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Monday, September 26, 2011
Friday, August 12, 2011
Meat Loaf Enlists Lil Jon, Chuck D for Upcoming 'Hell'-ish Album
by Gary Graff, Detroit
August 01, 2011 6:35 EDT
As he continues to tour in support of his 2010 album "Hang Cool Teddy Bear" -- and to commemorate his 40th anniversary as a recording artist -- Meat Loaf has three new projects in the works, including a studio album that will feature rappers Chuck D from Public Enemy and Lil Jon.
"Ever since we started with ('Hang Cool Teddy Bear' producer) Rob Cavallo, from that minute on I've been back in the music business and having a really, really great time -- which I haven't had for five years before that," Meat Loaf, who's returned to Sony Music -- which released three of his albums, including 1977's multi-platinum "Bat Out of Hell" -- tells Billboard.com.
First up will be "Hell in a Handbasket," due out in February (except for Australia and New Zealand) and an album Meat Loaf calls "the most personal record I've ever made. It's about how I feel the world's gone to hell in a handbasket. It's really the first record that I've ever put out about how I feel about life and how I feel about what's going on at the moment." Meat Loaf says the album is finished -- no release date has yet been established -- and "sounds different," although he adds that "it's rock, definitely rock," produced by Paul Crook, who's part of his current touring band, with Cavallo consulting.
As for the rappers, Meat Loaf met Lil Jon when the two appeared on "Celebrity Apprentice" this past spring, while Chuck D came through Anthrax's Scott Ian, who is Meat Loaf's son-in-law. "(D) was going to do one thing, and he came back and did something else and we flipped out," Meat Loaf reports.
Meat Loaf also has about nine songs towards another studio album, who's title we won't reveal. "We've started to do drum tracks on those songs, and we'll get more in pretty soon," he says. Meanwhile he's planning a 2012 Christmas album called "Hot Holidays" that will feature guests such as Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire "and different rock people and some actors...After I played Sony ('Hell in a Hand Basket') I said, 'Look, I've got two other records. I've got a Christmas record and I've got another record,' and they said, 'Well, get us the Christmas record and start working on the other one.' So there you go -- I'll just keep recording."
Meat Loaf -- whose first album, "Stoney & Meatloaf" with current Bob Seger backup singer Shaun Murphy, came out in 1971 on Motown's Rare Earth label -- says he's also keeping an eye out for further acting opportunities, although at this point "I'm more focused on the music than I've been in a long time." But he's also happy to be name-checked in an new TV ad for Allstate Insurance. "I liked it. I think it's funny," he notes. "They showed it to me, and they paid me for (use of) my picture. It's autographed, by the way; it goes by so fast you can't really read it, but it says, 'To the professor...' It's pretty cool."
Meat Loaf is recording in-between tour dates, which go into early September in the U.S. He's also booked a run of Australia and New Zealand for for October, including a spot on the A Day on the Green festival Oct. 8 in Hunter Valley. "Hell in a Handbasket" will be released in those countries to coincide with the tour.
http://www.billboard.com/news/meat-loaf-enlists-lil-jon-chuck-d-for-upcoming-1005299992.story#/news/meat-loaf-enlists-lil-jon-chuck-d-for-upcoming-1005299992.story
August 01, 2011 6:35 EDT
As he continues to tour in support of his 2010 album "Hang Cool Teddy Bear" -- and to commemorate his 40th anniversary as a recording artist -- Meat Loaf has three new projects in the works, including a studio album that will feature rappers Chuck D from Public Enemy and Lil Jon.
"Ever since we started with ('Hang Cool Teddy Bear' producer) Rob Cavallo, from that minute on I've been back in the music business and having a really, really great time -- which I haven't had for five years before that," Meat Loaf, who's returned to Sony Music -- which released three of his albums, including 1977's multi-platinum "Bat Out of Hell" -- tells Billboard.com.
First up will be "Hell in a Handbasket," due out in February (except for Australia and New Zealand) and an album Meat Loaf calls "the most personal record I've ever made. It's about how I feel the world's gone to hell in a handbasket. It's really the first record that I've ever put out about how I feel about life and how I feel about what's going on at the moment." Meat Loaf says the album is finished -- no release date has yet been established -- and "sounds different," although he adds that "it's rock, definitely rock," produced by Paul Crook, who's part of his current touring band, with Cavallo consulting.
As for the rappers, Meat Loaf met Lil Jon when the two appeared on "Celebrity Apprentice" this past spring, while Chuck D came through Anthrax's Scott Ian, who is Meat Loaf's son-in-law. "(D) was going to do one thing, and he came back and did something else and we flipped out," Meat Loaf reports.
Meat Loaf also has about nine songs towards another studio album, who's title we won't reveal. "We've started to do drum tracks on those songs, and we'll get more in pretty soon," he says. Meanwhile he's planning a 2012 Christmas album called "Hot Holidays" that will feature guests such as Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire "and different rock people and some actors...After I played Sony ('Hell in a Hand Basket') I said, 'Look, I've got two other records. I've got a Christmas record and I've got another record,' and they said, 'Well, get us the Christmas record and start working on the other one.' So there you go -- I'll just keep recording."
Meat Loaf -- whose first album, "Stoney & Meatloaf" with current Bob Seger backup singer Shaun Murphy, came out in 1971 on Motown's Rare Earth label -- says he's also keeping an eye out for further acting opportunities, although at this point "I'm more focused on the music than I've been in a long time." But he's also happy to be name-checked in an new TV ad for Allstate Insurance. "I liked it. I think it's funny," he notes. "They showed it to me, and they paid me for (use of) my picture. It's autographed, by the way; it goes by so fast you can't really read it, but it says, 'To the professor...' It's pretty cool."
