Musicals aren’t written – they’re re-written, goes one famous dictum about musical theatre. But Stephen Sondheim has added a clever variation to that in one interview I have read: “Musicals aren’t re-written – they’re written with an audience,” he said, and added, “I love changing things in front of the final collaborator, which is the audience.”
In other words, smart writers and creative teams listen to what audiences tell them in previews, and make changes appropriately. But then musicals live or die by their audiences, or lack of them, once the finished result is presented: in what is possibly the harshest theatrical economy of all, the question is always whether anyone actually turns up, in sufficient numbers, to keep a musical running commercially. And there are never any guarantees: Boublil and Schonberg may have created arguably the world’s most popular musical in Les Miserables, but earlier this year they wrote a show, The Pirate Queen, that will go down in history as one of the costliest flops in Broadway history, according to Broadway columnist Michael Riedel. They could, of course, have seen it coming: it played an out-of-town try-out in Chicago last autumn, and they were immediately in trouble. New staging and book support were brought in from Graciela Daniele and Richard Maltby Jr respectively, but they couldn’t fix it.
Nor have serial attempts to fix Boublil and Schonberg’s previous show, Martin Guerre. “Look, It’s Martin Guerre/Standing So Brave/Back from the Grave!”, sing the chorus at one point of the return of the eponymous hero, presumed dead, and so is the show, back from the grave yet again, in a UK regional production at the tiny Watermill Theatre in Newbury that I saw on Saturday. This is the musical that Cheek by Jowl’s Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod famously staged the premiere of at the Prince Edward Theatre in July 1996, but was sent back into rehearsals even while it was running, extensively re-tooled, and re-opened to the press in November 1996. Another director, Connall Morrison, took another look at it for a production at West Yorkshire Playhouse in a version that that subsequently toured the US in 1999, where Variety’s Minneapolis critic Chris Jones noted, “Shorn of spectacle, stomping, shouting and most of the superfluous plotting, there’s no question that this latest incarnation of the long-troubled tuner Martin Guerre is a vast improvement over the production that first underwhelmed the public at London’s Prince Edward Theater in 1996”. Jones went on to note, “Lord knows, the creative team worked themselves to the bone —- effecting radical surgery on book, music and lyrics.” Then he says, “But the generally impressive improvements in Schonberg’s score do not have much impact on the main issues here —- the music was always strong.”
Those main issues in Minneapolis surrounded the book and the actors’ engagement with it to give it a convincingly truthful life. And in the close-up proximity of the Watermill – even one whose rustic wooden environs are beautifully suited to the show’s intense and intimate world – we’re still at one remove from being able to believe and truly engage with it.
Perhaps its just not fixable. “If at first you don’t succeed, try again,” may be a good philosophy for life, but not always for musical theatre. Repeated attempts to revise Frank Wildhorn’s The Scarlet Pimpernel – which opened originally in 1997 at the Minskoff, then was re-tooled and re-opened to the critics there a year later, then re-tooled yet again when it was moved to the Neil Simon Theatre in 1999 – didn’t prove third time lucky, but did, at least, prove the resilience of the producers, and kept the show running far longer, with their constant hope triumphing over experience, than if they’d given up sooner.
Producers, of course, invariably believe in their shows – it’s why they put them on in the first place — often when no one else does. The jury is still out on the prospects for the revamped stage version of The Lord of the Rings, which opened unsucccessfully in Toronto last year. But despite running up massive losses there, it was extensively overhauled to bring it to Drury Lane. Having seen both productions, I know that serious work was done, as I reflected in my Stage review. As Rob Howell, the designer of the show, told me recently of the opening in Toronto, “Any opening night is a snapshot of where got to at that point, with everybody doing what they can to make sure that the snapshot is complete. But if we’d had another month, it would have been different, so it was a document of where got to.”
And as I previously blogged here, Matthew Warchus told me a few months before the revamped production opened, “We wouldn’t be here if the Toronto experience wasn’t positive enough. It revealed how close we came to getting it right and what needed to be recalibrated.” Toronto, he said, was a “stepping stone” to where they are now; but was it far enough?
Sometimes even more radical surgery is required. Disney, of course, famously shut down their production of Elton John’s Aida after its problematic Atlanta try-out, and put an entirely new creative team in place who re-staged, re-designed and mostly re-cast it before attempting Broadway, as I’ve previously blogged about here. Andrew Lloyd Webber shut down Hal Prince’s production of Whistle Down the Wind after its Washington DC try-out in 1996, cancelling the Broadway transfer that was scheduled for April 1997 (I remember seeing that the front-of-house had even gone up at what was then called the Martin Beck Theatre), and subsequently re-staged it with a new director, the Australian Gale Edwards, at the helm for a West End premiere at the Aldwych in 1998, where it ran for two-and-a-half years.
