ELVIS – The Musical
Cast/Band: Grahame Patrick, Alexander Gregor, The Stamps Quartet,
Seen on 12.4.2015

Plot:
ELVIS – The Musical takes us on a small tour through Elvis Presley‘s (Grahame Patrick) life and his music, accompanied by original photo and video footage.

ELVIS – The Musical was a great tribute concert, but an abysmal musical. Why they felt the need at all to turn it into a musical, I will never understand. But if you ignore that part and instead just enjoy the music (which is the main reason I want to watch a show like this anyway), you’ll have a wonderful evening.

Grahame Patrick is a good impersonator, especially when it comes to the faster, more rock-y numbers, but less when it comes to the slow numbers that require soft crooning – which is probably why they featured only very few of those (they didn’t even play Love Me Tender for example). Since there are enough good songs that you don’t necessarily need the slow numbers, this certainly wasn’t a problem.

The people around me obviously didn’t seem to mind either. The way people started screaming and climbed over seats to hug Patrick, when he walked down into the audience, was proof of that, though I have to admit that it really weirded me out. I’m just not prone to this super-fandom and if you consider that Patrick is not actually Elvis himself, it gets weirder still.

The biggest irritation of the evening, though, was the attempt to structure it as a musical. It starts off well enough – with news clippings about his death, and then a couple of short scenes in the studio where he was discovered – even though the unironic over-emphasis on “we need a white singer who can sing like a black guy” in those scenes was already a little weird (later-on they mention that Elvis was heavily influenced by gospel and as representatives of that traditionally black music style, they present The Stamps Quartet. That doesn’t make things better).

But halfway through the show, they abandon the musical concept entirely. There is no narration anymore, there is just music. Which isn’t bad per se, but it does mean that Elvis’ wife and daughter were almost entirely left out (they do show a couple of pictures of them) and that drugs aren’t mentioned at all. In fact, if you don’t know it any better, you could leave that musical thinking that he had died of a simple heart failure after a long, pretty much scandal-free, successful career. And that is a weird and lopsided image of his life.

If they had made a proper musical of it (one that doesn’t leave out the dark patches) or if they had just stuck with a simple tribute concert, I would have enjoyed it without reservations. But even if the format was wonky, the show was great.

Summarizing: Cool and entertaining.