Meat Loaf is recording in-between tour dates, which go into early September in the U.S. He's also booked a run of Australia and New Zealand for for October, including a spot on the A Day on the Green festival Oct. 8 in Hunter Valley. "Hell in a Handbasket" will be released in those countries to coincide with the tour.
http://www.billboard.com/news/meat-loaf-enlists-lil-jon-chuck-d-for-upcoming-1005299992.story#/news/meat-loaf-enlists-lil-jon-chuck-d-for-upcoming-1005299992.story
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Love Never Dies (but the West End musical has)
By Rob Sharp, Arts Correspondent
Saturday, 18 June 2011
Andrew Lloyd Webber's sequel to Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies, which has divided fans and critics throughout its brief history, will close in London's West End in August after just under 18 months playing at the Adelphi Theatre.
A spokesperson for the production confirmed that the show would close after it was revealed yesterday that another show, One Man, Two Guvnors, currently playing at the National Theatre, would transfer to the Adelphi from November.
The spokesperson said: "I can confirm that the show's run will end on 27 August." A spokesperson for Lord Lloyd-Webber's Really Useful Group refused to comment further.
The lavish production, which cost £5.5m, has had a troubled run, not least because of Phantom fans objecting to the production through a Facebook group and a website, loveshoulddie.com. The group has branded the show a "train wreck" and a bastardisation of the original early 20th century story by the French writer Gaston Leroux, subsequently made into a 1986 hit musical composed by Lord Lloyd Webber with lyrics by Charles Hart.
According to The Stage theatre critic Mark Shenton, the show, which stars Ramin Karimloo as the phantom and is set 10 years after the original story, "suffered from a series of production miscalculations". These included Lord Lloyd-Webber's "hubristic" plans to open the show simultaneously on three continents, something which never materialised.
Lord Lloyd-Webber later admitted it was a mistake to continue with the show in the wake of his cancer diagnosis in October 2009. "I had a unique issue because I got cancer in the middle of all of it," he said this month. "With hindsight we should have said, 'Let's put the whole thing on hold until I'm 100 per cent again.' Frankly I wasn't feeling very well."
In the same interview the impresario admitted that the show suffered from the lack of an outside producer to help steer its progress.
The show received mixed reviews when it opened last year, with one critic branding it "Paint Never Dries". In November it was postponed for changes to be made, and it bounced back from early box-office jitters to pick up seven nominations at the Olivier Awards this year.
In October it was reported that a planned Broadway run of the show was "indefinitely postponed". In May an Australian version of the show opened to more positive reviews than the original.
Shenton said: "I can hear the gloating already from the mad 'Love Should Die' lobby of Love Never Dies detractors, who have run their disgraceful campaign of intimidation and aggravation, lies and deceit around the show since before it even opened. But now they are finally getting their wish."
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/love-never-dies-but-the-west-end-musical-has-2299298.html
Saturday, 18 June 2011
Andrew Lloyd Webber's sequel to Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies, which has divided fans and critics throughout its brief history, will close in London's West End in August after just under 18 months playing at the Adelphi Theatre.
A spokesperson for the production confirmed that the show would close after it was revealed yesterday that another show, One Man, Two Guvnors, currently playing at the National Theatre, would transfer to the Adelphi from November.
The spokesperson said: "I can confirm that the show's run will end on 27 August." A spokesperson for Lord Lloyd-Webber's Really Useful Group refused to comment further.
The lavish production, which cost £5.5m, has had a troubled run, not least because of Phantom fans objecting to the production through a Facebook group and a website, loveshoulddie.com. The group has branded the show a "train wreck" and a bastardisation of the original early 20th century story by the French writer Gaston Leroux, subsequently made into a 1986 hit musical composed by Lord Lloyd Webber with lyrics by Charles Hart.
According to The Stage theatre critic Mark Shenton, the show, which stars Ramin Karimloo as the phantom and is set 10 years after the original story, "suffered from a series of production miscalculations". These included Lord Lloyd-Webber's "hubristic" plans to open the show simultaneously on three continents, something which never materialised.
Lord Lloyd-Webber later admitted it was a mistake to continue with the show in the wake of his cancer diagnosis in October 2009. "I had a unique issue because I got cancer in the middle of all of it," he said this month. "With hindsight we should have said, 'Let's put the whole thing on hold until I'm 100 per cent again.' Frankly I wasn't feeling very well."
In the same interview the impresario admitted that the show suffered from the lack of an outside producer to help steer its progress.
The show received mixed reviews when it opened last year, with one critic branding it "Paint Never Dries". In November it was postponed for changes to be made, and it bounced back from early box-office jitters to pick up seven nominations at the Olivier Awards this year.
In October it was reported that a planned Broadway run of the show was "indefinitely postponed". In May an Australian version of the show opened to more positive reviews than the original.
Shenton said: "I can hear the gloating already from the mad 'Love Should Die' lobby of Love Never Dies detractors, who have run their disgraceful campaign of intimidation and aggravation, lies and deceit around the show since before it even opened. But now they are finally getting their wish."
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/love-never-dies-but-the-west-end-musical-has-2299298.html
Monday, June 27, 2011
Really Useful Group maps out split
Posted: Sat., Jun. 25, 2011, 4:00am PT
Really Useful Group maps out split
Webber company planning restructure
By David Benedict
London-- In the midst of ongoing industry whispers about the future of Andrew Lloyd Webber and his 35-year-old Really Useful Group, the org is laying the groundwork for a 2013 split that will divide the company and its 70-strong staff into two divisions, both entirely owned by Lloyd Webber.
Really Useful chair Mark Wordsworth tells Variety that one company will manage and program the seven West End theaters owned or co-owned by Lloyd Webber, while the second will oversee "brand Lloyd Webber," producing the composer's musicals and controlling the rights to his popular body of work. Restructuring won't take place until 2013 due to employment and tax issues.
