I'm happy you clarified. As I said, I have no problem with your (and anyone's) expression of opinions, whether I agree with them or not, but the words you chose to use (tamper, excuse, uninvited, etc) suggested more than an opinion.
You ask why, why, why. The answer (not one I'm expecting you to embrace) is that some people believe that understanding a play in the present context and from a different perspective is a good thing. Does it always work? Is it always better? No, but no writer knows whether something they write is going to be any good until folks can see it and react to it. That's one of the beauties of theatre. I'm not afraid of that. Also, I have written many times on this board that, in my view, theatre (or any art) must resonate for its audience in order to be good. Resonance is not a static attribute of a work; it changes over time and it changes depending on the audience. When we don't let it breathe, we condemn it to the museum or, more likely, the dust bin. I don't know if the revisions here were good enough. (As I acknowledged, I did not see it.) That's on Encores if they were not. But I also know that one can't judge any production by the reaction of an audience that was looking for one thing and got another. And that's how I read a lot of the reaction. If I thought I was going to see Hello Dolly and the curtain rose on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (or v/v :-) ), you could not accurately gauge the production based on my reaction.
Finally, as you quoted, my comment about museum pieces etc began with "I don't think...." I'm not sure how you got from my words that I was attributing them to you. I was not and I am sorry if something about the way I wrote it made you think that.
And finally finally, if you have any actual interest in understanding the answer to all of your "why"s, the link from Chuck Mee discusses it much better than I ever could. |
