Saturday, December 19, 2009
Montego Glover and Chad Kimball’s Six Years in ‘Memphis’
NYTimes.com: "WHEN the musical “Memphis” had its world premiere in 2003, at the North Shore Music Theater in Massachusetts, the central character, Huey Calhoun, was a white, pill-popping alcoholic who limped through Act II after being beaten for dating a black woman. During the show’s six-year journey to Broadway, where it opened in October, the character was repeatedly reconfigured (Huey even died at one point), given new songs and went through “something like 900 drafts of his final scene,” said the director of “Memphis,” Christopher Ashley."
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Beyond having it's premiere in a theater in my home town that no longer exists, I'm surprised to hear about the sheer number or rewrites this play had between now and then. The idea that a play evolves even after it has opened is not a surprise, but the fact that a play changed its final scene about 900 times is just surprising. I assumed that the approach, pacing, and even mood of a play changed rapidly as it evolved, but the actual changing of the final scene strikes me as really abnormal for a play.
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