The company unveils the plan just as questions about the future of Really Useful have gained traction in the wake of last week's news of the early shuttering of the West End production of "Love Never Dies," Lloyd Webber's much-vaunted sequel to the seemingly unstoppable "The Phantom of the Opera." Word of the August closing leaked out unsupported by any press statement from the company.
That only added to a list of woes. Last year's deal to sell four of Really Useful's West End theaters to Michael Grade and Michael Linnit collapsed, and soon thereafter came the announcement that Andre Ptaszynski would be stepping down as the company's chief exec at the end of June. Further, although London box office figures are never published, insiders indicate that Lloyd Webber's current production of "The Wizard of Oz," cast via a primetime-TV reality show, is underperforming at the 2,255-seat London Palladium.
Small wonder, then, that questions are being asked. Yet Wordsworth roundly refutes the analysis that the company's future is fueled by a past now low on gas.
He concedes that no Really Useful production is slated for London until the "Cats" revival with Cameron Mackintosh in 2013. "But five top-grade productions in one city in a five-year period -- 'Evita,' 'The Sound of Music,' 'Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,' 'Love Never Dies' and 'The Wizard of Oz,' three of which were cast via TV shows -- is a heavy creative output for any company," he says.
Counterbalancing the all-quiet on the West End front, he points to future worldwide productions.
"The Australian 'Love Never Dies' is very successful, so we're deciding where that might go and how we develop it. Michael Grandage's production of 'Evita' is on Broadway in 2012, and 'The Wizard of Oz' will go at some point."
He and Lloyd Webber are also enthusiastic about Des McAnuff's production of "Jesus Christ Superstar" at the Stratford Festival in Ontario: "We're looking for Broadway slots and also talking about an arena tour," Wordsworth says.
And there's a Mandarin production of "Cats" opening next year in a prestigious new opera house in Guangzhou, China.
The structural change is an attempt to better manage such upcoming activity.
"RUG exists to support Andrew in all his creative activities: not just his new productions and the seven theaters but to manage his copyrights, royalties, stock and amateur rights," Wordsworth says, adding that over the past five years, rights management has taken a back seat to the London productions.
Once the group dissolves into two companies, one will concern itself with theater ownership and programming. That indicates a change of heart regarding the earlier attempt to sell off the venues.
According to Wordsworth, when last year's deal fell through, the company was approached by "everyone else on the planet" to buy the theaters.
But having recovered from prostate cancer, Lloyd Webber is now intent upon developing the properties himself, not least because three of them -- Her Majesty's, New London and Cambridge -- have their futures settled with, respectively, long-running hits "Phantom," "War Horse" and the Royal Shakespeare Company's incoming critical and audience smash "Matilda." No longer liabilities, they're now looking like prime assets.
The company's rights arm will be akin to the Gotham-based Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization (sold in 2009 to Imagem Music Group), which controls the rights to the legendary canon of the duo ("The Sound of Music," "South Pacific").
"It will take forward Andrew's new ideas, anything from shows being cast by TV in the U.S. through stadium tours, online video and games with Andrew's content. It will also beef up the stock and amateur side and be more proactive."
Even Ptasynski's departure is explained by the fact that the group will no longer exist as such. Besides working as an independent producer, he remains with Really Useful to manage and program the theaters.
As a composer, Lloyd Webber's last major profit-maker was "Phantom" a quarter of a century ago. His subsequent offerings "Sunset Boulevard," "Whistle Down the Wind," "The Beautiful Game," "The Woman in White" and (so far) "Love Never Dies" have failed to make it into the black.
But if his recent writing has disappointed financially, the business -- what Wordsworth terms "brand Lloyd Webber" -- may be strong enough to silence the naysayers.
Contact David Benedict at benedictdavid@mac.com
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118039120
Really Useful Group maps out split
Webber company planning restructure
By David Benedict
London-- In the midst of ongoing industry whispers about the future of Andrew Lloyd Webber and his 35-year-old Really Useful Group, the org is laying the groundwork for a 2013 split that will divide the company and its 70-strong staff into two divisions, both entirely owned by Lloyd Webber.
Really Useful chair Mark Wordsworth tells Variety that one company will manage and program the seven West End theaters owned or co-owned by Lloyd Webber, while the second will oversee "brand Lloyd Webber," producing the composer's musicals and controlling the rights to his popular body of work. Restructuring won't take place until 2013 due to employment and tax issues.
The company unveils the plan just as questions about the future of Really Useful have gained traction in the wake of last week's news of the early shuttering of the West End production of "Love Never Dies," Lloyd Webber's much-vaunted sequel to the seemingly unstoppable "The Phantom of the Opera." Word of the August closing leaked out unsupported by any press statement from the company.
That only added to a list of woes. Last year's deal to sell four of Really Useful's West End theaters to Michael Grade and Michael Linnit collapsed, and soon thereafter came the announcement that Andre Ptaszynski would be stepping down as the company's chief exec at the end of June. Further, although London box office figures are never published, insiders indicate that Lloyd Webber's current production of "The Wizard of Oz," cast via a primetime-TV reality show, is underperforming at the 2,255-seat London Palladium.
Small wonder, then, that questions are being asked. Yet Wordsworth roundly refutes the analysis that the company's future is fueled by a past now low on gas.
He concedes that no Really Useful production is slated for London until the "Cats" revival with Cameron Mackintosh in 2013. "But five top-grade productions in one city in a five-year period -- 'Evita,' 'The Sound of Music,' 'Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,' 'Love Never Dies' and 'The Wizard of Oz,' three of which were cast via TV shows -- is a heavy creative output for any company," he says.
Counterbalancing the all-quiet on the West End front, he points to future worldwide productions.
"The Australian 'Love Never Dies' is very successful, so we're deciding where that might go and how we develop it. Michael Grandage's production of 'Evita' is on Broadway in 2012, and 'The Wizard of Oz' will go at some point."
