Note: You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
3. Bullying
I one time wrote a skit about two friends who had been at the same potluck dinner. Sarah was very upset that there had been two tater tot casseroles at the potluck, and while the other dish was all gone, hardly anyone had touched hers. Naturally, she called her pal Barb to vent about the other casserole, “which wasn’t even that good.” Of course, we learn it was Barb who made the other casserole and what follows is an overly pleasant, sub-text heavy advice session laden with such helpful hints as:
Sarah: Honey, I was thinking that next time, you might want to add a little water before cooking your casserole. That’ll help make it less cementy.
Tone is everything. I would have no problem telling my mom that something she made was a little dry, but to say it was cementy is more than just a little brutal.
The same thing is true about reviews. You can easily say that something is ineffective or that it doesn’t work without resorting to bashing or insulting. It’s almost like middle school all over again, with one kid trying to gain popularity by besting another. And true, funny insults get mileage. Years ago, Broadway.com published a selection of funny lines from reviews on works during the prior season, and I laughed very hard. But when you consider all aspects of a review, it doesn’t seem like the most production route, no matter how funny.
In Suskin’s review of Thou Shalt Not, for example, he goes as far as to say that the “I Need to Be in Love Ballet” “looked more like ‘The Laundress Has Conniptions.’” Admittedly, it’s a very funny description. That is until you think about Kate Levering or Susan Stroman reading it. No matter how ineffective the dance was, there was an intention behind it, a bold move to communicate something through dance. And to reduce it to an insult just doesn’t seem productive, particularly when you think about Levering needing to do this choreography eight shows a week after maybe reading such reviews. Again, there’s nothing wrong with the nature of the criticism, it is the spirit in which it is communicated that seems wrong.
Suskin, in particular, has a habit of piling on the criticisms. It’s as if it’s not enough to say that something doesn’t work, but then you have to nit-pick. In Thou Shalt Not, he questions the lyrics “all alone in your all night gown,” asking, “What, pray tell, is an ‘all night gown?’” Call me a fool, but I have a feeling that when Bierko sang this to Levering, all alone except for a bed, the audience didn’t have any trouble answering that question. In earlier editions of his Broadway Yearbook series, Suskin also questions the phrase “welcome hinges on the door” from Bloomer Girl and “secret soul” from Jane Eyre. It doesn’t seem too hard to figure out what “welcome hinges” mean, and as for “secret soul,” not only does it come directly from Charlotte Brontë’s novel, but she likely got it from a hack playwright/poet named William Shakespeare who used the term in an almost-forgotten work he wrote called Twelfth Night, when Duke Orsino says to Viola/Cesario, “I have unclasped / To thee the book e’en of my secret soul.”
Once again, let me clarify that I am not attacking Steven Suskin. As I have written numerous times before, I love Suskin’s Broadway Yearbook series and was greatly saddened that it did not continue, for his observations are invaluable to those of us who got to see the shows as well as to those of us who didn’t.
At the same time, I find reading reviews like Suskin’s to be crippling at times. Plays are like people. You just plain old like some people and dislike others. A personality trait you tolerate in one person, you may readily attack in another simply because you don’t like him/her in general. Similarly, what you overlook in your best friend you may find annoying beyond belief in that co-worker down the hall. In short, it’s all about the adjectives. Your best friend is funny, while the guy down the hall is judgmental. It’s hard to say “which label [will be] able to persist.”
When I think of the plays I’ve written, I wonder what critics would say if the plays actually got anywhere. Would they attack the traditional plotting and lose sight of the humor? Would the unabashed romance help them ignore the number of ballads? Will the review be about the clever show-within-a-show, or about that fact that it’s yet another backstage musical?
I suppose the solution is to always stay close to your original vision, to focus on the act of creating in hopes that you have the talent to make your intentions shine through. Then, I suppose you need to hear the criticism of the creative team, the audience, and the out-of-town critics in order to use what they communicate to improve the show in every way possible for opening night.
Then when that’s done, you try really hard not lose sight of their meaning when someone tries to help you by calling your passion piece “The Laundress Has Conniptions.”
the Broadway Mouth
February 15, 2009
Showing posts with label Susan Stroman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Susan Stroman. Show all posts
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Critical Interception: Analysis of a Review (Part 1)
It’s a love/hate relationship. Yes, I love reading Steven Suskin’s three Broadway Yearbook volumes (for seasons 1999-2000, 2000-2001, and 2001-2002) and soaking in all I can. The first two are particular favorites because I was actually in New York to see some of those productions with the casts that he writes about in such detail.
I love the books because Suskin is well-spoken, entertaining, and his analyses are always thoughtful and written with a clear knowledge of the subject at hand. At the same time, as I read the individual entries, I can’t help but feel that I am also witnessing some pretty standard crimes against my beloved Broadway.
Perhaps I’m also afraid of how my own work will stand under such scrutiny. Second-guessing what you do can be pretty crippling.
