Danishes are better than muffins

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 7 Comments

Everett Collection; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Sarah Mackinnon

Jack Layton’s state funeral raised important questions such as, “What is the future of the social democratic movement in our country?” and “What happened to the rest of the Parachute Club?”

But more important, the New Democrat leader introduced to many of us the concept of the “farewell letter”: a final piece of correspondence to be released upon one’s passing. As Layton demonstrated, this is a powerful way to say goodbye, shape one’s legacy and maybe try a little bit to kiss up to voters in Quebec.

Jack’s letter is an example worth emulating—and given life’s tenuous nature, it’s never too soon to get to work on that first draft. The only problem is that few of us will depart with the accomplishments and public regard of a Jack Layton, so our letters may fall a little short as inspirational documents. For example, mine:

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Hey kids, time to walk slowly past old stuff

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 8 Comments

iStock; Getty Images; Photo illustration by Taylor Shute

After enduring the Spider-Man musical, which is neither good nor bad-good enough to warrant more words than these, we wandered through Central Park toward the Guggenheim Museum. It was time to get the kids some culture.

That’s a thing we’re supposed to do as parents: expose our children to “culture.” Enough of this having fun and enjoying everything we’re doing, kids—it’s time to walk slowly past some old stuff.

At the Louvre last summer, our family and every other tourist in Paris had the idea of heading straight for the Mona Lisa when the museum opened. At first we all walked casually. But the competitive instinct kicked in. Soon we were race-walking. Grown men were throwing out their elbows and grunting. Our boys charged ahead, weaving through the fading old ladies. They don’t remember anything about the painting but still talk about how they blew past a large Italian family on the final turn before the salon.

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Julie Taymor: The Charlie Sheen Of Broadway

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 at 3:18 PM - 1 Comment

I know stories about the Spider-Man musical have worn out their welcome even more than Charlie Sheen stories; at least we can see his show (given how often it’s on in syndication, we have to work hard to avoid it), whereas most sensible people will stay away from ever seeing Spider-Man. Still, it looks like Taymor is going to be forced out of the show she directed and co-wrote, the show where she turned a familiar pop-culture character into a side attraction.

(Update: I should clarify that the flippant Charlie Sheen comparison had to do with getting fired from a show completely built around her. Nothing to do with personal lives.)

It’s a little amazing. Plenty of directors and writers are forced out or forced to accept help, but until Bono turned against her (or that’s the impression these stories give anyway) Taymor was allowed to do virtually anything she wanted. Now the producers are finally running it like a real show where you replace people and write new songs and so on, but it may be too late; it is, if nothing else, one of the worst-produced shows in theatre history, since it’s the producer’s job to make sure they do this kind of thing before too much time and money has been wasted.

For those who find the Spider-Man story dull now but find theatre tryout stories interesting — I do, because even though I didn’t see the shows, I love how exposed and public the whole process is — I’d like to call attention again to this 1993 New York Times story on the Spider-Man of the early ’90s, the musical version of The Red Shoes. The producer of that show fired many key people, including director Susan Schulman (a recent fixture at Stratford, who has done a lot of their musical revivals) and re-tooled the whole thing from a quasi-feminist reinterpretation of the movie to a more straightforward re-telling of the film’s story. But though the show bombed and lost a ton of money, at least the producer was doing what producers of such a big show are supposed to do when there are creative conflicts: step in and take one side instead of the other, and retool the whole thing in keeping with the side that wins.

Spidenfreude

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 2:02 PM - 4 Comments

Not my word, but the only word possible to describe the reviews for Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark.

When I saw it back in January, I wondered in print if the critics would respect the endlessly-postponed “opening” date. Most of them have chosen to review it on the previous announced official opening date, and I think that was the right thing. First, the show was taking advantage of the lack of reviews to rake in money; with few notices to tell the public that the show was bad, it functioned as a heavily-publicized, critic-proof production. The nastiness of the reviews, while deserved, might have something to do with critics’ suspicion that Julie Taymor and company were trying to take advantage of an old tradition (not reviewing the show until the official opening) by postponing the opening until it was too late to stop it from becoming a long-running hit. It might still be too late, but it’s worth pointing out that it’s not a good show.

