ZORBA @ CITY CENTER/ENCORES- Page 2

[jv92]

Posted: 5/7/15 at 5:58pm

Wow, Turturro really can't count, can he? She seems adorable, though. 

 

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 5/7/15 at 6:18pm

Well perhaps overly harsh, I appreciated NYMag/Vulture's review commenting on the changes since Hal Prince's production.

 

"Well, that’s how it’s supposed to work, and if you watch even a blurry YouTube clip of the original cast performing the opening number (“Life Is&rdquo at the 1969 Tony Awards, you get a sense of what that might have felt like. Unfortunately you won’t get that feeling at City Center. For this production, following changes made earlier in the show’s history, the frame device has been jettisoned, and along with it the recitative verse of “Life Is;” the “leader” (Marin Mazzie) now has nothing to lead and simply reappears from time to time as if she wandered in from someone else’s funeral. "

https://www.vulture.com/2015/05/theater-review-zorba-at-encores.html

[Mr. Nowack]

Posted: 5/7/15 at 6:30pm

More clips.

 

[Cesare2]

Posted: 5/7/15 at 7:58pm

Those clips and the reviews so far hardly make this seem worth seeing.  (And I had seen the Quinn revival and liked the show a great deal, even though it had clearly been re-tooled to accommodate Quinn. Lila Kedrova was really wonderful.)  Too bad they chose not to go back to Prince's original concept.

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 5/7/15 at 8:06pm

It's ironic, too, especially since the Prince concept actually would probably work better than this for a not-fully-staged production...

[jv92]

Posted: 5/7/15 at 8:34pm

Jesse Green, once again, proves that he's the most perceptive, and perhaps the best, of all the theater critics reviewing shows today, and one who understands (and probably reads) music. To call the score "minor entry" (the usually interesting David Rooney) or "weak" (that moron who doesn't really count anyway, Matt Windman) is to disregard a lyrical, eclectic collection of wonderful theater songs. I love how dismissive theater critics are after listening to a score once. Even Ethan Mordden, who called ZORBA a "life-denying piece of evil sh*t" thought the score was one of K&E's best in his OPEN A NEW WINDOW book about musicals of the 1960s. 

The problem here seems to be the production and the casting. Seeing those clips of Turturro-- nasal and embarrassingly off-count-- is making me sort of dread what is looking to be a truly mediocre rendering of a wonderful, underrated score. It's funny how the shows that seemed the clunkiest and most dated-- LADY, BE GOOD! and PAINT YOUR WAGON-- came off best this season. 

I guess I'll have to see for myself, and  make a judgement on Saturday. 

[wonkit]

Posted: 5/7/15 at 10:35pm

I am seeing this tomorrow night, and the clips make me uncomfortable because Turturro is so inept with the music. I questioned his casting as soon as I heard it. But I love this musical - saw the original in 1970; Hershel Bernardi was so warm and heart-breaking in the title role. So half a loaf will be better than none for me, just to hear the music again, and Marin, Zoe and Santino look excellent. Glad they went back to original "Life Is" lyric. 

[Auggie27]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 9:02am

I can't say enough about the brilliance of the Bouzouki circle conceit, how it effortlessly tied a dark tale set in the 1920s to a very different contemporary culture.  This handful of disgruntled, slightly bored denizens trying to entertain themselves and find a take-away moral amid hardscrabble lives by conjuring up a shadowy tale. It provided immediate access, tethering something distant and slightly unrelatable to the here and now.  And rather than play heightened theatrics, as they seem to have done with Mazzie's muse get-up, they went very gritty.  Serabian's shapeless black dress, and indeed the rag-tag look of everyone in (then) modern dress made its own comment on the struggles of the people who needed to hear themselves explain this tragic if spiritually powerful story.  

