Where once there were adult book stores, massage parlors and convenience alleys for lonely tourists on fixed incomes, now giggling hordes of children and parents ran across well-scrubbed streets to attend spectacular new family musicals. Where once, that mean Big Apple resembled a prison yard at recess time and taunted out-of-towners to swim in its slime and take it like a real “New Yorka’,” now the folks from Petaluma to Providence stood in squeaky clean lines to see stage versions of Disney animated movie hits. Across the street at the sparkling new Center for the Performing Arts, more crowds formed in warm fuzzy bliss to patronize a musical with a heart as big and righteous as a neon-lit flag about turn-of-the-century race relations.
The streets of Gorky’s lower depths in old Manhattan had been swept free of hustlers, prostitutes and common riffraff—all herded out of the theatre district into more appropriate climes like Prospect Park or the Jerry Springer audience. Fretting city officials, fearing the loss of tourism to a growing national perception that sleaze and violence were synonymous with New York City, formed an alliance with movieland giant Walt Disney to refurbish the Old Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street—yes, that 42nd Street—and help lift the neighborhood back into mainstream respectability. Times Square went to the ducks. No wonder the locals reveled in shows like The Life and Rent, which dared to depict the way things were before Mickey Mouse moved east to astonish the most jaded by proving that he could rival those envied Brits and all their confounded hits. Disney made the chancy film-to-stage leap with all the derring-do of Secretariat entering a horse race at the Toledo County Fairgrounds.
No getting around it: There was a void to fill. Cameron Mackintosh and colleagues, who had performed rescue work not exactly welcomed by know-it-all New Yorkers, were lately striking out with new shows. To the implicating question—what could be done to offset a growing public impression that Broadway was basically a showcase for golden age revivals and all those brazen British imports which hung shamelessly around forever—had anybody else a better answer than the Disney machine? Certainly, however many new writers may have been stalking producers’ suites with demo tapes in hand, they were not being “discovered” by the Big Guns who own all the real estate and would rather rent than produce.
Ah, yes, rent. Disney had enough money to lease practically every playhouse in the district, and the Mickey Mouse makeover recast Broadway as a kiddie fun zone. Lording it over the new moppet-friendly midway was Disney’s regal The Lion King. Since taking the town by the tail in 1997, it has consistently pulled in packed houses. And the end of its reign on Broadway was nowhere in sight as the century came to a close. Epitomizing the absolute triumph of showmanship over substance, The Lion King offers a rare visual extravaganza that succeeds by never standing still long enough to reveal the machinery beyond the magic. It is a purely theatrical amalgam, continually hauling out new treats from the wings, by turns a children’s pantomime, a Busby Berkeley spectacle, an ice show charade, high camp humor, the Village People in jungle gear, Cirque du Soleil in the air, and, of course, Disney everywhere. Never were the arts of direction and stagecraft more critical to the success of a show—nor more transparently devoid of a soul. Hardly a musical at all, The Lion King does not feel so much written or composed as cobbled together down a Hollywood assembly line of time-tested ingredients, all of them shrewdly employed to sustain the spectacle—and sustain it they do. No producer alive has the showmanship and marketing savvy of Walt Disney. Audiences have responded with abundant devotion.
Stager Julie Taymor’s larger-than-life puppets enchant and mystify. The songs of Elton John, Tim Rice, and a host of additional contributors keep a basic ersatz jungle beat thumping. The predictable story line—the king’s evil brother, Scar, who covets the thrown, kills the king and banishes his young son, Simba, who must eventfully find a way back to reclaim his place—gives Disney fans sufficient excuse to believe the evening has a purpose beyond mere amusement. A theme? Oh, perhaps the hip allusion in Tim Rice’s verse to a kind of rare primitive wisdom, cosmically appealing as long as the listener refrains from contemplating present-day conflicts raging across the African continent:
It’s the circle of life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
Till we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the circle
The Circle of life.
