Monday, February 18, 2008
How a new musical fell apart
chicagotribune.com: "On Monday, the Goodman Theatre killed off 'The Boys Are Coming Home,' a musical adaptation of Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing.' This was the first time in Robert Falls' long tenure as artistic director that the theater had announced, and then nixed, a major subscription show. For the gifted-but-underexposed Canadian composer Leslie Arden, the decision represented a personal and professional disappointment, although she was partly to blame."
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3 comments:
I can't imagine what it's like to put so much in a show and have the anticipation build up to nothing. I guess it's part of the business that we don't often ponder about, but it's rough reality and another facet of our careers we need to learn to expect and how to handle it.
I feel really bad for the lyricist/composer- it sounds like she got the short end of the stick in all of this. Also the Northwestern students who worked on such a successful first production must be really disappointed. It seems like a hard environment to get new musicals off the ground- so much of the "new" work is really just rewritten older stuff. (Legally Blonde, The Little Mermaid, etc)
I think the ideas behind this whole program were really brilliant, but were not as well founded as necessary. I agree that the composer got the really bad end in this situation, but I guess at least a few individuals got something remotely positive out of this process. I think we all need to better prepare ourselves for the situation in which our hard work doesn't pay off and we are left with nothing. It could happen to anyone.
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