| re: This could well be the death of Encores. | |
| Last Edit: ShowGoer 06:54 pm EDT 03/17/22 | |
| Posted by: ShowGoer 06:53 pm EDT 03/17/22 | |
| In reply to: re: This could well be the death of Encores. - PlayWiz 06:18 pm EDT 03/17/22 | |
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| I don’t have those answers but I do know that feels like what the endgame would have to be (at the very least, were she to survive this it would be one of the more stunning turnarounds in theatre administration history; I can think of several well-known names who’ve held artistic directorships at major regionals only to be let go after a season or two for merely choosing shows that didn’t get the butts in the seats, but with none of the rocking of the boat than has happened here. Picking a few things the audiences didn’t like is unfortunate, but it doesn’t show as much, for lack of a better word, contempt as does changing the entire raison d’etre of the company in the first place). Somehow she went from planning to direct Thoroughly Modern Millie - where I believe the extent of the textual changes as announced was going to be bringing on a Chinese-American playwright primarily to address the highly problematic main villainess and make that character more less racially insensitive - to mounting a season that thus far has consisted of one show whose book was fully rewritten and set in a different time period, but which at least presented most of the score as originally heard and intended…. and now another show that’s basically a top-to-bottom rewrite not just of the tone, the intent, and the dialogue, but also of the score itself, by doing away with all the original orchestrations and arrangements and trying to make the classic Cy Coleman sound come across as more authentically ‘street’ or something. (The aspect that’s been touched the least, ironically, is the lyrics, never the high point of this particular show in the first place, and a moot point now because the loud instrumentation and poor sound design here don’t give those lyrics a fair hearing anyway). Talk about ‘give an inch, take a mile’… and in so doing, not only increasingly throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but in less than a month, squandering all the benefit of the doubt and nearly all of the good will that an incoming artistic director needs to have. |
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| Previous: | re: This could well be the death of Encores. - PlayWiz 06:18 pm EDT 03/17/22 |
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