The Lion King is likably lightweight entertainment, and Disney deserves some credit for at least introducing the stage to a whole new generation of moppets, who may gravitate in seasons to come to less pandering parades. The gushing reviews virtually all pointed to the obvious. “A theatrical achievement unrivaled in its beauty, brains and ingenuity,” declared Greg Evans, reviewing in Variety.1 Los Angeles Times critic Laurie Winer dared to register nagging qualms: “When Taymor’s hand is quiet, or when it is ineffectual (such as in the insipid, floating ballet number that adorns ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight?’), The Lion King is revealed to be a show that renders its themes simplistic, and one with a weakness for pandering jokes.”2 Less hesitant was Robert Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard, expressing dismay at yet another example of New York’s descent down a mindless thoroughfare of sterile family fun: “Ultimately I felt empty. What it’s about is essentially kitsch…. It just seems as though Broadway is just for foreign businessmen, out-of-town tourists and 10-year-olds…. It has lost its serious audience.”3
Although Disney’s inaugural 1994 stage entry, Beauty and the Beast, addressed a theme of real and relevant substance—physical versus spiritual beauty—it, too, got nearly buried alive under an incessant barrage of glitz and gadgetry. It lacked the film’s “visual wit,”4 complained the New York Times’ Janet Maslin. Quipped her Times cohort David Richard, “It belongs right up there with the Empire State Building, F.A.O. Schwarz and the Circle Line boat tours…. It is Las Vegas without sex, Mardi Gras without booze…. Others may look upon the mind-boggling spectacle as further proof of the age-old theory that if you throw enough money at the American public, the American public will throw it right back…. Only the primary emotions and the most elemental reactions stand a chance of holding their own against the bustle and blazing pyrotechnics.”5
Indeed, and agreed. The producer’s relentless deference to frosting, from blinding fireworks and dancing spoons to chattering costumes and endless mugging, telegraphs a chronic lack of faith in the worthy little tale being enacted. Charmingly romantic are the opening scenes, in which Belle’s eccentric inventor father, Maurice, is introduced with his unique wood-chopping automobile. There is momentarily in the air the look and sound of a delicate fantasy about to unfold. Soon after, though, Maurice loses his way in the Disney forest, and so does much of a promising story, which instead subsumes itself in a penny arcade of hyperactive stagecraft. And in the end, here is a show that may leave you feeling more exhausted than enchanted.
Disney’s show-stopping invasion of the Great White Way did not earn it many friends at the next Tony Awards, where, nominated for nine Tonys, Beauty won just one, for costume design. Its marvelous score, primarily the work of composer Alan Menken and the late lyricist Howard Ashman, with apt supplementary lyrics by Tim Rice, lost out to a second rate chamber musical by Stephen Sondheim, Passion, a supreme snub tantamount to, say, The King and I being trumped in 1951 by Golden Apple. While Passion, another typically profitless Sondheim work (this one about a soldier falling in love with an ugly woman), soon faded depressingly away, long lines continued forming outside the Palace Theatre by folks eager to experience the story of a beautiful young woman falling in love with a rather ugly beast. Five years later, it was playing to 90 percent capacity houses.
During the 1998 season, when The Lion King began to roar, Disney’s across-the-street neighbor, Canadian-based Livent corporation, finally unveiled its own new E-ticket ride to the theme park of bigger-than-musical musicals, this one called Ragtime. It was a show calculated to extract big emotions from America’s lingering, guilt-ridden ambivalence over the plight and place of African Americans in U.S. society. Now, Uncle Walt could gaze upon his rival across the street and see a mirror reflection of his own synthetic showmanship. The two tuners were said to be locked in a bloody duel for the heart and soul of American patronage via the Tony Awards. They ended up sharing top honors. No surprise. Ragtime was judged to contain the best score. The Lion King, however, roared off with the coveted “Best Musical” award.
