Totally agree with you, Scott. I saw it yesterday, and though I thought it was *good* then, the more I think about it, the more I'm thinking it really wasn't.
I, too, saw it years (and years, and years...) ago onstage and LOVED it. Not that I'm a huge musical theater fan, but of the 10 or so different musicals I've seen onstage over the years, it is by far my favorite. Never did quite get Andrew Lloyd Weber's stuff. Sondheim just speaks to me, for lack of a better way to put it.
So this version was a disappointment, to say the least.
I thought Johnny Depp had a pretty good singing voice, actually. But again, when I first saw it, the Crane School of Music (part of my college) put it on, and some of the folks in it went on to be professional singers in various venues, so they were fantastic. The orchestra wasn't too shabby, either.
Tim Burton made some directorial choices that left me cold. The extreme gore being the biggest offender. Of course on stage, it isn't nearly so bloody, and most of the macabre stuff is left to the imagination. That's always the better way to go, IMO. When you're looking away in horror instead of looking at it dead-on and imagining the horrors, you're missing, somehow, just how twisted it all is.
I got my first clue it maybe wasn't so good when I sat down in my seat on the third day of its opening and I was the first one in the theater with less than a half hour to showtime (hey - I like to get me dead-center seat, you know?) And then, when the titles rolled, the theater was maybe half-full at best. I thought "uh-oh." At this rate, the thing won't make it a month. At least not in my little podunky town.