He and Lloyd Webber are also enthusiastic about Des McAnuff's production of "Jesus Christ Superstar" at the Stratford Festival in Ontario: "We're looking for Broadway slots and also talking about an arena tour," Wordsworth says.
And there's a Mandarin production of "Cats" opening next year in a prestigious new opera house in Guangzhou, China.
The structural change is an attempt to better manage such upcoming activity.
"RUG exists to support Andrew in all his creative activities: not just his new productions and the seven theaters but to manage his copyrights, royalties, stock and amateur rights," Wordsworth says, adding that over the past five years, rights management has taken a back seat to the London productions.
Once the group dissolves into two companies, one will concern itself with theater ownership and programming. That indicates a change of heart regarding the earlier attempt to sell off the venues.
According to Wordsworth, when last year's deal fell through, the company was approached by "everyone else on the planet" to buy the theaters.
But having recovered from prostate cancer, Lloyd Webber is now intent upon developing the properties himself, not least because three of them -- Her Majesty's, New London and Cambridge -- have their futures settled with, respectively, long-running hits "Phantom," "War Horse" and the Royal Shakespeare Company's incoming critical and audience smash "Matilda." No longer liabilities, they're now looking like prime assets.
The company's rights arm will be akin to the Gotham-based Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization (sold in 2009 to Imagem Music Group), which controls the rights to the legendary canon of the duo ("The Sound of Music," "South Pacific").
"It will take forward Andrew's new ideas, anything from shows being cast by TV in the U.S. through stadium tours, online video and games with Andrew's content. It will also beef up the stock and amateur side and be more proactive."
Even Ptasynski's departure is explained by the fact that the group will no longer exist as such. Besides working as an independent producer, he remains with Really Useful to manage and program the theaters.
As a composer, Lloyd Webber's last major profit-maker was "Phantom" a quarter of a century ago. His subsequent offerings "Sunset Boulevard," "Whistle Down the Wind," "The Beautiful Game," "The Woman in White" and (so far) "Love Never Dies" have failed to make it into the black.
But if his recent writing has disappointed financially, the business -- what Wordsworth terms "brand Lloyd Webber" -- may be strong enough to silence the naysayers.
Contact David Benedict at benedictdavid@mac.com
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118039120
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
1 Radioactive Bite, 8 Legs and 183 Previews
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: June 14, 2011
There is something to be said for those dangerous flying objects — excuse me, I mean actors — that keep whizzing around the Foxwoods Theater, where the mega-expensive musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” has entered the latest chapter of its fraught and anxious existence. After all, if you’re worried that somebody might fall on top of you from a great height, the odds are that you won’t nod off.
Those adrenaline-raising acrobatics are a necessary part of the lumpy package that is “Spider-Man,” which had its long-delayed official opening on Tuesday night, after 180-some preview performances. First seen and deplored by critics several months ago — when impatient journalists (including me) broke the media embargo for reviews as the show’s opening date kept sliding into a misty future — this singing comic book is no longer the ungodly, indecipherable mess it was in February. It’s just a bore.
So is this ascent from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity a step upward? Well, until last weekend, when I caught a performance of this show’s latest incarnation, I would have recommended “Spider-Man” only to carrion-feasting theater vultures. Now, if I knew a less-than-precocious child of 10 or so, and had several hundred dollars to throw away, I would consider taking him or her to the new and improved “Spider-Man.”
The first time I saw the show, it was like watching the Hindenburg burn and crash. This time “Spider-Man” — which was originally conceived by the (since departed) visionary director Julie Taymor with the rock musicians Bono and the Edge (of U2) — stirred foggy, not unpleasant childhood memories of second-tier sci-fi TV in the 1960s, with blatantly artificial sets and actors in unconvincing alien masks.
“Spider-Man” may be the only Broadway show of the past half-century to make international headlines regularly, often with the adjective “troubled” attached to its title. So I’m assuming you already know at least a bit of its long and tortuous history of revision, cancellation, indecision and injury (from production-related accidents), and of its true star.
That would be Ms. Taymor (who retains an “original direction by” credit), who in the 1990s was hailed as the new Ziegfeld after reinventing a Disney animated film, “The Lion King,” as a classy, mass-appeal Broadway blockbuster. The prospect of her hooking up with Spidey, the nerdy-cool Marvel Comics crime fighter, seemed like a swell opportunity for another lucrative melding of pageantry, puppetry and culture high and low.
Those elements were certainly in abundance in the “Spider-Man” I saw several months ago. That production, which featured a script by Ms. Taymor and Glen Berger, placed its young superhero in a broader meta-context of Greek mythology and American Pop art, with a “geek chorus” of commentators and a classical goddess named Arachne as the morally ambiguous mentor of Spidey and his awkward alter ego, Peter Parker.
Unfortunately, traditional niceties like a comprehensible plot and characters got lost in the stew. After critics let loose with howls of derision, “Spider-Man” took a three-week performance hiatus to reassemble itself, with tools that included audience focus groups. Exit Ms. Taymor. (Bono, the Edge and Mr. Berger stayed put.)
Enter Philip William McKinley — a director whose credits include several versions of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth” — and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a writer of both plays and comic books. Now if you check out the directory of paid theater listings in The New York Times, you’ll see that the title “Spider-Man” is prefaced by the promising (if slightly desperate-sounding) words: “REIMAGINED! New Story! New Music!”
This is not false advertising. “Spider-Man” now bears only a scant resemblance to the muddled fever dream that was. It is instead not unlike one of those perky, tongue-in-cheek genre-spoof musicals (“Dames at Sea,” “Little Shop of Horrors”) that used to sprout like mushrooms in Greenwich Village, with witty cutout scenery and dialogue bristling with arch quotation marks.
