How would you direct a production?- Page 2

[broadwaybabytn]

Posted: 5/21/11 at 9:31pm

relatively poorly.

[theaterkid1015]

Posted: 5/22/11 at 2:03am

Three words:

Cats
in
CATS

[In Buddy's Eyes]

Posted: 5/22/11 at 2:24am

I want to see Evita as a Spanish language opera with all of her high belting phrases as really intricate coloratura soprano passages.

[Katia2]

Posted: 5/22/11 at 2:34am

A Passion where Giorgio is a hallucination of Fosca's and she's made him up to deal with being molested by the military men every day. In the end she commits suicide by eating a poisonous flower. Let's also have her be played by the most beautiful big name in theatre right now, i.e. Laura Benanti.

[PennybankBill]

Posted: 5/22/11 at 3:31am

My idea probably belongs with those low budget theatre companies, but I'll say it: Move Sweeney Todd from 1800's London to Great Depression Germany. Instead of Antony being a sailor, he is the son of a rich man who was repelled by his family's decadence and seeing that Joanna is basking in the same sort of bourgeois pall, He decides to take her away from it. Todd is educated by Antony about the Rich and the poor, and from this he decides the ultimate way to conquer the rich is to kill them. Now the formerly wealthy are sitting in the barber chair and becoming pies, hence society eats itself. Todd's wife Lucy has been raped by Turpin and the rest of his cronies, and now roams the streets infecting them by way of sex. Inflation money fuels the giant oven, is used as napkins. In "God, That's Good!", we hardly ever see the chorus pick their faces up from their food. Pirelli steals five pounds from different passers-by during the number. Tobias is shown being beaten by Pirelli. The beadle is solicited by women, and sometimes forces himself on them. I have many more thoughts about it, but it's very half-baked right now. GO AHEAD AND CRITICIZE! I don't mind!

[chewy5000]

Posted: 5/22/11 at 6:22am

I'd try to remove any shred of realism from Anyone Can Whistle and turn it into a madcap evening of crazed delight.

[PiraguaGuy2]

Posted: 5/22/11 at 8:57am

PennybankBill, your idea is actually pretty interesting, but I've just never interpreted Sweeney Todd as a class warfare fable, nor would I like to.

[sondheimfan2]

Posted: 5/22/11 at 10:13am

^ um..the show IS about class warfare.....

"Hal Prince believed it to be an allegory of capitalism and its selfish qualities. He described this theme as follows: "It was only when I realized that the show was about revenge…and then came the factory, and the class struggle—the terrible struggle to move out of the class in which you're born…"[21]

[gvendo2005]

Posted: 5/22/11 at 1:44pm

^ That then turns into a "he said this but the other guy said that" kind of thing. Hal didn't understand penny dreadfuls and melodrama (one thing he actually asked Stephen was if they would be serving meat pies at intermission), and came up with that concept so he could "get behind" it.

If you hear Sondheim tell it, it was designed to be an intimate chamber-sized thriller with people popping up in the audience and out of the fog and so forth.

Just because Hal saw those aspects in it, doesn't mean it's the way to do it. It does lend itself well to PennybankBill's idea though.

[PennybankBill]

Posted: 5/22/11 at 3:52pm

Some more thoughts just came to me: An unemployment count. Judge Turpin and the Beadle are Americans, and Todd believes they are the cause of the Great Depression, giving him yet another motive to kill them besides imprisoning him on false charges, raping his wife, and stealing his daughter. when the 3 million unemployed are not queueing for applications at the unemployment offices, they are getting shaves or meat pies for cheap.