The antithesis of a fairy tale, Ragtime, based on the novel by E. L. Doctorow, pitches with virtuous determination the major American saga of race relations, something on the order of Julie Andrews holding court in a high school civics class. It has the look, sound, and good intentions of a proficiently polished amateur musical. What it suffers from the most is Terrence McNally’s sprawling free-form libretto, which juggles, not too gracefully, several stories simultaneously and treats them in stereotypical fashion, much like a patriotic world’s fair pageant fraught with one dimensional characters and Big Messages. The stiffest of the lot turns out to be Coalhouse Walker Jr., ironically written to hold center stage, even though his just grievance against some bigoted firemen for smashing up his new Model T does not get fueled up until well into a meandering first act. Into the surrounding morass wanders the infinitely engaging Tateh, a widowed Jewish emigrant from Eastern Europe who dreams of becoming a movie director. His ever-pensive soul and story would have made a fine musical all in itself.
Critic Laurie Winer, in whose Southern California backyard the show made its first stateside appearance, argued that the story springs from a humanity not fairly acknowledged by everyone and that, on balance, “Ragtime is the work of a producer with a passion for history, unafraid of a tragic ending, and who possesses a strong commercial sense.”6 Conversely, among a panel of dissenters, there was Vincent Canby, in whose New York Times notice, headlined “Big and Beautiful, Ragtime Never Quite Sings,” he lamented, “The first act begins with huge promise in a knockout title number…. With increasing frequency in the course of the show, the individual numbers appear to be illustrating emotions that have already been announced. The score, especially in its third hour, seems not to be hurtling the show forward in great leaps but stopping it dead in its tracks. You begin to feel cornered…. Toward the end of the show, the score has begun to sound like a nonstop series of personal epiphanies and gallant resolves to plug on, no matter what the obstacles, to some better tomorrow.”7
What both Ragtime and The Lion King shared prolifically in common were undistinguished scores of plodding calculation. Ragtime rides high and wide on fanfaric anthems either celebrating the American promise for incoming immigrants or decrying righteously the specter of racial bigotry and injustice, all set to words as cloyingly simple minded as ad copy for a presidential campaign. Its creators, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, may have a unique voice of their own, but it does not sing through here. At the outset, the songs are fetchingly in tune with the syncopated rhythms of the colorful era portrayed, especially the title number, then “Crime of the Century,” “Getting Ready to Rag,” “Henry Ford” and “New Music.” But what promises to be a journey full of rhythm and insight goes musically, and certainly lyrically, downhill as the narrative shrivels and shrinks into overstatement, from breezy to ponderous. Among a few standouts with a pulse of their own is the wonderfully intimate little “Buffalo Nickel Photoplay, Inc.” In it, the human size dreams of Tateh trickle through like pure unexpected sunshine out of a big, ashen, concept-musical sky. For a moment in the key of humanity, we are actually face to face with a real flesh-and-blood person, not a cardboard articulation of the producer’s strident idealism.
The musical disappointments of The Lion King are of a different sort, apparently induced, just the same, by the cold dictates of corporate design to achieve a demographics-sensitive diversity of sounds—from jungle chants and bongo drums to “Yeah, man!” ’60s rock power. In this case, the power of a huge film studio doubtlessly deserves credit for the pleasing if pedestrian patchwork, which does not so much move the action as embroider it with atmosphere and primal energy. While the show’s famous nonprofit arts director, Julie Taymor, may rightfully claim having enjoyed reasonable autonomy, the composer Elton John and lyricist Tim Rice openly acknowledged, without a trace of discomfort, allowing Disney all the revisions it deemed essential to satisfy its particular scheme. Not just revisions, but additional words and music supplied by an army of other songwriters—ten people in all, including Taymor—reportedly engaged to overcome a noticeable weakness in the original batch of John and Rice songs.
In fact, the show’s musical highlight, “Shadowland,” was supplied by three of them—Lebo M, Hans Zimmer and Mark Mancina. But John and Rice delivered a home run of their own in their edgy “Chow Down,” an atypically fierce outburst that flirts with acid rock:
Tell us again—gee
It’s so incredible
That you’re so rude
When you’re so edible
When you are food!