Well, that is, if you could imagine such a show being stripped of its irony and supersized by a diabolical mad scientist with an enlarging ray. Though “Spider-Man” has shed its geek chorus and scaled down the role of Arachne (T. V. Carpio), it retains the most spectacular-looking centerpieces from the Taymor version. (George Tsypin is the set designer.) They include a vertiginous vision of Manhattan as seen from the top of the Chrysler Building, judiciously repositioned for plot purposes.
But they do seem out of proportion to what has become a straightforward children’s entertainment with a mildly suspenseful story, two-dimensional characters, unapologetically bad jokes and the kind of melodious rock tunes that those under 12 might be familiar with from listening to their parents’ salad-day favorites of the 1980s and ’90s. The puppet figures and mask-dominated costumes worn by the supporting villains still seem to have wandered in from a theme park. The projection designs by Kyle Cooper continue to suggest vintage MTV videos, as does the unimaginative choreography by Daniel Ezralow and Chase Brock.
The bonus is that anyone can follow the story now. (Boy is bitten by radioactive spider, boy acquires amazing powers, boy fights crime, boy has doubts, boy triumphs.) And the performers no longer seem overwhelmed by what surrounds them. Their characters now register as distinct if one-note personalities.
In the title role Reeve Carney is an appropriately nonthreatening crush object for tweens, an appealingly agitated Everydweeb with great cheekbones and a sanitized, lite version of a concert rocker’s voice. He is well paired with the wryly sincere Jennifer Damiano (“Next to Normal”) as Mary Jane Watson, Peter’s girlfriend.
Ms. Carpio’s Arachne (now a beneficent fairy godmother rather than an erotically troubling dream spider) provides the most arresting vocal moments with her ululating nasality. Michael Mulheren is suitably blustery and fatuous as the pandering newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson. And Patrick Page, as the megalomaniacal scientist who becomes the evil mutant called the Green Goblin, provides the one reason for adults unaccompanied by minors to see the show.
His role has been expanded, and Mr. Page uses the extra time not just to terrorize the audience amiably, as you expect mean green scene stealers to do. (He has charmingly reinvented that staple of melodramatic villains, the sustained insane cackle.) He also has become the show’s entertaining id, channeling and deflecting our own dark thoughts about this lopsided spectacle.
“I’m a $65 million circus tragedy,” he crows at one point. “Well, more like 75 million.”
But even Mr. Page is only a sideshow (not to switch metaphors) to the main event. And that’s the sight of real people — mostly stuntmen — flying over the audience, and the implicit danger therein. (An amplified voice warns the audience not only to turn off their cellphones but also to avoid trying to catch a ride with the professional fliers.)
Unlike the first time I saw “Spider-Man,” the flying (the first instance of which occurs about 45 minutes into the show) went off without a hitch on this occasion. The potential magic is undercut, though, by the very visible wires and harnesses that facilitate these aerodynamics.
Partly because the performers are masked, you experience little of the vicarious wonder and exhilaration that comes from watching Peter Pan or even Mary Poppins ride the air in other musicals. The effect is rather like looking at anonymous daredevils who have been strapped into a breakneck ride at an amusement park. Come to think of it, Coney Island might be a more satisfying choice.
http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/theater/reviews/spider-man-turn-off-the-dark-opens-after-changes-review.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=2&adxnnlx=1308122895-pwrrSYQgYFTJz5YrRVYAfg
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: June 14, 2011
There is something to be said for those dangerous flying objects — excuse me, I mean actors — that keep whizzing around the Foxwoods Theater, where the mega-expensive musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” has entered the latest chapter of its fraught and anxious existence. After all, if you’re worried that somebody might fall on top of you from a great height, the odds are that you won’t nod off.
Those adrenaline-raising acrobatics are a necessary part of the lumpy package that is “Spider-Man,” which had its long-delayed official opening on Tuesday night, after 180-some preview performances. First seen and deplored by critics several months ago — when impatient journalists (including me) broke the media embargo for reviews as the show’s opening date kept sliding into a misty future — this singing comic book is no longer the ungodly, indecipherable mess it was in February. It’s just a bore.
So is this ascent from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity a step upward? Well, until last weekend, when I caught a performance of this show’s latest incarnation, I would have recommended “Spider-Man” only to carrion-feasting theater vultures. Now, if I knew a less-than-precocious child of 10 or so, and had several hundred dollars to throw away, I would consider taking him or her to the new and improved “Spider-Man.”
The first time I saw the show, it was like watching the Hindenburg burn and crash. This time “Spider-Man” — which was originally conceived by the (since departed) visionary director Julie Taymor with the rock musicians Bono and the Edge (of U2) — stirred foggy, not unpleasant childhood memories of second-tier sci-fi TV in the 1960s, with blatantly artificial sets and actors in unconvincing alien masks.
“Spider-Man” may be the only Broadway show of the past half-century to make international headlines regularly, often with the adjective “troubled” attached to its title. So I’m assuming you already know at least a bit of its long and tortuous history of revision, cancellation, indecision and injury (from production-related accidents), and of its true star.
That would be Ms. Taymor (who retains an “original direction by” credit), who in the 1990s was hailed as the new Ziegfeld after reinventing a Disney animated film, “The Lion King,” as a classy, mass-appeal Broadway blockbuster. The prospect of her hooking up with Spidey, the nerdy-cool Marvel Comics crime fighter, seemed like a swell opportunity for another lucrative melding of pageantry, puppetry and culture high and low.
Those elements were certainly in abundance in the “Spider-Man” I saw several months ago. That production, which featured a script by Ms. Taymor and Glen Berger, placed its young superhero in a broader meta-context of Greek mythology and American Pop art, with a “geek chorus” of commentators and a classical goddess named Arachne as the morally ambiguous mentor of Spidey and his awkward alter ego, Peter Parker.
Unfortunately, traditional niceties like a comprehensible plot and characters got lost in the stew. After critics let loose with howls of derision, “Spider-Man” took a three-week performance hiatus to reassemble itself, with tools that included audience focus groups. Exit Ms. Taymor. (Bono, the Edge and Mr. Berger stayed put.)
