Thanks to a dear reader, I am watching one of the single most horrifying things I have ever seen, worse than any horror movie - the revival of Promises, Promises. The director of this show should not be allowed near a show ever again, and yet here he is in LA helming a new musical. Not only that, the gentleman in question, who attended last week's recording session, was beyond rude, not saying hello to one person in the booth who didn't have something major to do with the show, and that includes having the courtesy to say hello to me and my engineer - and certainly unless this "person" has been living under a rock, which is entirely possible, he would know who I am. And I don't mind that kind of arrogance IF the person has genius or even a boatload of talent. This man, based on everything I've seen, has nothing - and this revival is putrid and makes me want to vomit on the ground for reasons I will go into in the notes. And frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn WHO knows. How DARE him do this to this show, which, believe me, did not need his help, not in any way, shape, or form. Sean Hayes, while perfectly okay perfectly likable, is so lightweight that there's no there there. Jerry Orbach you cared about. Jerry Orbach didn't need to do TV sitcom shtick to get his laughs - no, Jerry Orbach spoke Mr. Simon's lines well and got his laughs. That's called having both timing and understanding and trusting the material. His leading lady is twenty years too old for the part and therefore the part makes no sense on any level. The added songs? Awful. Disgusting. Nauseating. One of the greatest overtures ever written has been ruined AND because the director doesn't trust that an audience can just revel in a great overture, he stages it, with poor Mr. Hayes forced to sit there while people do meaningless steps around him. Terrible. Grapes of Roth's arrangement has also been changed and ruined - in the original, that number brought down the house and it wasn't even a number - it wasn't so much choreographed as brilliantly imagined by Michael Bennett, who, by the way, WAS a genius and understood the POINT of a number. Adding dancers to She Likes Basketball, one of the most glorious solos ever? Talk about a fool who doesn't trust the material and just wants to show off. It is C.C. Baxter's number, period. Add dancers and it becomes stupid. And prior to it, add Say A Little Prayer, which sits there like a lox because - wait for it - it has NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS SHOW, and you stop the show cold and not in a good way.
And Turkey Lurkey Time? Worse than you can imaging, perhaps one of the all-time botches of a sure-fire showstopper. With Michael Bennett, who knew how to build a number until the audience was in a frenzy, this number tore the roof off the theater - it door the damn roof off New World Stages when we did the Bacharach benefit. But no, this director/choreographer has to put his own inept stamp on it, and so we get one meaningless unexciting step after another - he actually has the temerity to ADD music to the end while they do MORE meaningless steps. The tepid applause (no matter how hard the teens in the audience try to have it be otherwise) says all there is to day. And then follow it with an added six minutes for A House is Not A Home, and they completely subvert and ruin one of the great act one closers - going directly from a showstopper to a heartbreaker moment. That's what this show is, and that's what this director does not understand.
And I haven't even seen act two yet. Be afraid, be very afraid.
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Topic: THE CHALICE FROM THE PALACE HAS THE PELLET WITH THE POISON... (Read 13758 times)