When Rodgers and Hammerstein’s now-legendary first musical together Oklahoma! first tried out in New Haven in 1943, one of the early reports of its likely prospects for Broadway proclaimed, “No legs, no jokes, no chance!” That verdict, of course, proved entirely wrong, and the history of modern musical theatre was re-written when it actually opened in New York and eventually became the longest-running musical of its time.
But in the show-within-the-show that is presented by a bunch of Jewish actors in Imagine This, a musical set in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, the lead actor assures the Nazi commander of their re-telling of the Masada story, “You’ll love it. It has singing, dancing and all the Jews die in the end.”
That joke may have scored points for irony, but the London critics were not similarly enamoured (with the exception of Tim Walker, who gave it four stars in the Sunday Telegraph, and another review in freesheet London Lite). Now it has been announced that the musical is to shutter prematurely at the New London Theatre on December 20, just a month and a day after it opened there.
Lead producer Beth Trachtenberg has firmly laid the blame for its failure at the feet of London’s critical fraternity, declaring in a press statement, “Night after night we have seen audiences stirred to the depths of their emotions by this show. Fundamentally I do not think the critics should be making a moral judgment over the subject matter and moreover that they are generally not prepared to embrace musicals. I’ve witnessed the public’s response to the show that is directly opposed to a narrow-minded critical belief that musicals are limited in their emotional impact and ability to deal with meaningful subject matter in a powerful and sensitive manner.”
Even the Jewish Chronicle expressed doubts for its prospects, asking whether it was, above all, “in good taste to set a musical in Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto in 1942 with the Holocaust as background”. But if several critics did, indeed, wonder if this was likely to put in the in the realm of The Producers’ ‘Springtime for Hitler’ sequence, the main criticisms came not so much for the show’s content as its execution.
Indeed, the National Theatre has previously proved that it is possible to make great art out of just such a great tragedy: in 1989, Nick Hytner made his NT directorial debut when he staged Joshua Sobol’s play Ghetto also set there, but which used authentic music actually written in the ghetto to accompany it.
Trachtenberg may be legitimate to be disappointed by criticisms of her show that were made by the likes of commentator Norman Lebrecht, who called it “one musical too far” without having actually seen it; and whom she confronted on Radio 4’s Today programme, offering listeners the chance to see it for free and judge for themselves by actually doing what Lebrecht hadn’t, and that’s see the show.
But if, as she now insists, “the show’s content ensured a mood of prejudgement reigned over the production in general”, she is wrong to now extend that supposed climate to Stephen Daldry’s new film The Reader, which she claims is “being similarly criticised before its release”. Has she seen it yet to qualify her to put it in the same category as her own show? Or is she simply hijacking it to make back up her point that “it would appear that Imagine This has fallen foul to the broader sensitivities surrounding its topic”?
But if the general public is responding so warmly to the show, as she also claims, it would have overcome the negative reviews: We Will Rock You has famously done so. Imagine This, of course, is in a completely different category, and was always going to be a hard sell: it had no stars and or rock pedigree, and has a difficult and challenging story. But opening it in the midst of a fast-approaching recession, with tickets up to £60 each, it needed something else; the urgent imperative of being a show that people simply had to see. It is not the critics’ fault that it isn’t, but entirely the show’s own failings that make it considerably less than that.
It's a bad show. I wish it were good but its not. It has generic euro pop music that doesn't reflect any place or period beyond the 1980's sung through musicals it was hoping to be when it was initially conceived as "Masada" . The characters, such as they are, are stereotypes with no individuality whatsoever and consequently we don't invest in them emotionally. I'm not saying that their intentions were cynical when they were creating the show - I believe that they were most sincere but sincerity doesn't make it good. And the fact that they were attempting to dramatize a difficult and challenging subject matter is admirable, but they simply weren't up to the task. Perhaps if they hadn't resorted to cheap laughs, and panto duets and had accepted their dark subject matter and treated it seriously they would've succeeded. If the audience truly loved it they'd have told their friends. But they didn't - they were moved by the ending because you'd have to have a heart of stone to not be moved by it - but the previous 2 hours in the theatre were crap.
Imagine This has also been hit by the climate of fear created by lazy writers like Mark Shenton who have all decided they are economic pundits. Perhaps Mr Shenton would explain exactly what he means by 'in the midst of a fast-approaching recession'. Are we in a recession or the lead-up to it? How does Mr Shenton know we are in the 'lead-up'? How does Mr Shenton know a recession is coming? Does he have a crystal ball? Or perhaps Mr Shenton is one of those misguided people who believe what they read in the newspapers, where it's cheaper to publish acres of comment about statistics than employ reporters to find real stories. There was a recession in 2002, 1990, 1980, 1973, etc., etc., etc. This is no recession. Wait until North Sea gas dries up, then you'll know what real recession is all about.
'Hooray hooray hooray misery's on the way!' as Noel Coward sang, and encouraging that attitude will affect everyone whose wage depends on people buying tickets. That will impact all the way back to The Stage and Mr Shenton's own wage. I thought the whole point of being in theatre is that you take the knocks and get on with things – an attitude Mr Shenton would be well advised to promote.
Perhaps tyro stage producer Trachtenberg, who comes from a career in television (and that's not a value judgement, just an observation that her grounding is in a radically different area) might consider actually getting acquainted with the realities of commercial theatre and the power (or not) of reviews before making tendentious pronouncements about them... just the kind of approach, in fact, that she advised so forcefully with regard to her own show.
Regardless of its quality, such a show was always going to be a tough sell, not necessarily the sort of thing for a debut producer to take on in a foreign country. When the actual material turned out to be, well, let's be charitable and say "patchy", it was an even tougher sell. It didn't sell. That's not the critics' responsibility. Our job isn't to sell shows, it's to report about them. That's what we did.
So “the show’s content ensured a mood of prejudgement reigned over the production in general” - did she really mean to say "ensured"? Because if she did, then what blame to critics for acquiescing in something "the show's mood ensured"? And if she says that now, did she not spot that it was also true when she took the show on? If so, what, if anything, did she do to try to combat it? If not, why is she now trying to foist responsibility on to others for her own absence of foresight?
Come on Jon, you don't have to be an economic pundit to know the economy is screwed. I thought about linking to economic articles discussing the Euro zone officially being in recession for the first time since the introduction of that currency, UK likely to be declared so at the end of this quarter etc However you can find them yourself in 2 seconds of Google search.
Ignoring all the experts (that you don't trust with their mere statistics) I know we are trouble when my friends are losing their jobs and businesses are closing down on every high street.
To say a climate of fear has been created by lazy reporters and that affected the running of the show seems completely insane to me. However I am not surprised, I have seen many bizarre defences of this show mounted around various sites indeed. I will make my own mind up when I get round to seeing it in the next few days but God it hasn't half had lots of nutters springing out the woodwork.