Enter Philip William McKinley — a director whose credits include several versions of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth” — and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a writer of both plays and comic books. Now if you check out the directory of paid theater listings in The New York Times, you’ll see that the title “Spider-Man” is prefaced by the promising (if slightly desperate-sounding) words: “REIMAGINED! New Story! New Music!”
This is not false advertising. “Spider-Man” now bears only a scant resemblance to the muddled fever dream that was. It is instead not unlike one of those perky, tongue-in-cheek genre-spoof musicals (“Dames at Sea,” “Little Shop of Horrors”) that used to sprout like mushrooms in Greenwich Village, with witty cutout scenery and dialogue bristling with arch quotation marks.
Well, that is, if you could imagine such a show being stripped of its irony and supersized by a diabolical mad scientist with an enlarging ray. Though “Spider-Man” has shed its geek chorus and scaled down the role of Arachne (T. V. Carpio), it retains the most spectacular-looking centerpieces from the Taymor version. (George Tsypin is the set designer.) They include a vertiginous vision of Manhattan as seen from the top of the Chrysler Building, judiciously repositioned for plot purposes.
But they do seem out of proportion to what has become a straightforward children’s entertainment with a mildly suspenseful story, two-dimensional characters, unapologetically bad jokes and the kind of melodious rock tunes that those under 12 might be familiar with from listening to their parents’ salad-day favorites of the 1980s and ’90s. The puppet figures and mask-dominated costumes worn by the supporting villains still seem to have wandered in from a theme park. The projection designs by Kyle Cooper continue to suggest vintage MTV videos, as does the unimaginative choreography by Daniel Ezralow and Chase Brock.
The bonus is that anyone can follow the story now. (Boy is bitten by radioactive spider, boy acquires amazing powers, boy fights crime, boy has doubts, boy triumphs.) And the performers no longer seem overwhelmed by what surrounds them. Their characters now register as distinct if one-note personalities.
In the title role Reeve Carney is an appropriately nonthreatening crush object for tweens, an appealingly agitated Everydweeb with great cheekbones and a sanitized, lite version of a concert rocker’s voice. He is well paired with the wryly sincere Jennifer Damiano (“Next to Normal”) as Mary Jane Watson, Peter’s girlfriend.
Ms. Carpio’s Arachne (now a beneficent fairy godmother rather than an erotically troubling dream spider) provides the most arresting vocal moments with her ululating nasality. Michael Mulheren is suitably blustery and fatuous as the pandering newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson. And Patrick Page, as the megalomaniacal scientist who becomes the evil mutant called the Green Goblin, provides the one reason for adults unaccompanied by minors to see the show.
His role has been expanded, and Mr. Page uses the extra time not just to terrorize the audience amiably, as you expect mean green scene stealers to do. (He has charmingly reinvented that staple of melodramatic villains, the sustained insane cackle.) He also has become the show’s entertaining id, channeling and deflecting our own dark thoughts about this lopsided spectacle.
“I’m a $65 million circus tragedy,” he crows at one point. “Well, more like 75 million.”
But even Mr. Page is only a sideshow (not to switch metaphors) to the main event. And that’s the sight of real people — mostly stuntmen — flying over the audience, and the implicit danger therein. (An amplified voice warns the audience not only to turn off their cellphones but also to avoid trying to catch a ride with the professional fliers.)
Unlike the first time I saw “Spider-Man,” the flying (the first instance of which occurs about 45 minutes into the show) went off without a hitch on this occasion. The potential magic is undercut, though, by the very visible wires and harnesses that facilitate these aerodynamics.
Partly because the performers are masked, you experience little of the vicarious wonder and exhilaration that comes from watching Peter Pan or even Mary Poppins ride the air in other musicals. The effect is rather like looking at anonymous daredevils who have been strapped into a breakneck ride at an amusement park. Come to think of it, Coney Island might be a more satisfying choice.
http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/theater/reviews/spider-man-turn-off-the-dark-opens-after-changes-review.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=2&adxnnlx=1308122895-pwrrSYQgYFTJz5YrRVYAfg
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Love Never Dies is Phantom, take two
Simon Plant
From: Herald Sun
May 28, 2011 12:00AM
THE man who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and The Phantom of the Opera knows a hit when he sees one.
So, right after he saw the first dress rehearsal in London of his Phantom sequel, Love Never Dies, Lord Lloyd Webber rang his wife, Madeleine Gurdon, and said: "Darling, it's not going to work.
"I'm sorry, we'll make the best of it, but it isn't."
That was March last year. Flash forward to Melbourne a week ago. Lloyd Webber is in the stalls of the Regent Theatre to view the first run-through of a radically different Australian version of Love Never Dies starring two relative unknowns: Ben Lewis as the Phantom and Anna O'Byrne as Christine.
Later that evening, the world's most successful living composer rings his wife and says: "I've got to tell you, it's the other end of the scale. This one is bliss!"
What happened in between could almost make a musical. How Lloyd Webber overcame harsh reviews and a cancer scare to restage the show by collaborating with a creative team on the other side of the world.
"I can't really even put it into words but I feel very deeply that this show takes what I originally did (The Phantom) into another dimension," he says. "It sort of closes a chapter."
We will know if there's a happy ending tonight, when the new $9 million production of Love Never Dies has its Australian premiere in front of an audience containing top producers from North America and Asia.
Whether or not they surrender to its passions, Lloyd Webber believes he is seeing Love Never Dies "as I always hoped it would one day be. I didn't know that would happen here but, honestly, it is an absolutely extraordinary piece of work".
Lloyd Webber sensed the new approach was right even before the overture ended. Gobsmacked by the sight of dome-capped towers and twinkling lights signifying New York's Coney Island fairground, he decided: "You just know that you're in the world where it's supposed to be."
