempt at a Broadway style show using preexisting music that was inappropriate for the style and scale of the venue. Let me also say that I'm a fan of musical theater and theme park shows, and my initial reaction watching Entwined was that this is a show that only a gay musical theater fan could relate to (and I'm qualified to know that). The lack of a strong reaction from the audience told me that something was wrong even if I liked aspects of the show.
Here are some of the strong and weak points I noted. Firstly, the audience has come to expect an Octoberfest style show based on decades of seeing one in that building. That's a challenge to overcome when an entirely different style show is presented. The building is huge, much of the audience is at a distance, and people are dining, not fixated on a story or a single character, so the Octoberfest shows worked well. For the same reasons, a Broadway style show does not work well in this venue. Theater In the Round as a style of theater can work very well but the lack of a large set requires a strong performance and a compelling story, and it requires the audience to be more intimate. The new Festhaus stage floor is much too large, so even viewers up front feel distant from the featured performer when he or she is across the stage, and the venue itself is too large so that viewers in the back are totally disengaged from the performance.
Similarly, the performance space could work if a spectacle was presented there, not a show that focuses on solo performances and story. A show like Imaginique, Kinetix, or Katonga from BGT could work. They are flashy and large productions. The second half of Entwined worked better than the first half because it focused more on ensemble dance numbers and acrobats and less on solo performances, character, and story.
By the second viewing, I began to accept and understand the show more. For a story and character based show, there are too many characters that are not part of the story and just add confusion. The ensemble should have been restricted to group numbers like the gingerbread men, the gnomes, and the red capes, not additional superfluous characters such as goldilocks, rapunzel, and the pied piper. They had no significance to the story, and they were distracting.
On the second viewing I really liked the opening song about believing in fairy tales, Pure Imagination from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and the closing number about overcoming fears and driving on. These were strong musically and came across well. On the third and fourth viewings I continued to appreciate the individual performers and to find the better segments very enjoyable, and I forgave the rest off the show as being a big misunderstanding of how to create a show that utilized the space appropriately.
Another underlying problem with the creation of this show is that it's very difficult to use preexising songs in the context of a story and have it be believable. Songs for the theater are written for specific characters and stories, and they don't feel right when they are shoehorned into another story and set of characters. That's a herculean challenge that is difficult for any producer to overcome. It works to mixed results in some recent Broadway musicals like Mamma Mia and Billy Joel's Moving Out, but it's very difficult even for the experts to pull off, let alone a theme park show.
Entwined could work if it was moved to the Globe Theater in England where it could be fully staged and the audience could be more engaged, if the story was strengthened, and if the songs were more appropriate to the story and characters or if they were all original songs. The show did grow on me tremendously for it's strong points, hence my wanting to watch it a third and fourth time, but I can see from the weak reaction, that it is not going over as well with the general public who come to be entertained while they eat.
Interestingly, I didn't see this as a children's show. I saw it as a misguided family show. It could have been a show for all ages like a Disney production or a musical like Into the Woods, something that uses fairy tale characters while being mature and entertaining. I kept finding myself remembering Katonga from BGT or Alure from SeaWorld Orlando and wishing Entwined could have been more like that, if not Imaginique, Kinetix, or any Cirque style show.