It’s time to chow down
Chow down!
Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-chow down
……I think we should begin the meal from scratch
So many juicy segments to detach
Be good as gold for you’re as good as carved
Here, kitty, kitty …
We’re starved!
This howling irreverence sends the score momentarily into male-hormone orbit, away from the ersatz jungle drums and two-syllable laments of a bamboo musical, and it gives us a tantalizing taste of what the two Englishmen might have done had they been encouraged or granted permission to forge raucously ahead in this hard rock vein. Another gem from the British duo that makes you forget you’re on a plastic safari ride is the hilariously fun “Madness of King Scar.”
In matters of script and score development, Disney and Livent mirrored each other’s control-freak producing methods and lavish production fetishes. Livent’s founder, Garth Drabinsky, who dreamed up adapting E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, held a competition among composers and lyricists for the job of creating the tunes, and then evidently dominated the songwriting process, note by note by note. Ditto essentially for Disney. Both organizations shunned any association, formal or affiliate, with the New York League of Theatre Producers. Perhaps the feeling was mutual. Given the snide indifference of New York theatre people to outsiders, one can imagine a reluctance on the part of Drabinsky and Disney to meet for coffee or share trade secrets with the producing colleagues of Peter Stone and his Circle of Thirty. Disney has shown a preference for English songwriters, Drabinsky for Americans. Neither is all that revolutionary, nor has either yet quite managed to duplicate, as no doubt each burningly desires, the global marketing wizardry of modern day magnate, Mackintosh. Disney is fast getting there, though, having by the year 2000 mounted a total of six companies of The Lion King on the boards worldwide, from New York to Toronto and Los Angeles, and with another two units playing on Japanese stages.
So far, Disney has reaped real profits. Not so for its smooth-talking rival across the street, who talked himself into bankruptcy, the inevitable outcome of Mr. Drabinsky’s having conned his gullible investors with some of the most advanced bookkeeping deceptions ever sold a pack of angels. Before the discovery of fraud caught up with the Canadian producer, he reveled in the heady role of Broadway’s promising new impresario, dreaming of becoming another Cameron Mackintosh. Madly devoted to American musicals, Drabinsky latched onto The Kiss of the Spider Woman in its troubled infancy, deciding he was destined to give it legs. He sponsored rewrites and additional tours, none profitable, then brought it back to Broadway for a second chance before the critics, making this possibly the shortest time in history between the opening of a failed musical and the date of its subsequent first New York revival. Kiss, even with better reviews, proceeded to languish at the box office—a protracted exercise in long-run image-building by a producer slipping deeper into debt. The downbeat original cast album does not inspire much of an urge to see the actual show, and none of the national on-tour engagements generated strong turnouts to witness the sullen songfest between two unlikely inmates—a drag queen and a South American political revolutionary—trapped behind prison bars in the same cell, where their disparate sexual urges ultimately collapse into an uneasy consummation.
Riding high on falsely inflated earnings, Mr. Drabinsky paid for the magnificent if needlessly overwrought revival of Show Boat. A man with passionate determination, he gravitated to Harold Prince, who directed Kiss and Show Boat. Besides his penchant for bookkeeping gymnastics, Drabinsky also threw blind embraces around all things American, commissioning a dizzying array of new work and revivals for future presentation, including a Dr. Seuss children’s musical; an adaptation of the film The Sweet Smell of Success, with a score by Marvin Hamlisch; and a revival of Pal Joey. And he envisioned an empire of new theatres spanning coast to coast, which he in time would build, and which would house his many imagined hits. Ragtime was to have been his crowning attraction in the Big Apple, as well as in multiple companies touring the globe. Perhaps there will one day be a musical about this insanely ambitious Canadian. Numerous felled impresarios will identify.8
To his credit and before he lost control of his enterprise, Mr. Drabinsky did demonstrate the admirable resolve to put his bogus capital and personal drive behind some new work. The same could not be said of the Disney office, where an evident abhorrence of failure has kept them from taking seriously anything not already tested on the silver screen and fit for children of all ages. They have sponsored endless workshops and readings of new musicals “in development,” none of which has progressed to opening night, while turning another animation property, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, into a stage tuner of uncertain merit and box office lure, which premiered quietly in Berlin in the summer of 1999. With its ability to attract top creative talent from all over the world, would Disney ever put up a new musical first written for the stage? Well, almost…. A new work already halfway in the hands of the Burbank animators, who assumed they’d be sketching it into full-blown cinematic glory, became instead the new Elton John and Tim Rice Broadway-bound tuner Aida. When Disney had approached John in 1994 about working on the film project, he showed such scant interest, not wanting to follow The Lion King with a similar assignment, that Disney countered with an offer to skip animation and go directly to Broadway if John and Rice would agree to do the songs.