For the past week, Lloyd Webber's world has orbited around the gloriously gothic Regent and a theatre suite overlooking Collins St.
The morning we meet, his lordship looks relaxed in a navy blazer, grey slacks and black slip-on shoes - as if he's wandered in off the deck of a yacht - but producer Tim McFarlane (The Really Useful Group Asia Pacific) advises that Lloyd Webber has been haunting the Regent since he arrived from London: dashing off notes to cast and crew, slogging through tech runs and fine-tuning every aspect of a show he calls "97 per cent there".
"Yes, I've had six days doing what I love doing," he says, "which is actually being a composer working with the director."
Simon Phillips (retiring artistic director of the MTC) is directing this second version of Love Never Dies. It was McFarlane who suggested he meet Lloyd Webber in the UK about restaging the show Down Under and they agreed it would benefit from "going back to the drawing board and reconceiving everything".
That meeting led to another at Lloyd Webber's Mediterranean home, where Phillips's preferred designer, Gabriela Tylesova, unveiled a scenic model with swooping roller-coaster curves.
"I've never seen anything like it before," an astonished Lloyd Webber told her. And standing before the real thing this week, the composer was still dumbfounded by its daring, saying: "Wow, wow."
MILLIONS say the same thing about The Phantom. Lloyd Webber's mega-hit musical has been seen in 149 cities and taken more than $5 billion. But, almost from the moment that famous chandelier rattled in 1986, Lloyd Webber was looking at ways to extend the story of the Phantom, Christine and Raoul.
"I care very much for those characters and the love triangle that exists there," he says.
In 1994, Lloyd Webber discussed the idea of a sequel with novelist Frederick Forsyth. Ten years later, he and comic writer Ben Elton came up with a story that placed the trio on the other side of the Atlantic.
Lloyd Webber was especially attracted to Coney Island - "The only place you could go to where everybody was a freak of some kind" - and imagined a romantic trap being laid there in 1907: 10 years after the Phantom's dramatic disappearance from the Paris Opera House.
"This is a very personal piece for me," he says. "There's probably more of my real self in this than anything else I've ever done."
For his new tale of unrequited love, Lloyd Webber crafted music with a darker, more operatic hue than its classical-pop predecessor and imagined an electrically charged carnival world where his songs could soar.
Shaping a clear storyline proved harder. As he says: "If the book is not fundamentally right, you can be in an awful lot of trouble."
A "perfect storm" of trouble engulfed Love Never Dies as its West End debut approached. Phantom fanatics who objected to a sequel staged what he calls a "professionally run internet campaign against us".
Then Lloyd Webber was diagnosed with cancer. He expected to recover quickly from a prostate operation but explains: "I wasn't back properly and I wasn't on the case as I could normally be with a production that actually wasn't right ... all of us involved with it should have said, 'We've got to put it on hold'."
The theatre critics in London pounced and bloggers cruelly dubbed the show Paint Never Dries. Lloyd Webber says now: "Because I was ill and everything, it probably would have been better if it had been actually produced by someone else."
Second time round, Lloyd Webber has focused on the script and the score and allowed the Australians maximum creative space - a privilege he and lyricist Tim Rice enjoyed in the late 1960s and '70s.
"I sometimes wonder whether Jesus Christ Superstar (1972) would even have been heard of if we'd (first) done it in the theatre," he muses. "Instead, we just made it as an album and said, 'If you want to stage it, you're just going to do what we wrote or not'. Because we were kids and you could say those sorts of things."
Recently reunited on a production of The Wizard of Oz, Rice told Lloyd Webber: "The thing is, Andrew, when we started off, you just did it and didn't listen to anybody. Now, at this stage of our careers, we end up with so many people and don't always come up with the right result."
Love Never Dies mark II could be an exception.
LLOYD Webber's only "real reservation" about Melbourne was the size of the Regent, but those doubts eased after he saw Phillips's "consummate staging".
"Simon seems to know exactly what he wants. I have to say, I'm incredibly impressed," he says.
He is full of praise also for choreographer Graeme Murphy, musical supervisor Guy Simpson, and the cast. Asked about plans to take Love Never Dies overseas, he hesitates, then says: "I would like to see this production go everywhere. It's just the best."
What about New York?
"This is the show that should go to Broadway without any question."
For now, Lloyd Webber is probing every crochet in his score for Love Never Dies. This week, he even penned some new music.
"Only a little touch," he stresses, "but these things are cumulative. I want to do a little bit of work with the orchestra still."
That's my cue to leave but as I go, I ask why we identify so powerfully with the Phantom. "I don't know the answer to it," he sighs. "Maybe it's to do with everybody wanting to change something about themselves."
What would Lord Lloyd Webber change about himself?
"If you know what you want to do in life, you're a very lucky person. If you are then successful and able to make a career out of the one thing you want to do, you're an extraordinarily lucky person. Sometimes, I think I'm the luckiest person alive," he says.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/love-never-dies-is-phantom-take-two/story-e6frf96f-1226064421319
From: Herald Sun
May 28, 2011 12:00AM
THE man who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and The Phantom of the Opera knows a hit when he sees one.
So, right after he saw the first dress rehearsal in London of his Phantom sequel, Love Never Dies, Lord Lloyd Webber rang his wife, Madeleine Gurdon, and said: "Darling, it's not going to work.
"I'm sorry, we'll make the best of it, but it isn't."
That was March last year. Flash forward to Melbourne a week ago. Lloyd Webber is in the stalls of the Regent Theatre to view the first run-through of a radically different Australian version of Love Never Dies starring two relative unknowns: Ben Lewis as the Phantom and Anna O'Byrne as Christine.
Later that evening, the world's most successful living composer rings his wife and says: "I've got to tell you, it's the other end of the scale. This one is bliss!"
