|
| Home | News | Tour | Charts | Board | Archive | Shop | Links | FAQ | Contact |
| ELTON JOHN NEWS |
| "Lestat" shaping on Broadway Monday, April 24 2006 |
With the opening of "Lestat," his Broadway debut, only a few days away, the producer Gregg Maday has problems.
Not simply the niggling technical glitches that plague every production of this size — reportedly more than $12 million — but huge, scary, potentially fatal problems, the kind that might have sent a lesser person swan diving from the mezzanine by now.
"Listen, I know the first 20 minutes still doesn't work," he told a reporter just before the curtain rose at a recent Saturday night preview, tugging playfully on his white goatee. The creative team, including the director Robert Jess Roth (formerly of "Beauty and the Beast"), had spent the day before laboriously reworking those same 20 minutes, radically altering lighting, sound and set; mere hours ago, Mr. Maday had sounded as though everything was on track. "By Monday," he now said, "it'll be totally different. Don't you love this process?"
A more pressing question might be, Why is this man smiling? Why isn't he throwing tantrums and hurling invective? After all, it was he who persuaded his employer, Warner Brothers, to mount this adaptation of the novels of Anne Rice, with a score by Elton John and lyrics by Bernie Taupin. In so doing he ushered the company into the risky business of adapting its properties for the stage. (The company bought the rights when it made the 1994 film "Interview With a Vampire," with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.)
He also opened it to what may be unfavorable comparisons with Disney, which has had unqualified success with shows like "Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King" and "Aida." Mr. Maday has also set himself up for tough comparisons personally. By persuading Warner to let him control "Lestat" without the help of a veteran Broadway producer, he is bound to be measured against Thomas Schumacher, Disney's dapper in-house theatrical impresario, the only other corporate producer to go it alone.
But Warner, unlike Disney, has no theatrical division in place, no long history in live action born of years in the theme park business, just Mr. Maday, hanging out there for all to see.
"There a lot resting on him," said Mark Kaufman, executive vice president of production for music and theater at New Line Cinema, who produced "Hairspray" and the forthcoming "Wedding Singer" with Margo Lion. "I might find it pretty scary if it were just me out there."
All this might be less daunting if "Lestat" had the crowd-pleasing gimmicks common to virtually all mass-market musicals today. But it has no falling chandelier, whirring helicopter or swinging vines. "We purposefully decided to avoid production theatrics like that," Mr. Maday said. "And now we know we have to deliver on the basic merits."
That has not proved easy thus far. "Lestat" has gotten some of the worst press in recent memory, including universally awful reviews during a January 2006 tryout in San Francisco. Elton John's songs were called "unrelentingly saccharine," "banal" and "virtually undistinguishable," and the show's book cursory and jumbled. While audiences familiar with Ms. Rice's work were most likely prepared for the fact that the story contains no heterosexual love angle, critics complained that even the homoerotic tension had been neutered, leaving little oomph of any kind.
"The whole thing was ordinary, to say the least," said Sir Elton, in a telephone interview, "soulless and bland." He thought Mr. Maday might fold the production. "But instead of throwing up his hands," Sir Elton said, "he was a rock."
Since moving the operation to New York in February 2006, Mr. Maday and the creative team have engaged in a thorough overhaul. Jonathan Butterell, the choreographer of "The Light in the Piazza," was hired to lend a fresh creative eye, Sir Elton wrote two new songs and Linda Woolverton ("Aida"), who wrote the book, stripped away many of the plot points that audiences found confusing. The passionate undertones of Ms. Rice's novels have been restored, some sly humor added and the elaborate exposition originally projected on large scrims throughout the play excised.
Originally expected to open April 13, 2006 with previews beginning March 11, 2006, the play was pushed back a couple of weeks. Mr. Maday estimates that 75 percent of the production has been changed since San Francisco. "We've made it better since we came to New York, without a doubt," he said. "The question will be, Is it good enough?"
Mr. Maday is no newcomer to such high-wire acts, especially ones that require a deft hand with corporate boundaries and high-priced talent. He has been an executive at Warner for nearly two decades, a fairly astonishing tenure in Hollywood. Before that he spent nearly nine years at CBS, where as head of comedy and drama development he shepherded shows like "Murphy Brown" and the critically acclaimed but short-lived "Frank's Place."
"They know what I'm capable of," he said of his employers. "It might have been different if they had hired me just to do this; the relationship between us would have been less secure. Because of the situation, I didn't see this as just a way to advance my career. I love the theater, and for me, getting to do this is a way to go back to something that I never got out of my blood."
Tom Fontana, the creator of the HBO series "Oz" and "The Bedford Diaries," now on WB, went to a Roman Catholic school in Buffalo with Mr. Maday. He traces the producer's grace under pressure to their Jesuit education. "They taught us that if you can remain calm in the eye of the storm, you can make almost anything work," he said. "Gregg has always been like that. I've never seen him panic."
Beatific demeanor notwithstanding, Mr. Maday concedes that he is feeling the screws. "It would ludicrous to deny that there's pressure on me," he said, lounging in the empty orchestra section, looking hip in a corduroy suit and sneakers. "But at some point you just have to have faith that you'll come up with the answer, or at least an answer. You remind yourself that you've put together a lot of challenging projects in the past, and there are a lot of phenomenally talented people working with you. You have to be strong."
