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Anthem – the musical This io9 piece reports that a musical based on Ayn Rand’s Anthem will open, in New York, on May 29th.
There is a website, where you can read this:
Anthem is told through the words of Equality 7-2521, in diary form. Equality 7-2521 is a young man who lives in the future after a time called the “Great Re-birth”. The city in which he lives is surrounded by an immense forest which is thought to be impassable due to the fact it is filled with wild animals. This is a simple and isolated society in which all technology is carefully controlled and in its most primitive state. All awareness and understanding of individualism has been lost and words such as ‘I’, ‘me’, or ‘mine’, do not exist in spoken or written language, therefore, nearly the entire story is told in the ‘first person plural’. Independent thoughts and/or actions are strictly prohibited by law and therefore, everyone lives and works in groups as a collective body also known as the “Great We”. …
It will be interesting to see how well it does.
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They’d have been better off making this into a movie rather than Atlas Shrugged.
It will be interesting.
I hope it does well, like probably many others,
it was the first Ayn Rand book I read.
@GC – They’d have been better off making Atlas Shrugged into a movie too, rather than three.
I read Anthem so long ago I can barely remember it; I suppose it’s time for a re-read. But I don’t see how it can make a good musical (and I’m a huge fan of musicals). It’s not really a love story, which is at the core of most of them, and there don’t seem to be a whole lot of places in it where a song would fit. Also, if you go to the website (linked in Brian’s original article) there are snips of six of the songs, and I didn’t find any of them appealing.
Free audio recording:
https://librivox.org/
A musical has already been done – it was called 2112.
I think I read this recently. I probably paid no attention to the author’s name.
Isn’t that a fair description of parts of Detroit?
“It’s not really a love story, which is at the core of most of them”
Well there is one, of sorts, in there. The part of Liberty 5-3000 could be fleshed out without entirely losing the sense of the thing. And I can see how, musically, it could start off all grimly mechanical and dissonant, giving way to brighter, melodic, stuff towards the end. It could work really well (and I’m not a fan of musicals at all). But I won’t hold my breath.
Yep. If anyone is interested, the story is included in “The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack” on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Fourth-Science-Fiction-Megapack-ebook/dp/B0085TK53K
Only 99c. I suspect many of these stories are likely out of copyright but it still seems pretty good value to me.