What happened in between could almost make a musical. How Lloyd Webber overcame harsh reviews and a cancer scare to restage the show by collaborating with a creative team on the other side of the world.
"I can't really even put it into words but I feel very deeply that this show takes what I originally did (The Phantom) into another dimension," he says. "It sort of closes a chapter."
We will know if there's a happy ending tonight, when the new $9 million production of Love Never Dies has its Australian premiere in front of an audience containing top producers from North America and Asia.
Whether or not they surrender to its passions, Lloyd Webber believes he is seeing Love Never Dies "as I always hoped it would one day be. I didn't know that would happen here but, honestly, it is an absolutely extraordinary piece of work".
Lloyd Webber sensed the new approach was right even before the overture ended. Gobsmacked by the sight of dome-capped towers and twinkling lights signifying New York's Coney Island fairground, he decided: "You just know that you're in the world where it's supposed to be."
For the past week, Lloyd Webber's world has orbited around the gloriously gothic Regent and a theatre suite overlooking Collins St.
The morning we meet, his lordship looks relaxed in a navy blazer, grey slacks and black slip-on shoes - as if he's wandered in off the deck of a yacht - but producer Tim McFarlane (The Really Useful Group Asia Pacific) advises that Lloyd Webber has been haunting the Regent since he arrived from London: dashing off notes to cast and crew, slogging through tech runs and fine-tuning every aspect of a show he calls "97 per cent there".
"Yes, I've had six days doing what I love doing," he says, "which is actually being a composer working with the director."
Simon Phillips (retiring artistic director of the MTC) is directing this second version of Love Never Dies. It was McFarlane who suggested he meet Lloyd Webber in the UK about restaging the show Down Under and they agreed it would benefit from "going back to the drawing board and reconceiving everything".
That meeting led to another at Lloyd Webber's Mediterranean home, where Phillips's preferred designer, Gabriela Tylesova, unveiled a scenic model with swooping roller-coaster curves.
"I've never seen anything like it before," an astonished Lloyd Webber told her. And standing before the real thing this week, the composer was still dumbfounded by its daring, saying: "Wow, wow."
MILLIONS say the same thing about The Phantom. Lloyd Webber's mega-hit musical has been seen in 149 cities and taken more than $5 billion. But, almost from the moment that famous chandelier rattled in 1986, Lloyd Webber was looking at ways to extend the story of the Phantom, Christine and Raoul.
"I care very much for those characters and the love triangle that exists there," he says.
In 1994, Lloyd Webber discussed the idea of a sequel with novelist Frederick Forsyth. Ten years later, he and comic writer Ben Elton came up with a story that placed the trio on the other side of the Atlantic.
Lloyd Webber was especially attracted to Coney Island - "The only place you could go to where everybody was a freak of some kind" - and imagined a romantic trap being laid there in 1907: 10 years after the Phantom's dramatic disappearance from the Paris Opera House.
"This is a very personal piece for me," he says. "There's probably more of my real self in this than anything else I've ever done."
For his new tale of unrequited love, Lloyd Webber crafted music with a darker, more operatic hue than its classical-pop predecessor and imagined an electrically charged carnival world where his songs could soar.
Shaping a clear storyline proved harder. As he says: "If the book is not fundamentally right, you can be in an awful lot of trouble."
A "perfect storm" of trouble engulfed Love Never Dies as its West End debut approached. Phantom fanatics who objected to a sequel staged what he calls a "professionally run internet campaign against us".
Then Lloyd Webber was diagnosed with cancer. He expected to recover quickly from a prostate operation but explains: "I wasn't back properly and I wasn't on the case as I could normally be with a production that actually wasn't right ... all of us involved with it should have said, 'We've got to put it on hold'."
The theatre critics in London pounced and bloggers cruelly dubbed the show Paint Never Dries. Lloyd Webber says now: "Because I was ill and everything, it probably would have been better if it had been actually produced by someone else."
Second time round, Lloyd Webber has focused on the script and the score and allowed the Australians maximum creative space - a privilege he and lyricist Tim Rice enjoyed in the late 1960s and '70s.
"I sometimes wonder whether Jesus Christ Superstar (1972) would even have been heard of if we'd (first) done it in the theatre," he muses. "Instead, we just made it as an album and said, 'If you want to stage it, you're just going to do what we wrote or not'. Because we were kids and you could say those sorts of things."
Recently reunited on a production of The Wizard of Oz, Rice told Lloyd Webber: "The thing is, Andrew, when we started off, you just did it and didn't listen to anybody. Now, at this stage of our careers, we end up with so many people and don't always come up with the right result."
Love Never Dies mark II could be an exception.
LLOYD Webber's only "real reservation" about Melbourne was the size of the Regent, but those doubts eased after he saw Phillips's "consummate staging".
"Simon seems to know exactly what he wants. I have to say, I'm incredibly impressed," he says.
He is full of praise also for choreographer Graeme Murphy, musical supervisor Guy Simpson, and the cast. Asked about plans to take Love Never Dies overseas, he hesitates, then says: "I would like to see this production go everywhere. It's just the best."
What about New York?
"This is the show that should go to Broadway without any question."
For now, Lloyd Webber is probing every crochet in his score for Love Never Dies. This week, he even penned some new music.
"Only a little touch," he stresses, "but these things are cumulative. I want to do a little bit of work with the orchestra still."
That's my cue to leave but as I go, I ask why we identify so powerfully with the Phantom. "I don't know the answer to it," he sighs. "Maybe it's to do with everybody wanting to change something about themselves."
What would Lord Lloyd Webber change about himself?
"If you know what you want to do in life, you're a very lucky person. If you are then successful and able to make a career out of the one thing you want to do, you're an extraordinarily lucky person. Sometimes, I think I'm the luckiest person alive," he says.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/love-never-dies-is-phantom-take-two/story-e6frf96f-1226064421319
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