Author:
Paula
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Date Posted: 04:56:29 08/11/02 Sun
Well, so ya didn't design it, thanks anyway(n/a)
Tony, thought you might like reading this from todays Newsday. It's a piece by critic Linda Werner about the Chicago/New York preview flap from last week or the week before, whenever it was!!
CRITICAL MASS
Linda Winer
Critical Mass
Top Secret? Get Out of Town!
August 11, 2002
More than a week has passed since I blithely returned from a European trip without a thought on my beach brain about the way Broadway develops shows. And it has been more than a week since anyone has asked me about anything else.
The agitation involves the future of the out-of-town tryout - tradition so ingrained in great show-biz lore that, I swear, even plays about tryouts used to have tryouts. The practice was - inadvertently, I believe - challenged late last month when Newsday, behaving like a newspaper instead of a Broadway collaborator, broke the unwritten rules. We reprinted the Chicago Tribune review of the tryout of the highly anticipated Twyla Tharp-Billy Joel musical "Movin' Out." New York critics don't get to review until it opens as a presumably finished product in October.
Why is this a problem? Anyone with half an ear to the ground can decode the buzz from the road. Everyone heard that "The Producers" was a hit after the first preview in Chicago last year. The word from Seattle this summer is that "Hairspray," which opens here Thursday, feels like a winner. Advance stories inevitably report the road health of a show - often running excerpts from various out-of-town critics. Most significant, newspaper and Web reviews are available instantly on the Internet.
The difference here is that Newsday (which is owned by the Tribune Co.) gave its readers a single full review of a show with music by a Long Island hometown favorite, Joel. Michael Phillips' review, like the one by Heidi Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times, was not enthusiastic. The industry went ballistic - less, I suspect, because of the negative effect of this single breach of the long-held gentleperson's agreement and more because of the precedent. If Newsday and the Tribune aren't slapped down for playing loose with the unraveling development process, there is no telling what renegade paper might send out a real New York critic to review next time.
I am of so many minds on this issue that I wish I had more faces. I appreciate that musicals, hardly the healthiest of America's indigenous treasures, don't really exist until all the elements - story, music, dance, spectacle - are crashing into one another on stage. What works on the page means nothing without the live experience. I believe that creators need to see, hear, taste their material - preferably in front of live bodies that laugh, cry and, if necessary, nap.
Everyone knows that without frantic rewrites in New Haven in 1943, "Oklahoma!" would have opened cold on Broadway as a flop called "Away We Go." (Remember what Walter Winchell's column reported - from the road - "No legs, no jokes, no chance!") If Stephen Sondheim had not holed up for that weekend in Washington in 1963 and come out with a new opening number called "Comedy Tonight," a funny thing would probably not have happened on the way to the forum. Then again, if the critic at the Chicago Tribune had not complained in 1977 about a mess of a Liza Minnelli showcase called "Shine It On," Martin Scorsese's first and last Broadway musical still would have opened and been forgotten on Broadway as "The Act."
I know about that last one. I was that critic. I've been there in tryout land trying to figure out why I was reviewing somebody's practice so that the shows could be made better for the real audience in New York. There have been fine critics - most famously Elliott Norton in Boston and Richard Coe in Washington - with no apparent qualms about turning into unofficial show doctors, working for directors and authors instead of talking to audiences. I appreciate why shows need a place to work away from Manhattan's glare - an increasingly costly luxury - but I never felt comfortable being part of that process.
When producers began previewing shows on the road, the American theater really could be divided between New York and out of town. The perfect tryout city was believed to have audiences with New York tastes, audiences that didn't mind being used as guinea pigs - usually at Broadway prices - for the chance to play insider.
The options are far from perfect. We have seen shows developed in New York workshops with subscriber audiences and no invited press. But the barricades could never stop the gossip. Nonprofit theaters are often used as unofficial tryout houses, but the process corrupts the nonprofit mission and, besides, national reviewing is fair game. Producers go to more remote cities and attract less attention - though audience feedback may be less applicable.
I have no desire to fly off to tryout cities, sneak into theaters and review shows before they're finished. But the pretense of secrecy is not just quaint and arbitrary. I am sorry, but, ultimately, I'm afraid it will be impossible. I do not intend to be the crusader who changes the rules that helped develop the best of American theater. I like - even cherish - the old rules. When the Pentagon can't keep its plot to attack Iraq off the front pages, however, a secret Broadway tryout in public may may already be yesterday's news.
Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.
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