The Theater Blog

October 17, 2007

The horror, of course, is that the sheer energy of crap like Legally Blonde and a single thematic song - in that case "Oh My God" - can drive a show to a lot of audience for a long time. And something much more ambitious and thoughtful, like A Catered Affair, will have a hard time seeing Week 8, if they are ever reckless enough to open this on Broadway.

The thing is, from the perspective of the show producers, they see Middle America in San Diego every night rising to their feet and applauding, so what are they to assume? The lack of restraint by audiences is frustrating as someone who wants to feel that rising to my feet for a performance means something profound and is appropriately special to the actor(s) and director and writers. Some would say driven to nightly standing ovations for every show because they paid so much that they need to prove the money was earned. Perhaps audiences are simply empathetic to the actors who do such a great job up there, even if they don't much like the show. Either way, how do producers on the road judge what they really have when the audience response is either walkouts or overenthusiasm?

How do any of us know what's real anymore?

The rest...

Posted by poland at 01:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 29, 2007

This is the follow-up to Monday's spoiler-free review column on Young Frankenstein, now out-of-towning in Seattle. Don't read a word if you want to maintain a show surprise, though most of it is set by the movie we all know so well.

ACT ONE
Scene 1: A Village In Transylvania, 1934
"Frankenstein Is Dead, The Happiest Town In Town"

The rest...

Posted by poland at 01:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 27, 2007

The thrill and the horror of Young Frankenstein is that it, unlike The Producers, has the feel of the giant machine shows that have been hitting Broadway in recent years. For instance, the current Grease revival - generated not by the need for a revival, but as a guaranteed pre-sale based on a television contest that theoretically made intimate celebrities of the new Danny & Sandy. (I can’t wait for the all-Real World/Road Rules revival of Spring Awakening in a few years.) Or the insultingly bad, but terribly energetic turn of Legally Blonde from a teen girl cult movie into a teen girl cult Broadway show. Once we learned that Disney knew how to make a Broadway show as special as its family films, we can now expect hits when they make the transfer (even if Tarzan, their first non-musical movie turned musical theater show, flopped.)

Some of these shows, including the jukebox musicals, reach well beyond their roots. The Lion King does. So does Jersey Boys. And of course, The Producers. For me, Spamalot is the example of where the line is clearest. The show is at its best when it uses the Python movie as a starting point for its wonderful musical hall style humor, way off the narrative. The show is at its worst when pandering to the audience that is expecting to see “It’s just a flesh wound” or “Pink… no blue… agghhhhh!” Some moments just don’t transfer. And I am pleased to report that Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan had the good sense to realize that the little girl on the see-saw flying back into her bed was just not going to make it as anything but a laugh of recognition in their show and left it out.

In point of fact, Young Frankenstein does a pretty damned good job of walking that line. Reading the reviews in Seattle after first seeing the show on Friday, I was surprised how unilaterally they all seemed to argue that the show suffered from the “already know the lines” syndrome, especially in kicking at some of the performances. Not I. I was actually quite pleased to find that six of the seven major performers really did find their own space in creating these legendary characters for the stage, even when uttering the same lines.

The rest...

Posted by poland at 01:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sept 5, 2007

There is no drama like theater people throwing gossip around about the latest show they hope goes down the drain. When shows fail, the gossip is "I told you so." When the gossiped about shows hit, they suddenly forget that there was any fuss at all.

The latest show to get bashed and bashed hard is Disney "The Little Mermaid," now in a pre-Broadway run in Denver';s Ellie Caukins Opera House. Variety's David Rooney shredded the show and soon after, Michael Reidel, The NY Post's theater attack dog, threw the Variety review and every rumor about the show out into a spectacularly bitchy column.

So The Little Mermaid must be one dead fish, right?

Wrong.

The rest...

Posted by poland at 01:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)