Theatrical ducks (and turkeys)….

What is it with ducks and the theatre? After last year’s London disaster of Duckstastic – the Right Size’s follow-up to their megahit The Play What I Wrote – there’s a new off-Broadway musical in New York called Mimi LeDuck, and as the subhead to the Village Voice review asks, “Why can’t show folk tell duck from turkey?” As critic Michael Feingold goes on to write in his review, “Mimi LeDuck is one of the great mysteries of the theatrical universe. People of high professional standing are involved. The show boasts at least eight producers, six of whom are known quantities with reasonable credentials; those members of its better-known design team are even more impressive, while its eight-person cast’s combined credits add up to nearly three centuries’ worth of solid onstage experience. And yet all of these skilled theater hands, at least some of whom had presumably read the script and heard the score, signed on to participate in something called Mimi LeDuck, about a Mormon housewife who paints ducks for a living until she abandons Ketchum, Idaho, and her accountant husband to discover her destiny in Paris. The show is up and running, and their names are on the program, so they all must have signed their contracts and somebody must have signed some checks. Why did they do it?”

In other words, couldn’t they have seen it coming? But making hits is an inexact science, and no one can ever tell in advance what might work and might not. And if they couldn’t see it coming, can I be blamed for going (at least to the first half)? Yes, I wasted a precious evening in New York; but I was curious to see Eartha Kitt in a new musical – and at least I went for free, and haven’t lost all the money it must have cost to put on.

The same morbid fascination with theatrical turkeys also took me to see Twyla Tharp’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, which sought to do for the Dylan catalogue what her Movin’ Out did for Billy Joel: to thread a new dance piece around an existing song repertoire. But this tepid show – set, according to the playbill, “sometime between awake and asleep” – actually put me somewhere between those two states, too. It closes today after a run of less than a month.