The John-Rice work, based on the children’s story by Leontyne Price, and also the subject of the famed 1871 Verdi opera, slogged erratically through hissing notices when first presented in an elaborate workshop at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre. The humbling glitches resulted in a rapid turnover among the creative staff. In came replacement director Robert Falls, of Chicago’s famed Goodman Theatre. Falls recruited others to help rescue the ailing infant, including playwright Henry David Hwang. At the center of all the critical sniping was a split-personality musical trying to be both serious and cartoonist. “These Egyptians,” wrote Charles Isherwood, reporting for Variety, “sound just like post-adolescents from today’s hot-blooded TV dramas.”9 Revisions were implemented without the on-site participation of the composer, confined to his English abode and concert dates. John did drop one number and add another.
Songs from Aida, issued in a pre–Broadway concept album, failed ominously to make a decent dent on Billboard charts. The show was greeted by indifferent reviews ranging from cool to nasty when finally it faced the Manhattan first nighters. In a Wall Street Journal notice headlined “Bland as Custard … a Saccharine Dud,” Amy Gamerman observed, “This musical about a doomed romance in the age of the Pharaohs is as lifeless as a mummy.”10
Hundreds of new musicals are forever in the works, and only a handful of them, if that, will ever see an audience in the city that never sleeps. The romantic notion harbored by writers that big-time producers are looking for them is largely a myth. In truth, the more successful a New York producer becomes, the less likely will he or she be to seek out and present the work of neophytes. Disney can and does attract the most marketable and accomplished writers in the world. And yet through all the countless readings and workshops of new work by outsiders that Disney has reportedly sponsored since first taking Broadway back in 1994, not a single show has been launched on the road out of Burbank. In fact, by virtue of its association with two or three already established names (Ashman, John and Rice), Disney had not promoted any new talents at all. Par for the course. Drabinsky beholden to Flaherty and Ahrens? Just before plunging into financial infamy, he had his Ragtime creators at work on his new Dr. Seuss show Seussical; they were given an up front advance of half a million dollars. The show did not last a year in New York.
Cameron Mackintosh has yet to produce in a big way any of the budding British talents whose work he has tried out on local English workshop audiences. He has made his fortunes entirely off the efforts of just two teams: Webber and his various lyricists, and Boublil and Schonberg. Oh, but you say, yesterday’s titans took real chances! On whom, beyond maybe the lucky one or two? For all his bluster, David Merrick was spineless when it came to the discovery and support of unknowns. In 1960, in association with Zev Bufman, Merrick did dabble with a trio of neophytes—Jack Wilson, Alan Jeffreys, Maxwell Grant, all of whom remained incognito ever after—in the 8 performance fizzle Vintage ’60, for which they, along with Fred Ebb and Sheldon Harnick, supplied songs and sketches. On his own, Merrick virtually never worked with newcomers; there is the one obscure exception when he took half a chance by introducing to the world outside of Manhattan Edward Thomas, the ill-fated participant of a failed David Miracle. Thomas composed the music for a show that closed out of town in 1967, Mata Hari, with words crafted by Martin Charnin. Charnin himself had already been to Broadway briefly four years earlier when he and Mary Rogers, in association with a horde of people who came and went during stormy on-the-road rewrites, wrote Hot Spot, a 43-performance deadbeat staring Judy Holliday. Beyond this one fruitless gamble, Merrick never again typed out contracts for unproven talents. And, surely, he fought them off daily at the door. Merrick took on only credentialed songwriters, such as pop titans Burt Bacharach and Hal David, assigned to provide the songs for Promises, Promises.
