| This could well be the death of Encores. | |
| Last Edit: ShowGoer 08:39 am EDT 03/17/22 | |
| Posted by: ShowGoer 08:26 am EDT 03/17/22 | |
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| I wouldn’t have thought it possible in this time, where many are feeling kindly towards theater getting back on its feet, for a show to have worse word of mouth and more ill will out of the gate than The Tap Dance Kid… but this 3-hour production of “The Life”, one which proudly, from the director’s mouth, stripped all the humor from the show, and rewrote the orchestrations so that Cy Coleman no longer sounds like Cy Coleman, seems to have done the trick. It’s not merely anecdotal either- aside from the people who tried to warn me away after the invited dress (“spare yourself the time and the agony”), aside from the hordes leaving at intermission of the 3-hour show (with a 90-minute first act), aside from the mostly scathing reviews on the other board.. and it really is as bad as all that- it also has one of the lowest ratings I’ve seen on the audience-based Show-Score website… lower than any show on Broadway, and lower than any other currently running show I could find except for “Perfect Crime”. (Multiple reviews use the words “excruciating” and “indulgent”, and one of the more charitable ones calls it “Porterized”.). This whole new mission was probably clearly a mistake, but maybe it could’ve been implemented better with surer hands, other initial choices of shows and directors, or a different artistic director… but even if they had possibly more intriguing options such as, say, Lila Neugebauer reinventing “Chess”, Liesl Tommy doing “Jelly’s Last Jam”, or Sergio Trujillo finally showing NYC what “The Mambo Kings” would’ve been like – who thought it was a good idea to make such a drastic change coming out of the pandemic, when after years of not spending discretionary income on theater, people are being choosier than ever about what they see? As far as I know they didn’t commit to this lineup until last spring, so they should’ve reversed course and done a variation of their usual - if not “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Love Life” with (so-called) non-traditional casting, then maybe a slightly different take on a Gershwin, a Cole Porter, and maybe a Jerry Herman or Kander & Ebb. Those would’ve been easier sells, they would’ve sat better with the long-time subscribers, and they wouldn’t have turned off the new younger audiences as well as the old. As it now stands, after this disaster and the shambles this season has been - and regardless of how professional and/or traditional “Into the Woods” might be, well-cast as it is - unless City Center does a huge mea culpa and basically says “We made a mistake” (“Our hearts were in the right place but we did too much too soon at the wrong time, and implemented it poorly”)… who in the WORLD is going to resubscribe for another season of this, at subscription prices that average between $300-$400? Hardly a soul. |
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| Previous: | re: Ronald Tavel - comedywest 10:29 am EDT 03/17/22 |
| Next: | in contrast, here's the ecstatic NYT piece from 1997, "Why Whisper About It? 'The Life' Is a Joy" - Chazwaza 11:19 pm EDT 03/17/22 |
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