Second, the reason critics wait until previews are over is that a show is supposed to get fixed during those early performances, and the show a critic sees in tryouts might be different, and worse, than the show that opens. But the amazing thing about Spider-Man is that despite having the most previews of any musical, it doesn’t appear to have changed that much. Taymor has spent a lot of time tweaking the special effects, and the ending, but the songs — the things that most need to be cut and changed and added during previews — appear to have remained mostly unchanged; Bono and the Edge weren’t there for most of the preview period, and when they came back, they reportedly added “no new songs.” When I was there, it was obvious that the score was not good and that there were severe problems with even hearing the score: everyone complained about the sound system, which rendered most of the lyrics as unintelligible mush. Yet a month later, preview audiences were still hearing the same songs and still complaining about the bad sound system that wouldn’t let them hear the lyrics. If the show isn’t really going to be substantially fixed, then there’s less necessity for critics to wait.

If the show does not do well, and I still have this fear that it might yet prove indestructible, the refusal to re-think the score may turn out to have been the biggest problem. It’s as if Taymor thought the real highlights of the show would be the flying sequences and other effects, and they just aren’t; people have been flying in the theatre for over 100 years and there’s only so many times the audience can be “wowed” by such sequences in one show. Most musicals depend on great numbers. They need a good strong book, too, which this ain’t got, but they also need to have a couple of showstopping numbers, or why have we even gone to a musical? It’s a truism that this show doesn’t have a single song as good as the old Spider-Man cartoon song, because that one had a memorable musical hook, lyrics that were specifically about Spider-Man, and was mixed so that you could understand most of the words.

But Bono and the Edge were busy, and the creative team was apparently focused on making the special effects safer, and little attention seemed to be paid to the problem of the songs sounding the same and the numbers sort of beginning and ending without any real shape to them. This is why it’s important to have the songwriters there during the preview period. An anecdotal example: during tryouts, a little show called Fiddler On the Roof had serious second-act trouble. So the creators threw out all but one song in the second act, and went to work coming up with new ones: a song to solidify a key relationship and lighten the mood (“Do You Love Me?”) and a new final song that would establish a sense of community and make us understand what the characters were leaving behind at the end (“Anatevka”). Musicals, good and bad alike, need to throw out the songs that don’t work and add new ones.

Otherwise, my impression of the show was closest to Ben Brantley’s in the New York Times. Mostly because, at a different performance, he noticed the same thing: the audience only really got excited when something went wrong. That’s the main attraction. And it’s really not enough of an attraction to justify that kind of money.

Another problem, but one I’m more sympathetic about because it’s built into the material, is that Spidey’s costume is just really bad for the theatre. In the comics, it works fine: Spidey talks constantly with the help of speech balloons, and it doesn’t matter that you can’t see his mouth. On film it’s trickier, and in the theatre it’s very difficult to have any sound coming out of a character whose entire head is covered by a mask. (Most heroes have their mouths or even their whole faces uncovered. Not Spider-boy.) That means that when Spidey is in costume, he really doesn’t project any personality at all on the stage. Taymor has tried to deal with this — by making Spidey more of a pantomime character and having Peter go around with his mask off as much as possible — but it doesn’t really work. There’s a reason there are few musicals about characters who don’t sing, and while Peter Parker sings a lot, Spider-Man really can’t express himself on the stage.

Break a leg, Spider-Man

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; Joan Marcus; Photo illustration by Bradley Reinhardt

A Sunday matinee of Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark is going smoothly. Too smoothly. Unlike the performance where a stuntman fell 20 feet onto the floor, or the one where actress Natalie Mendoza suffered a concussion that forced her to quit the show, this one pulls off the complicated stunts and moving sets that caused writer-director Julie Taymor (The Lion King, Titus) to run up a $65-million budget. But then, with only one more number left to go in the second act, the prop people lower a giant spiderweb that looks very much like an old gym net—and it gets stuck on the way down. The musicians keep playing, stagehands come out onto the stage to fix it; Spider-Man, or perhaps it’s one of the many stunt Spider-Men, is pacing around in the wings with his mask off. Finally, a sheepish offstage voice announces that the show is experiencing a delay. The audience bursts into some of the most enthusiastic applause of the afternoon. There hasn’t been much clapping for the songs by U2’s Bono and the Edge; this is what they paid to see: something going wrong at a legendary showcase for theatrical disasters.

