The Audience They Are A-Divided
Letters to the editor flow into the Union Tribune yesterday regarding a somewhat more negative review of the new musical "The Times They Are A-Changin'." Critic George Varga takes the musical to task for reducing Dylan's
"rich body of work to a simplistic, plot-challenged exercise in warm, fuzzy nostalgia."
Varga also feels that:
"The target audience for this Broadway-bound show, apparently, is graying baby boomers for whom authenticity matters less than entertainment value. And this audience may like the idea of Dylan a lot better than it does Dylan himself..."
His assertations result in several letters to the editor, some defending the play for trying something new, others applauding Varga for defending the complexity of Dylan's songwriting. I still know that I would hate this play, but the overall tone of Varga's criticism seems to be that Dylan's work is untouchable, that it is upon some higher plane of art that shouldn't be subjected to this. As someone who is familiar with the twists and turns that Dylan himself put his music through, (listen to Live At Budokan, where his songs are given the Vegas "Big Band" treatment, for example,) there is no reason to afford the man this off-limits stature, since he has never believed in it himself. As reader Dolores Christensen points out:
If Dylan wanted to never change his work, he wouldn't have added electric guitar and the Band to his performances.
Dylan has demonstrated over the years that he has an incredibly perverse and inscrutable sense of humor. There is no way that this show negatively affects his reputation, if anything it results in criticism like Varga's, which glorifies his work even more. That's what makes all the bad Dylan material from the past four decades still remain intriguing to people: you're never quite sure if you're in a a big joke or not.
