Inferno the Musical: Can You Take the Heat?

So as I was searching for this fortnight's Dante post, I stumbled upon something dark and scary.  Evidently there is a musical dedicated to Dante's Inferno.    In its own website's words the musical  "“Inferno” is the story of a young person navigating the moral vagaries of modern life, who by force of both human nature and events walks on the sordid side of the city of man, while trying to avoid eternal damnation for his deeds."  

The standard description of the musical makes it sound like it might be somewhat faithful to the plot of the comedy, in a similar way that Sandow Birk's film is faithful to the text.  There is a brief hope that the musical would be a modernized version that would speak to current generations through song and dance.  It had the potential to be tolerable, if it wasn't too cheesy. That hope is dashed by both the next line "Inferno is a musical dramady loosley based on Dante’s Inferno." (spelling errors aside a loosely based rendition is bad news) and then the brief glimpses of the libretto that are on the website reveal Dante and Minos chatting, like poker buddies, in hell.  For example, when Minos asks Dante why he is in hell the response is as follows:

DANTE
Oh Minos, we get so bored with heaven. Its one curse is a lack of drama. We need a distraction. An entertainment that, yea, still may answer some curious questions we have.
God cares not of our movements so busy is he with coming up with new ways and theories to keep the scientists down on earth from discovering truths which reason will not bear.
He’s given them string theory to ponder and the Higgs Boson. But is having a damned time trying to keep the big bang idea from falling apart. He never thinks these things through-who would if he were all powerful-and then has to play pick up with the humans-they think so much. Dark matter, accelerating expansion of the universe, all manner of strategies to keep them from having to ponder what really happened—that he created it all in a day and spent the next six eating Cheetos and playing with it like a video game. When you’re all powerful, you do get bored.

I suppose there is something to be said... wait, no, there is really no way to justify the above.  Between the obvious disregard for the text, the disdain for the attitude of the time it was written in, the apathy of the religious feelings that the text is supposed to speak to and the truly terrifying attempts at making puns about God "having a damned time," the justifications for this text belong somewhere between idiocy and treacherous fraud.

It's possible that I'm being particularly hard on this musical for unjust reasons, but in my own defense its existence has been in the back of my mind for a couple of days now.  (I started this fortnight's research during a lull in a paper I was writing.)  One of the things that really upsets me, is that the quote from above is supposedly from a work in progress, with various copyrights from 2010, 2011 and 2012. 

The problem here is that in 2009 in the NYC Fringe Festival there was another musical called "Inferno The New Rock Musical""Hell Has Never Been so Hot!" (warning: that website gives you a sample of music.)


Now first of all I can't tell if the two shows are related at all.  But if they are, this older version actually seems a little more palatable.  Firstly it was for a fringe festival, so it was supposed to be an interesting idea, tried in a low tech way, and only run for a short period.  What is really actually cool about the 2009 version, is that  the music is findable (they have merch!,) the lyrics are all there on the site, and the lyrics are actually legitimate in regards to the text.  Each Canto has its own lyrics and while certainly not verbatim, they are based on a translation and they preserve the text.

And again he spoke
From the ship he steered
 “Abandon All Hope
You who enter here”

“Charon it is willed”      
You know you must oblige
The ferryman held still
With wheels of flames in his eyes

We reached the shore
Through the cursing crowd
The earth shook just before
I fell to the ground

Ok, so the rhyme scheme is still cheesy and it is extremely over simplified.  But it picks up the important parts of the text and show them accurately.  (It's also pretty cool that the website also has a works cited page for the musical!)

So.  Musicals from texts are usually bad.  Lord of the Rings lasted for only a very short time on the West End and in Toronto, Jane Eyre, Little Women, Jekyll and Hyde etc are often decent representations of their respective books but as far as most musical goers are concerned they often have a couple good songs but are not great musicals. The top example of Inferno the Musical, the one we can look forward to in the future (if it survives),  is not even a good representation of the text, in fact it completely mutates the text until it is a mockery of itself.  The second, Inferno the New Rock Musical, seem interesting.  It looks like it was intended to represent the text, to convey the meaning and to be an experiment.  All in all I'd spend 15$ to see the second, and I will run away from the first as if the Harpies were chasing me.