| Addressing things you wrote in your replies as well as your first post | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 06:17 am EST 02/01/21 | |
| In reply to: What was it like when Madeline Kahn was fired from Twentieth Century? - bobby2 12:27 am EST 02/01/21 | |
|
|
|
| This is way too long. It was announced immediately as a full-time permanent takeover. The story made the front page of the Post the day after the takeover, with a photo of Judy Kaye on the cover (perhaps with John Cullum and Imogene Coca but I'm not positive). It was pretty prominently featured in the News. The Times reported the story but not very prominently. I'm guessing the playbills were not changed till the second week. I think the marquee was changed within a few days at most. I don't remember it seeming all that shocking at the time. Perhaps this was because I'd seen it with Kahn, and I didn't think she gave a great performance. I didn't think she gave an awful performance, but certainly not great. In your reply to Michael_Portantiere, you wrote, “They'd never fire someone like that today. The box office would take such a hit. (As did Twentieth Century's)" It didn’t. It neither went appreciably up nor appreciably down. The week Kaye took over, it actually went up a small amount. Then it went down a bit for two weeks (but those were bad weeks on Broadway generally with most everything down), then it went back up a bit, and that was the way it continued. A bit up and and a bit down and then a bit up, back and forth. The long-term overall trend was generally down but there is nothing odd about that as it never had really become a big hit in the first place with Kahn. It had never played a sold-out week with Kahn. The only sold-out week it would ever play was Christmas-New Year’s after it had been playing 10 months and was generally doing poorly. It had its highest gross that week, which is invariably the best week of the year on Broadway, and set a house record. But then, as with most shows that are not hot tickets, it went way down after that week. But the producers were probably already planning to close in March. If it had been doing better, they might have needed to replace John Cullum, who was audibly suffering vocally by November or December. He took a vacation (I think it was three weeks) in December, perhaps partly in hopes that his voice would recover, but it didn’t. Hal Prince believed that if Kahn had stayed in the show, it would have closed much earlier. He said audiences were generally not leaving happy, there were many walkouts, and word of mouth was bad because of Kahn being unable to summon the energy to play the show full out at most performances. I know people who felt she was brilliant, but maybe they saw one of her good performances. Others have said she seemed to be walking through it. I felt somewhere in between. It didn’t seem to me that she was walking through it. If anything, she seemed to be working too hard to physicalize things but in a sort of small, tight, tense way. She did end up seeming smaller than most everyone around her and also just a tad underpowered vocally. I was sitting in the second row on the house right aisle. Lily Garland’s drawing room was generally (stage) left of center. So I was seated very close to where she played many of her scenes. Prince felt her performance was too small, and, as I said, it did seem small to me in comparison with the very big performances from everyone else, but perhaps because I was so close it didn’t read to me as walking through it. Perhaps further back, it would have. There were places where her weirdness just seemed wrong for the show and the character and not funny to me. There is no way to know if Prince was right that business would have started to fall substantially if Kahn had remained in the show, as bad word of mouth continued (if, indeed, it was bad). It certainly doesn’t seem to have been great as the show never played a sold-out week and fairly soon after the opening it seemed clear that word of mouth was not overcoming the somewhat mixed reviews. Most shows that aren’t big hits are soon on a generally downward spiral. Would the downward spiral have been faster and worse if Kahn had remained in the show? My sense is that the show would not have done better if Kahn had stayed in it, but I can’t say I’m sure that it would have done notably worse. The other question is whether it would have gotten better reviews and better initial word-of-mouth if it had opened with Judy Kaye, as Prince believed. Again, we’ll never know. I certainly felt that the whole show was much better with Judy Kaye, but I have no idea if it would have made that much difference to the reviews. I do know that the audience response seemed very enthusiastic the five times I saw it between May and September. When I saw it in October or November, the house was far from full, and that by itself hurt the show. It was broad farce and it needed big houses. At a return in February during a week when business suddenly jumped back up a bit and the orchestra at least was packed at a Sunday matinee, it played well again even with Cullum clearly having vocal problems and without Kevin Kline. In your reply to Chromolume, you wrote, "That bio of her a few years ago made it sound like she was dating one of the producers and the stress of that relationship added to her instability at the time (and maybe a key to her being fired.)" It was an actor. |
|
| reply | |
|
|
|
| Previous: | re: The Broadway firing that affected me most deeply ... - Singapore/Fling 03:56 pm EST 02/01/21 |
| Next: | I had tickets to see Kahn and ended up seeing Kaye - aleck 11:50 am EST 02/01/21 |
| Thread: |
|
Time to render: 0.039569 seconds.