It's hardly a mystery why Warner has invested heavily Broadway. Ever since Disney entered the fray with "Beauty and the Beast," the lure of turning a movie property into a stage show has been a holy grail for entertainment conglomerates. In addition to New Line, which, like Warner, is a division of the media giant Time Warner, MGM has gotten into the game through licensing, as it did with "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels."
What attracts them is not the bottom line of the show itself — $1 million a week, a good haul for a musical, would be an embarrassment for a film — but its potential ripple effect. Even a semi-successful show can restore an old movie's luster in the DVD market and give rise to a slew of video games, road companies, toys, T-shirts and collectibles. "It's a way to make it all three-dimensional," said Mr. Kaufman, who saw "Hairspray" morph from a low-budget John Waters film to a Broadway musical and to a big-budget movie. "When it works, it can be magic."
But only with the right property. "The balance," said the Broadway producer Emanuel Azenberg, "is that you achieve the right equilibrium between money and art. That's harder to do when you're a corporation because there are other reasons you make choices. When you have a corporation behind you, you gain money and that's great, but you lose something."
What led Mr. Maday and Warner to choose "Lestat," by all measures challenging source material, is a case in point. He had been working on an adaptation of "Batman" (Warner owns the right to all the DC Comics) but in 2003 Mr. Roth approached him about "Lestat." Sir Elton, Mr. Taupin and Ms. Woolverton had already signed on. Ms. Rice was gung-ho, too. They had even brainstormed the show in a three-day session in Las Vegas, which Sir Elton refers to fondly as "vampire boot camp."
"They came to us and said, 'Hey you guys own this already, so obviously you should do it,' " Mr. Maday recalled. Like everyone else, he knew the weak history of vampire shows on Broadway — the $12 million "Dance of the Vampires" closed after only a month in 2003, and "Dracula, the Musical" ran for a mere five months a year later. But, he recalled: "You say to yourself, hmmm. Anne Rice has sold 60 million copies of these books. Elton John is a legend, and he's already done two shows. And then you say yes." The clincher was that, as Mr. Taupin's first musical, it could be advertised as the first show by Sir Elton and his longtime collaborator. Sir Elton wrote the songs in less than two weeks.
But there was still the problem of the source material. Ms. Rice's books are highly detailed, graphically violent and narratively complex, full of morally ambiguous, pansexual characters. Making that work in a mainstream Broadway context has been among Mr. Maday's greatest challenges. "I realized that we had to find a way to be deeply true to the source material without being shackled by it," he said. "That balance didn't come easily."
Or quickly. Sir Elton saw the show a couple of weeks ago and said he was knocked out by the changes. "They were able to do exactly what they needed to," he said, "and that is bring humanity to it, make it a serious work." But Mr. Maday concedes that it will be hard to overcome the negative buzz.
"There's no way to fly under the radar in this day and age," he said, "no way to retool without everyone watching and judging. You need to perform in front of preview audiences to know where to take it. But then the bloggers come and post their comments. In one way it's great to have the immediate feedback, but it's also frustrating."
So far, he said, group sales have "not been where we want them to be," but he said he believed the show would catch on with the 18-to-35 demographic that "Spamalot" has tapped.
Traditionally financed shows are judged by how quickly they earn back their original investment, but Warner's top brass will assess this experiment based on a strange brew of critical reception, revenue, long-term marketing possibilities and what they view as necessary investment in the learning curve of a new industry. "We know how we're going to judge it, but I'm not going to talk about it," Barry M. Meyer, the company's chairman and chief executive officer, said coyly. But he insisted that whatever the final tally, Warner would pursue other theater ventures, through one financing model or another.
Already, he said, he has learned an important lesson: "Mounting a Broadway play is much harder than it looks, especially something like 'Lestat,' which is wildly ambitious. You're fixing it, changing it all the time. That's been hard for us because it's not what we're accustomed to, but it also appeals to us tremendously."
Mr. Maday is hesitant to speak of the future, but with a little prodding, he will confess he has a Broadway wish list. He hasn't given up on "Batman," and the company also owns partial rights to "Harry Potter" and "Charlie and Chocolate Factory," both of which he says he thinks would make great stage adaptations. Before he plunged into "Lestat," he had developed an interpretative dance version of "Casablanca," another Warner title; it had its debut in China last year, and he hopes to bring it to the United States.
But for now such plans are mere dream sequences; he has a play to fix. That 20-minute opening has to be locked down before the critics start streaming in. "Tomorrow night we're going to try it on a blank stage, real stripped down, 'Arte Povera' style, you know?" he said, his voice tinged with hope. "It could be great. It could be the answer we've been looking for."
| Related News |
Sunday, March 26 2006 at 20:21:27
Wednesday, March 22 2006 at 10:40:05
Saturday, February 25 2006 at 12:10:31
Tuesday, February 21 2006 at 09:31:32
Monday, February 6 2006 at 17:10:38
Friday, February 3 2006 at 15:57:59
Friday, January 27 2006 at 17:11:44
Friday, December 23 2005 at 07:14:23
Monday, December 19 2005 at 07:52:31
© 1997-2017 by HERCULES International. Hercules is not affiliated with Elton John`s management or the Elton John Aids Foundation. Please note that this site has been discontinued on March 31, 2017 and will not be updated anymore. |