Courage it takes, to say “yes” to untested stage composing talents. Only a few producers have shown it (revue master Leonard Sillman certainly did), and then only on very rare occasions and with mostly established professionals from Hollywood or the recording studio. Feuer and Martin brought to the stage Cy Coleman and Frank Loesser, both of whom came in with popular songwriting credits. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who struggled individually up the theatre ladder through a number of disappointing ventures, got their first big break together when Mark Warnow (a virtual unknown himself) produced their inaugural collaboration, the flop wartime musical What’s Up. Kermit Bloomgarden believed in pop music maker Meredith Willson. Lee Sabinson and William Katzell put E. Y. Harburg and Burton Lane over on Broadway after each had amassed numerous film and stage credits.
Edward Padula produced the first Strouse-Adams show, Bye, Bye, Birdie, after the duo had contributed, together and separately, to three Ben Bagley revues in the mid ’50s. Before Richard Kollmar and Albert W. Selden mounted Bock and Harnick’s first effort, Body Beautiful, Bock had already, working with lyricist Larry Holofcener, sold songs to Sid Caesar’s TV series, “Your Show of Shows,” and had co-composed Mr. Wonderful. And Harnick had worked on Silllman’s New Faces of ’52 and on the Bette Davis bomb, mounted the same season, Two’s Company. Harold Prince took a chance on Kander and Ebb, two relative unknowns with limited stage resumes but with a big song hit, “My Coloring Book,” to their name. Also direct from the Hit Parade, Richard Adler and Jerry Ross (“Rags to Riches”) had Prince, Robert Griffith and Frederick Brisson in their court.
Costume designer and producer Oliver Smith, in partnership with Paul Feigay, helped launched three major talents: Leonard Bernstein, then a symphonic and ballet composer, and Betty Comden and Adolph Green, two nightclub entertainers who had never worked on a Broadway show in any capacity. Edgar Lansbury in association with four other producers brought us Stephen Schwartz a couple of years after he, at age 21, had composed the title song for the hit 1969 play Butterflies Are Free. Lore Note raised the capital for the late off–Broadway sensation The Fantasticks, the work of fellow Texans Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones, who had already supplied music and verse to a couple of New York revues, including Ben Bagley’s short-lived off–Broadway effort, Shoestring ’57.
Garth Drabinsky had shown a preference for people who know their way around Manhattan. While his reins of power were slipping fiendishly away, the hyperactive Canadian mover and shaker was overseeing fifteen new projects in various phases of development. He produced the cheerfully reviewed Fosse: A Celebration in Song and Dance, and daringly he turned his back on vacuous spectacle by turning to a work of grim non-opulent naturalism, Parade. This he accomplished by once again confusing the stage for a classroom and by slipping into a fatal co-producing arrangement with Lincoln Center. The chancy new work they agreed to present had a score by Jason Robert Brown, a book by Alfred Unry, and direction by Mr. Drabinsky’s favorite, Hal Prince. (Prince had originally tried talking Stephen Sondheim into the project; Sondheim declined, wanting to work on something in “a lighter vein.”) Nothing much about Parade could overcome the gloomy premise: Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman in Atlanta, is tried and convicted for murdering one of his pencil factory workers, a 13-year-old girl. Following a dubiously conducted trial fraught with anti–Semitism, Frank is sentenced to death. When his fate is commuted to life imprisonment, an angry mob out for revenge breaks into the jail, hauls Frank out and lynches him.