I honestly don’t get to read many New York reviews—I don’t have tons of time to locate and read them online—though I do follow the general leaning of reviews via the various Broadway message boards (I do miss the days when Broadway.com would publish a survey of the reviews).
Yet, I’ve read enough of them to feel like Suskin’s writings in the Broadway Yearbook series are a good representation of the beast, though Suskin also takes the added step of including a vast amount of background and historical detail related to each production.
As a model for analysis, I use his Thou Shalt Not review from Broadway Yearbook 2001-2002. Thou Shalt Not was the 2001 Harry Connick, Jr./Susan Stroman musical that starred Craig Bierko, Kate Levering, Norbert Leo Butz, and Debra Monk. Coming off the highs of Contact and The Producers, Thou Shalt Not was another Stroman baby; however, unlike so many of her other children, this one received a harsh critical backlash and was brutally expelled, as is typical of anything that aims high and thuds hard.
I did not see Thou Shalt Not, so I cannot speak to its quality. My only experience with the work has been through the bonus CD included with the revival recording of The Pajama Game starring Connick, Jr. Despite the considerable talents of the songwriter and Kelli O’Hara, who perform several songs from the show on the CD, nothing on the disc ever registers. As earnest an effort as it is, the recording never rises above in-one-ear-and-out-the-other status.
1. Experiencing the Source Material is Not a Necessity
It would seem reading the book, reading the play, or renting the movie would be a good first step in reviewing a big new Broadway production. It certainly is an honorable thing to do (a tradition that I’m sure could come to an abrupt end if anyone ever writes Portrait of a Lady: The Musical!).
The problem is that “the movie is never as good as the book.” And even if the adaptation is better than the book, no one who’s read the book can recognize that. Nothing ever beats mom’s sugar cookies because you ate them first. The definition of sugar cookie was defined by mom’s recipe. The only place to go from there is down.
As an example, I offer Pat Conroy’s huge novel The Lords of Discipline, his fictionalized account of his years at the Citadel. While the book was not a favorite by any means, I enjoyed much of the narrative and characters and so rented the movie. It’s a somewhat okay movie, but the characters are an abbreviated version of the novel’s characters, the plotting is summarized, and the conflicts are reduced. While The Lords of Discipline as a novel could amble its way through some 500 pages or so, it didn’t warrant a five hour epic on the big screen. Someone had to make some cuts somewhere, and they just happened to make a lot of the wrong ones.
But the problem is that I couldn’t honestly evaluate the movie of The Lords of Discipline as a movie because I was evaluating it as a novel. Whether it succeeds or fails as a movie independent of the novel, I’ll never know. Millions of Americans have not read the novel and will encounter the movie version in an entirely different way. As an aspiring-to-be-produced writer, it’s an important educational exercise to evaluate and learn from the adaptation, but in purely determining its quality as an independent work, experiencing the source material doesn’t allow one to speak to that.
In his review of Thou Shalt Not, Suskin compares it significantly with its source material, the Emile Zola novel Thérèse Raquin, highlighting the differences between what made the novel work and how the adaptation offset the delicate balance Zola created, thereby making for a crappy evening of theatre.
Not surprisingly, Zola’s Thérèse Raquin was far superior to Stroman’s Thérèse Raquin. And I should certainly hope so.
What makes for an effective adaptation is a topic in itself, but in short, the successful adapter needs to decide between faithfully adapting the work for a new medium (think Jane Eyre), revising the work (think Thoroughly Modern Millie), or interpreting the work (think Marie Christine). And to borrow a phrase, it is indeed brain surgery. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. The problem is that if you are bathing yourself in the source material immediately before reviewing the show (and the source material is of high enough quality to have survived generations), there is a statistically higher chance that it is not going to work in the show’s favor. And since most people aren’t out to adapt You Don’t Mess With the Zohan or Zoolander, this is typically a reviewing recipe for disaster. It’s the Mom’s Sugar Cookies effect.
The most annoying example of this was with the comparisons between Judy Holliday’s Ella Peterson in the Bells are Ringing movie and Faith Prince’s Ella Peterson in the revival. As far as film musicals go, Bells are Ringing is a pretty minor work. It’s enjoyable, but I can’t imagine it ever rivaling one’s affection for, say, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Sound of Music, or State Fair. I can’t for once believe that most of the critics dancing the “She’s Not Judy Holliday” ballet were basing the evaluation based upon their Comden and Greene period back in ’89. As much as I love the show, the movie hasn’t particularly stuck to my ribs. So by watching the video—and how else would Holliday’s performance be so fresh (it’s not, by any means, a remarkable film performance, though it probably was so on stage)—people were bringing on the Mom’s Sugar Cookies effect.
the Broadway Mouth
February 5, 2009
I love the books because Suskin is well-spoken, entertaining, and his analyses are always thoughtful and written with a clear knowledge of the subject at hand. At the same time, as I read the individual entries, I can’t help but feel that I am also witnessing some pretty standard crimes against my beloved Broadway.
