| I agree. It's fair to say that the direction is the ultimate culprit here, not finding a way to pull the disparate quartet of stars into the same show. It felt cast by committee and staged with almost generic sense of time and place. The stock-like set, not a design debacle but no help, contributing. We're all bone weary from discussing the score demands, and I'm in the camp that found the direction of the book far more of an obstacle than anything in performance. Recast, the show will still be the show, the staging mostly a replica of what's there now (without a shut-down, it's hard to fathom a major set of changes, which would cost a lot in rehearsal.) Two friends who went over the weekend, rooting for everything about it including the star, basically had the same feelings, the actors not much of the discussion, only the disappointing material and its handling. |