Brown’s score is full of promise for the composer, too sprawling and self-conscious for the show. Variety’s Charles Isherwood was left utterly dismayed by the depressing affair. “Broadway has not exactly been a festive place in recent months.” Isherwood sensed a black and white depiction of victim and villain: “Its moral positions are hammered home with dogged insistence, and its unhappy ending seems to be quietly present in every scene.”11
Vincent Canby was left perplexed by the lifeless treatment. “It plays as if it were still a collection of notes for a show that has yet to be discovered.” The music? “Some pleasing melodies.” Lyrics? “Banal (I assume) by design in the way of commonplace speech.” Candy wondered how such a sordid and downbeat little roadblock had gotten this far. And in his pondering the preparation phase, he may just as well have been describing the behind-the-scenes trials of the musical’s famously fallen producer: “What was Mr. Prince thinking in allowing Parade to be produced in this condition? He believed in it, certainly, but something happens in the course of long pre-production work, readings, workshops and rehearsals, even to the pros. Collaborators have a way of psyching each other up, as they should do. At the same time, they can become isolated, so self-absorbed, so removed from reality and so mired in tiny details that they begin to see results not visible to the outsider.”12
Isolated. Self absorbed. Removed from reality. Not without a few fine reviews to its name, Parade closed down after 39 previews and 84 performances at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre. Lincoln Center, minus the critical support of the now bankrupt Garth Drabinsky, was left solely responsible for the weekly running costs, and for losses approaching $5.5 million. Still, Parade might have some kind of a future in the emerging touring and regional theatre market for Broadway also-rans. There is something indelibly magic about even a musical that lasts only a single night on the Great White Way. It has been there, as precious few can claim. One night on Broadway is really all a show needs to pick up a Tony or two, and there were plenty of them to go around at the upcoming final Tony Awards presentation of the century.
The fate of every planned new Livent opening was thrown into jeopardy in April 1998, when control of the theatre on the other side of the street directly facing Walt Disney’s New Amsterdam fell into the hands of another Disney figure, ex–Disney president Michael Ovitz, famous for a well-publicized Disney severance package amounting to $20 million. In an act of corporate sibling rivalry, Ovitz dropped $20 million into Livent, which had reported a fourth quarter loss of US$37.7 million and a loss of C$44.1 million for the year of 1997. Buying up 12 percent stock, Ovitz immediately assumed the status of potential savior, and he legally finagled himself into a position which allowed him to vote 36 percent of the company stock. Later he admitted that even he had been hoodwinked by Drabinsky’s bookkeeping shenanigans and that the firm’s financial health was worse than he had initially been led to believe. Touring companies of Ragtime were shut down, though the New York edition was still doing brisk business. Wall Street analysts figured that if it could continue drawing near-capacity houses and generate extra revenue from touring companies for another five years, it would probably pay off its herculean production costs and start reaping profits.13 Alas, Ragtime failed the longevity test by two or three seasons. A gradual downward spiral in attendance proved fatally uncontrollable. Up went the notice: Following a two-year run, the show would give its final performance on January 16, 2000, losing, according to Variety, “much if not all” of its $10 million investment.
What irony: At the end of the century, two Hollywood moguls associated with multi-venue entertainment were competing with each other on the same street in the biggest theatre town in the world! Will Disneyland Square continue turning millions on the sale of trinkets, sweatshirts, souvenir mugs and peanuts?
Will it ever produce a show to thrill grownups? The mega-musical experience offered by the tycoons from London, Burbank and Canada has made it increasingly difficult for any show to succeed. And as long as the alternative to theme park tuners is Brecht or Genet or Sondheim, the public will continue going for Elton John tunes and warm fuzzy animals parading up theatre aisles in Ringling Bros. formation. Only when a new generation of bold assertive composers, lyricists and librettists appear to truly lead the way, will the circuses now flying high over Broadway stages begin to seem a little less compelling and necessary.