Word: broadways
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...More than just watching the backstage story unfold, however, the chroniclers of Broadway love to play a part in it. This kind of pre-opening brouhaha generally can have only two satisfying endings. First scenario: a determined creative team works through the problems, pulls off a miraculous turnaround, and the show is a surprise hit. Second (and more frequent) scenario: the troubles really do turn out to be as bad as everybody suspected, no one can fix them in time, and the show is a big, sloppy, they-got-what-they-deserved flop...
...book and a less-than-ideal production - that probably no one in good conscience can make a case for Scenario 1. Still, that doesn?t mean the howling critics who are gleefully writing their Scenario 2 endings are treating the show any more fairly. ?Not since Urban Cowboy has Broadway been littered with so much smoldering wreckage,? announced the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post?s critic found the show so awful that it drove him into ?questioning the entire institution of Broadway.? The New York Times? Ben Brantley gave the show that ultimate put-down from the guardians...
...Just how Cats, the most successful musical in Broadway history (and an adventurous one in its day) has come to be a synonym for mass-audience schlock is the subject for another day. The real question is why the critics are so eager to turn Taboo into Rosie O?Donnell?s personal Titanic. I liked Taboo when I saw it in London a year and a half ago. And I liked it on Broadway, though it is much changed - in some ways for the better and some for the worse...
...Junked almost entirely is the old book, which focused on a middle-class kid from the provinces who leaves home to join the glitzy, decadent London club scene. The rewrite, by Charles Busch (creator of off-Broadway drag spectacles like Vampire Lesbians of Sodom), eliminates this somewhat clich?d character and plunges us more directly into the club underworld, and the rise and drug-addled fall of its most famous denizen, Boy George (Euan Morton). The book is better now, but still too unfocused, with too many characters vying for stage time, among them the campy, cross-dressing narrator, Philip Sallon...
...down the block - The Boy From Oz, a candy-coated account of the life of pop star Peter Allen. With the exception of O?Dowd, who?s a little stiff as Bowery, the cast is superb, especially Morton, a sweet-voiced doppleganger for Boy George, and Esparza, an electric Broadway star, who touches the humanity behind the high-camp shallowness of Sallon...