2010′s Musical Thoughts #7- Bonnie & Clyde Bonnie & Clyde opened on Broadway o

2010′s Musical Thoughts #7- Bonnie & Clyde

Bonnie & Clyde opened on Broadway on December 1st, 2011. With music by Jekyll and Hyde’s Frank Wildhorn, this musical is based on the true story of the titular criminal couple as they go on their famous robbing spree in Depression-era West Texas. A side plot follows the home life of Clyde’s brother Buck (another criminal), as his religious wife Blanche tries to get him to turn himself in after he and Clyde escape from jail. I’m gonna start this off by saying this feels like the most complete Frank Wildhorn musical. Jekyll and Hyde had an incredibly rich score, but a bare-bones book that sometimes doesn’t make sense. Its universally hated 2013 revival replaced the wonderful score with new heavy metal orchestrations and screeches that really suck. Wonderland was an interesting concept for the first half of Act One then quickly became one of the worst musicals ever made. Death Note (which never went to Broadway) is, well, based on Death Note (I tend to stay away from musicals based on manga). Bonnie & Clyde just feels complete. The score is wonderful, the book does an incredible job of showing the humanity behind two of the most infamous criminals in American history, and Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan, two of the best actors working today, starred in the title roles. However, the show was slow at the box office and closed after only a four week run on Broadway. It still had an audience however, and wasn’t a complete bomb like most other Frank Wildhorn shows (it’s interesting to me that Jekyll and Hyde ran for four years and never recouped its 7 million dollar investment). What went wrong? It can be assumed audiences just saw Frank Wildhorn and immediately dismissed it. In his NYT review of the Jekyll and Hyde revival a couple of years later, Charles Isherwood referred to Frank Wildhorn as “the crabgrass of Broadway.” And after five critically panned box office bombs before Bonnie & Clyde’s debut, I would have agreed with him. However, this is different from his other works. Bonnie & Clyde is better than anything Wildhorn has done before or since, and it’s a damn shame it never got its due on Broadway.