It’s becoming pretty clear to me, and this is almost too disturbing to be funny, that Val Kilmer has a serious Moses fetish.
It’s not like he needs the money, having made his name largely through big-budget blockbusters. And he’s not hard up for work, either: Since his excellent performance in 2005’s “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” Kilmer has completed five films, with seven others in varying stages of production.
So why, against presumably better judgment — the man had to suspect how bad this was going to be — did he choose to star in a musical theater rendition of “The Ten Commandments” produced by a fashion designer and scored with operatic pop music?
The show, performed at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood in 2004, was released on DVD in November despite negative reviews from critics.
And judging from the DVD, those reviews were warranted. Yet Kilmer looks entranced throughout, wearing the dazed grin of a star-struck child as he plays Moses a second time following his voiceover work in “The Prince of Egypt.”
Director Robert Iscove chose to present the story of Moses with no spoken dialogue whatsoever, relying instead on non-stop singing and massively overstated stage histrionics. The “rock opera” format may have worked for Andrew Lloyd Webber; here, it fails to develop the characters or plot into anything more than a self-indulgent reminder of an already familiar story.
The music, composed by Patrick Leonard (responsible for many of Madonna’s hits), is corny as can be, with the synthesized guitars, pop drumbeats and hollered vocals actually lending the production a bizarre sense of televangelism.
Singers like Adam Lambert, who plays Joshua, belt out lines with a reckless abandon that would make Michael Bolton and Celine Dion blush. Fortunately for us, Kilmer favors a form of haughty talk-singing to conceal his vocal shortcomings.
Making matters worse, infantile, matter-of-fact lyrics reduce the biblical story to sub-Disney levels.
The commandments themselves are rewritten into lines like “Never take things that belong to someone else” and “Never want things that are not yours,” while Moses’ meditations on social class produce profound statements such as: “What is the hidden meaning contained in a name/ Why does it make us better than, less than, or the same?”
Like the music, the choreography and costumes are overblown to the point of absurdity, with at least a little male eroticism thrown in for good measure. As half-naked actors sporting grade-school level “Egyptian garb” prance and pose on stage, the cameras do something unexpected: They slowly pan up and down the men’s torsos, showing their bare chests expand and contract with every gulp of air.
Another quirk is the musical’s questionable use of non-white actors in desert scenes, juxtaposed with its use of almost exclusively white actors inside Egypt. Perhaps skin color provided Iscove with an easy way to show a major change of scenery, but compounding Eastern-sounding dance music with dark-skinned desert goddesses reeks of exotification.
To say the characters are cardboard cutouts would be to take this work too seriously; many of them aren’t even identified by name, let alone made interesting or credible.
In a press pamphlet accompanying the DVD, fashion designer and show producer Max Azria says, “I didn’t choose to be a producer — I feel I was chosen. This is a mission of love.”
God help Azria if he truly feels some higher power had a role in his producing this musical.
This is more the 11th plague than anything else.
“The Ten Commandments: The Musical” ($12.88, available at Amazon.com.)