That may be a typical moment from the longest and most lucrative tryout period in the history of musical theatre. Spider-Man keeps delaying its official opening; it’s been in previews since November, and last week the producers pushed the date back by another month, to March 15. And why should it actually open? If the previews end, it’ll have to contend with critics—and the only critic who seems to like it for the moment is Glenn Beck. He called it “by far the best show I’ve ever seen,” and argued that it has a conservative message because the villainous Green Goblin is “an atheist, godlike scientist who’s in bed with the giant government.” On the other hand, as a show “trying out,” where things can go wrong and an executive producer has to walk out to assure us that the New York Labour Department has declared the show safe for the actors, it’s doing great: last week the New York Times reported that it “played to full houses” and managed to gross more at the box office than Broadway’s biggest hit, Wicked.

Some shows, particularly those that try out in New York like Spider-Man, can be hurt by nasty gossip during the preview period. But the bad word of mouth in this case seems to have been good for the show, because of all the publicity it’s generated. Spider-Man has been a target for late-night comedians (like Conan O’Brien, who regularly features parodies of the musical on his show) ever since it ran out of money during rehearsals. The original producer pulled out, replaced by Michael Cohl, the Canadian concert-tour producer who has handled the Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson—and also had a hand in Canada’s most expensive musical flop, Lord of the Rings. But Lord of the Rings’ inflated budget just made it a bad joke; Spider-Man’s problems are actually pulling in people who aren’t theatre fans. Jeremy Gerard, the theatre critic for Bloom­berg News, told Maclean’s that “sales did spike after the reports of the injuries.”

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Spider-Man: Turn off the Show

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, December 21, 2010 at 11:49 AM - 7 Comments

The tryout of Julie Taymor and U2′s Spider-Man musical is, if nothing else, the first Broadway musical in a while to become part of the international cultural consciousness. You don’t hear Conan O’Brien and SNL making many jokes about Elf: The Musical. The fact that performers are getting hurt makes the story less funny than it was, but it’s not the first show to suffer special effects failures or injured performers. Some of them even happen after the tryouts. (On the opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro, one of  the most technically complicated productions in Broadway history, a supporting performer supposedly fell into the orchestra pit while singing.) The news that the stuntman who fell last night is in “serious condition” makes the story even less funny; I thought we’d be able to go back to laughing at the production eventually, but it may have crossed the line from “funny” to “upsetting,” particularly given Taymor’s apparent problem recognizing — or at least admitting — that something is wrong. (Update: However, as pointed out in comments, the CBS story exaggerates this problem of Taymor’s by making it seem like something she said two days ago, about “danger” and “risk,” was a direct comment on last night’s accident. It wasn’t.)

Spider-Man is yet another in a long line of examples of why it’s dangerous for Broadway shows to hold their previews in New York, opening “cold” as it’s called in theatre terminology. Traditionally, out-of-town tryouts are considered preferable: you open in another city, fix it on the road, and come to New York with the final version. The out-of-town tryout has been periodically endangered because it’s very expensive, and more recently, because the internet has made it possible for bad word of mouth to trickle in from any city. Camelot opened in Toronto at the O’Keefe Centre and was incredibly overlong, but not many people outside of Toronto knew how much work it needed. Today, many more people would know, and it would limp into New York with a ton of bad publicity — even if the show had been rewritten and improved.

But the internet hasn’t changed the world quite as much as we may think, and there’s still a big difference between bad word of mouth from out of town and bad word of mouth in New York. Shows that open cold in New York are frequently savaged — because there’s no sense of separation between the previews and the official opening. The last Stephen Sondheim/Harold Prince musical, Merrily We Roll Along, had to be revised from top to bottom during its previews (the costumes and choreography were replaced, along with the lead performer), but because it was all happening in New York, the revisions — aimed at improving the show — actually created bad publicity for the piece.

There have been shows that opened cold and managed to become hits, but it creates an extra layer of difficulty: the 1952 musical Wish You Were Here had to try out in New York because the whole set was built around an onstage swimming pool, and it became a city-wide joke that had critics ready to attack even before they saw it. That show succeeded, but it had to fight back against weeks of terrible publicity. The point of previews is to fix things, but when it’s happening in the same city as the opening, the word of mouth will emphasize that the show is in trouble. It doesn’t matter if the final version turns out better or not.

