Shrek, The Musical

So I saw Shrek, The Musical, last night. It carried the same story line as the original cartoon, but was laced with a whole bunch of different jokes, gags, and of course, there was the music as well. The overall message in musical morals I got were:

1) If you're a girl waiting for your Prince, you'll have to "settle" and adapt to him.
2) If you're a "freak", that's a good thing. People will eventually learn to love you for who you are.
3) Beware of people who try and make everyone the same (more like them - ie. - short like Lord Farquaad - [btw- the 'r' in Farquadd is silent].
4) Whoever has the hardest childhood upbringing, automatically gains moral superiority and is designated the better person.
5) If you kiss him, you'll end up looking like your one true love (an ogre, most likely).

I guess I mostly agree with musical moral #5. The rest of the musical morals.... you can keep. The show was "entertaining" though.

And thinking a little more about how this fairy tale compares with others I've heard in the ever more distant, yet strangely recent past, I wonder whatever happened to those vintage princess and the frog stories where the frog aspires to be a Prince or Cinderella longs to become a more "Charming" Princess? I used to like those stories and their values a LOT better. And what happened to all those witches enchanting and casting spells on everybody? Did they ALL give up their broomsticks and kettles and turn Broadway and/or Hollywood producer?

Which brings me to previously omitted musical moral #6:

6) Our Fairy Tales need updating.

Hmmmm... that almost sounds like an attempted violation of moral #3 to me. I mean, there is a certain sameness in "universal difference", isn't there? But then, I've been down that universal "tolerance", universal "non-discrimination" road before. Of course, I was less than 6 months old at the time and couldn't tell the difference between my mother and anybody else in the room and I certainly wasn't really very concerned in finding the answers to the following pertinent questions, like "Who's going to change my diaper? Wah-h-h-h-h-h! Who's going to feed me? Wah-h-h-h-h-h!" cuz it kinda magically happened. But does anybody really believe that any Hollywood/Broadway producer types would "step up" and change my didee if I cried loud enough? I guess that's why they call them "Fairy Tales". For/with the Hollywood/Broadway crowd, teaching people about "real" responsibility is always "someone else's" problem. Maybe that why they call it "entertainment".

Shrek, the Musical. It's a fairy tale one should LOVE to hear/tell about, but one should never "kiss", (see musical moral #5). ;)