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| re: Harold Prince: The Director's Life and the case for original productions | |
| Posted by: BigM 03:12 pm EST 12/02/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Harold Prince: The Director's Life and the case for original productions - showtunetrivia 12:52 pm EST 12/02/18 | |
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| As a former director, I have to chime in on this. Theater is an art, and art depends on spontaneous creation. Every new production of a show depends on the talents and impulses of a new group of artists. If you try to duplicate the original production over and over, what you end up with will be stale and regimented. When Bertolt Brecht was alive, his productions at his German theater, the Berliner Ensemble, were praised as breathtaking and innovative. After he died, while the theater was still run by members of his family, they duplicated his productions and the theater was widely scorned as a lifeless museum. You can see this with Hal Prince himself; his 1987 revival of Cabaret, featuring one of the original actors, was widely panned, and thought to lack the excitement of the original - even though it featured not only that actor but the same director and the same designs. In general, I've found that musicals are especially dependent on the chemistry of the original artists, and are often customized to those artists' particular skills. New productions must be tailored to a whole new team of people. | |
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| re: Harold Prince: The Director's Life and the case for original productions | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 10:03 pm EST 12/02/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Harold Prince: The Director's Life and the case for original productions - BigM 03:12 pm EST 12/02/18 | |
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| Variety summarized the New York critical to Prince's 1987 revival thus: five enthusiastic, seven favorable, two mixed, and five unfavorable. And the original won awards and had a long run but it got very mixed reviews. Variety did not summarize nearly as reviews of the original, but it ranked those as four favorable and two unfavorable. I've just re-read a bunch of the original reviews, and it was certainly not universally hailed, not even close. The original West Side Story is often remembered as having gotten somewhat mixed notices, but I'd say that it got a much more favorable critical response than the original Cabaret. I do think that the 1987 production was problematic in various ways, including rewrites that didn't work all that, but then I don't think the Mendes-Marshall version works all that well. I'm not sure that I would have felt the original worked all that well, even as I'm sure I would have admired many aspects of it. |
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| Let's try that again | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 12:22 am EST 12/03/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Harold Prince: The Director's Life and the case for original productions - AlanScott 10:03 pm EST 12/02/18 | |
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| I hope that I don't leave out words that should be there this time. :( Variety summarized the New York critical response to Prince's 1987 revival thus: five enthusiastic, seven favorable, two mixed, and five unfavorable. And the original won awards and had a long run but it got very mixed reviews. Variety did not classify nearly as many reviews of the original, but it ranked those it did cover as four favorable and two unfavorable. I've just re-read a bunch of the original reviews, and it was certainly not universally hailed, not even close. The original West Side Story is often remembered as having gotten somewhat mixed notices, but I'd say that it got a much more favorable critical response than the original Cabaret. I do think that the 1987 production was problematic in various ways, including rewrites that didn't work all that well, but then I don't think the Mendes-Marshall version works all that well. I'm not sure that I would have felt the original worked all that well, even as I'm sure I would have admired many aspects of it. |
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| re: Harold Prince: The Director's Life and the case for original productions | |
| Posted by: peter3053 03:38 pm EST 12/02/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Harold Prince: The Director's Life and the case for original productions - BigM 03:12 pm EST 12/02/18 | |
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| While it's absolutely true that the text of a show should be open to re-invention, it is also true that it's been hard to find better productions of Hal Prince shows than his original direction. Not that anyone can re-invent the spark that made those productions work simply by reproducing staging, but sometimes the re-imaginings seem to miss the way he blended the theatricality with the idea in a very tightly focused way, a way that brought an engaging tension to the evening. Has there ever been a better version of Follies than his? A Little Night Music? Sweeney Todd? Evita? Phantom of the Opera? Could there ever be? On a related point, remember the splendid recreation of the original Oklahoma by the North Carolina (I think) students and staff, broadcast on TV? We saw not a museum piece but a timeless one, still alive with the joy of fresh collaboration circa 1943. Everything is possible! |
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| re: Harold Prince: The Director's Life and the case for original productions | |
| Posted by: fosse76 02:18 pm EST 12/03/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Harold Prince: The Director's Life and the case for original productions - peter3053 03:38 pm EST 12/02/18 | |
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| "In a related point, remember the splendid recreation of the original Oklahoma by the North Carolina (I think) students and staff, broadcast on TV? We saw not a museum piece but a timeless one, still alive with the joy of fresh collaboration circa 1943." Actually, I thought it looked very much like the college production that it was. But since not even my parents were alive at the time of the original, I wouldn't know how the original looked anyway. |
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