Now, Spider-Man doesn’t really get much sympathy from me, not so much because of the subject matter as because Taymor decided to co-write the book herself (something that has worked exactly once, with Chicago, which Bob Fosse co-wrote) and to hire superannuated pop songwriters instead of theatre songwriters. Also, it’s using the New York tryout to its own financial advantage: it’s selling lots of tickets for previews, so by extending the tryout, it guarantees itself an extra month of sold-out performances that critics are not allowed to review. It’s a good racket. There’s even a slight amount of positive publicity value in all these stories about the technical disasters and injuries: it focuses attention on the stuff that’s relatively easy to fix. The negative reports about the book and score are almost getting submerged, even though in the long run, the book and score are going to be much bigger problems for this thing.

Still, the fact that the show is in trouble during previews does not, in itself, mean that the show is doomed. It’s doomed because it spent so much money that it can’t make it back. That’s a different thing altogether. But the stuff that’s happening during previews is… stuff that happens during previews. It’s just that it’s happening in the biggest city in North America instead of some other town where the publicity is less vicious.

Also, about Taymor, I should add that a lot of the blame for what’s going on with this show has to rest with the producers, rather than her. (In fact, a lot of stories have heaped apparently-deserved blame on the original producer, David Garfinkle, who ran out of money; he was replaced by Michael Cohl, who kept the production afloat.) She has a reputation as a perfectionist and a megalomaniac, but there’s an element of megalomania in the very act of directing. Directors are supposed to want to do the impossible, no matter how much it costs. The producer’s job is to say “no” or to find a way for the director to do what he or she wants without killing the show’s financial prospects.

FanExpo: freaks, nerds and corporate takeover

By Tom Henheffer - Monday, August 30, 2010 at 5:47 PM - 0 Comments

Photography Tom Henheffer

The cramped and kind-of-smelly halls are packed with blue-haired anime nuts carrying six-foot cardboard swords, gangly Chinese Checkers experts with an encyclopedic knowledge of Star Wars, and far too many fanny packs. The 15th annual FanExpo is Canada’s largest celebration of pop culture, and it brought more than 60,000 freaks, nerds and people dressed like ghostbusters to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

Like other events that were once strictly comic-book-centered—such as the San Diego and New York Comic Cons—FanExpo has exploded from a humble celebration of multi-paneled visual storytelling into a full-blown, corporate-sponsored pop culture bacchanal, combining horror, sci-fi, anime, comic book and video and board gaming conventions into one massive festival.

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Superheroes are starting to bug me

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 118 Comments

No disrespect to Wolverine, who’s the hottest Canadian at the box office since Mary Pickford (even if they do need an Australian to play him), but I wonder about this superhero business. They’ve been cleaning up at the multiplex ever since the dawn of the millennium: Spider-Man. X-Men. Batman. Iron Man. The mid-20th-century long-underwear guys are bigger than ever in the 21st. Truly this is the Age of the Superhero. And it’s beginning to bother me.

Don’t get me wrong. I love comic books. Meeting Stan Lee was one of the great moments of my life. Read a zillion of his masterpieces as a kid—although my grasp of the details decades later is generally frozen circa issue No. 22: Jean Grey will always be Marvel Girl to me. Please, no need to write to point out that she subsequently became Phoenix, and then Dark Phoenix, and then died, and then turned up in a pod at the bottom of Jamaica Bay, which was given to Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four, and then she died again but implanted her psyche in the body of the comatose Emma Frost . . . I’m just skimming the CliffsNotes here, so, alternatively, don’t write if my précis has omitted many fascinating plot twists over the decades. My point is that keeping up with these guys is a full-time job. And even the fellows whose basic bio doesn’t change much get “reinvented.” The reinventions are invariably the same: out with the breezy guy swinging through the streets of Gotham to a ring-a-ding-ding Neal Hefti theme tune; in with some morose misanthrope hunched on the rooftops brooding and riddled with self-doubt. In the sixties, the TV Batman was camp. Then he got dark in the eighties movie. But then by the nineties sequels the dark Batman had mysteriously camped up again. So now he’s darker than ever. I think the concept of reinvention could do with reinventing.

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