Perhaps I’m also afraid of how my own work will stand under such scrutiny. Second-guessing what you do can be pretty crippling.
I honestly don’t get to read many New York reviews—I don’t have tons of time to locate and read them online—though I do follow the general leaning of reviews via the various Broadway message boards (I do miss the days when Broadway.com would publish a survey of the reviews).
Yet, I’ve read enough of them to feel like Suskin’s writings in the Broadway Yearbook series are a good representation of the beast, though Suskin also takes the added step of including a vast amount of background and historical detail related to each production.
As a model for analysis, I use his Thou Shalt Not review from Broadway Yearbook 2001-2002. Thou Shalt Not was the 2001 Harry Connick, Jr./Susan Stroman musical that starred Craig Bierko, Kate Levering, Norbert Leo Butz, and Debra Monk. Coming off the highs of Contact and The Producers, Thou Shalt Not was another Stroman baby; however, unlike so many of her other children, this one received a harsh critical backlash and was brutally expelled, as is typical of anything that aims high and thuds hard.
I did not see Thou Shalt Not, so I cannot speak to its quality. My only experience with the work has been through the bonus CD included with the revival recording of The Pajama Game starring Connick, Jr. Despite the considerable talents of the songwriter and Kelli O’Hara, who perform several songs from the show on the CD, nothing on the disc ever registers. As earnest an effort as it is, the recording never rises above in-one-ear-and-out-the-other status.
1. Experiencing the Source Material is Not a Necessity
It would seem reading the book, reading the play, or renting the movie would be a good first step in reviewing a big new Broadway production. It certainly is an honorable thing to do (a tradition that I’m sure could come to an abrupt end if anyone ever writes Portrait of a Lady: The Musical!).
The problem is that “the movie is never as good as the book.” And even if the adaptation is better than the book, no one who’s read the book can recognize that. Nothing ever beats mom’s sugar cookies because you ate them first. The definition of sugar cookie was defined by mom’s recipe. The only place to go from there is down.
As an example, I offer Pat Conroy’s huge novel The Lords of Discipline, his fictionalized account of his years at the Citadel. While the book was not a favorite by any means, I enjoyed much of the narrative and characters and so rented the movie. It’s a somewhat okay movie, but the characters are an abbreviated version of the novel’s characters, the plotting is summarized, and the conflicts are reduced. While The Lords of Discipline as a novel could amble its way through some 500 pages or so, it didn’t warrant a five hour epic on the big screen. Someone had to make some cuts somewhere, and they just happened to make a lot of the wrong ones.
But the problem is that I couldn’t honestly evaluate the movie of The Lords of Discipline as a movie because I was evaluating it as a novel. Whether it succeeds or fails as a movie independent of the novel, I’ll never know. Millions of Americans have not read the novel and will encounter the movie version in an entirely different way. As an aspiring-to-be-produced writer, it’s an important educational exercise to evaluate and learn from the adaptation, but in purely determining its quality as an independent work, experiencing the source material doesn’t allow one to speak to that.
In his review of Thou Shalt Not, Suskin compares it significantly with its source material, the Emile Zola novel Thérèse Raquin, highlighting the differences between what made the novel work and how the adaptation offset the delicate balance Zola created, thereby making for a crappy evening of theatre.
Not surprisingly, Zola’s Thérèse Raquin was far superior to Stroman’s Thérèse Raquin. And I should certainly hope so.
What makes for an effective adaptation is a topic in itself, but in short, the successful adapter needs to decide between faithfully adapting the work for a new medium (think Jane Eyre), revising the work (think Thoroughly Modern Millie), or interpreting the work (think Marie Christine). And to borrow a phrase, it is indeed brain surgery. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. The problem is that if you are bathing yourself in the source material immediately before reviewing the show (and the source material is of high enough quality to have survived generations), there is a statistically higher chance that it is not going to work in the show’s favor. And since most people aren’t out to adapt You Don’t Mess With the Zohan or Zoolander, this is typically a reviewing recipe for disaster. It’s the Mom’s Sugar Cookies effect.
The most annoying example of this was with the comparisons between Judy Holliday’s Ella Peterson in the Bells are Ringing movie and Faith Prince’s Ella Peterson in the revival. As far as film musicals go, Bells are Ringing is a pretty minor work. It’s enjoyable, but I can’t imagine it ever rivaling one’s affection for, say, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Sound of Music, or State Fair. I can’t for once believe that most of the critics dancing the “She’s Not Judy Holliday” ballet were basing the evaluation based upon their Comden and Greene period back in ’89. As much as I love the show, the movie hasn’t particularly stuck to my ribs. So by watching the video—and how else would Holliday’s performance be so fresh (it’s not, by any means, a remarkable film performance, though it probably was so on stage)—people were bringing on the Mom’s Sugar Cookies effect.
the Broadway Mouth
February 5, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