I don't know why Stein, Kander and Ebb abandoned this, because turning The Leader into a contrived whiff of magic realism, rather than a woman in a town leading the storytelling, made the commentary numbers more precious.  Serabian was world-weary to the point of cynical, her knowledge of the outcome made perfect sense. The story of Zorba was just that: a tale well told. Now we have a supernatural non-being annotating the plot to explain the theme. The difference is a chasm in terms of unifying style and tone.

Still, I'll reserve my final judgement (yeah right) until Sunday.  I am no less excited to see this show, having watched all of the clips.  And it looks like Wanamaker is giving one of the wonderful performances of the season.

Updated On: 5/8/15 at 09:02 AM

[wonkit]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 12:16pm

Auggie - very perceptive and articulate description. Glad I saw the original.

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 3:46pm

"I can't say enough about the brilliance of the Bouzouki circle conceit, how it effortlessly tied a dark tale set in the 1920s to a very different contemporary culture.  This handful of disgruntled, slightly bored denizens trying to entertain themselves and find a take-away moral amid hardscrabble lives by conjuring up a shadowy tale. It provided immediate access, tethering something distant and slightly unrelatable to the here and now.  And rather than play heightened theatrics, as they seem to have done with Mazzie's muse get-up, they went very gritty.  Serabian's shapeless black dress, and indeed the rag-tag look of everyone in (then) modern dress made its own comment on the struggles of the people who needed to hear themselves explain this tragic if spiritually powerful story.  
I don't know why Stein, Kander and Ebb abandoned this, because turning The Leader into a contrived whiff of magic realism, rather than a woman in a town leading the storytelling, made the commentary numbers more precious.  Serabian was world-weary to the point of cynical, her knowledge of the outcome made perfect sense. The story of Zorba was just that: a tale well told. Now we have a supernatural non-being annotating the plot to explain the theme. The difference is a chasm in terms of unifying style and tone. 

 

The reason why K&E&S abandoned the concept, it seems, is they felt it distanced the audience and was one of the reason audiences were put off by it.  They discuss this a bit in Colored Lights.  However, as Jesse Green's review in Vulture that I linked to pointed out, I think, and other reviews have said anyway, Prince's staging also helped to make some of what now seems sentimental, dark melodrama more effective.  Of course Prince came up with the whole storytelling device before Stein was even HIRED--so, like with much of Prince's work, in many ways he was as much an author of the original production as anyone else... 

Your analysis I think is spot on--by making it more "naturalistic" (for lack of a better word,) and yet of course not wanting to really rewrite the great Leader's stuff, it just muddles matters really. 

I look forward to reading what you think of the Encores!

[forgetmenotnyc]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 3:59pm

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR POSTING THE VIDEOS - MR NOWACK.

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 5:52pm

"Jesse Green, once again, proves that he's the most perceptive, and perhaps the best, of all the theater critics reviewing shows today, and one who understands (and probably reads) music. To call the score "minor entry" (the usually interesting David Rooney) or "weak" (that moron who doesn't really count anyway, Matt Windman) is to disregard a lyrical, eclectic collection of wonderful theater songs. I love how dismissive theater critics are after listening to a score once. "

 I'll have to pay more attention to Jesse Green--based on your comment and just this review, I agree with you.  Of course it helps that I can totally relate with his comment about being obsessed since a kid with the Zorba cast album and trying to find out everything about the original production as possible (which can be frustrating--out of the two decent books written about Hal Prince, not counting his memoirs, one gives a pretty good appraisal of Zorba, and how it divided critics, and the other covers Zorba in one tiny paragraph.) 

And yes, I think the thing about Zorba's music that those statements prove is it simply is not that well known.  For the record, I think as an overall score, it's at least, and probably stronger, than Cabaret.  But Cabaret has several standards, and most ofthe rest of it is known by any theatre critic.

[jv92]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 6:57pm

It's interesting that David Rooney was slightly dismissive in regard to ZORBA's score, because he can be...CAN BE (not always is) perceptive musically and lyrically. Matt Windbag, on the other hand...

Frankly, I find all of their scores written between FLORA and 70, GIRLS, 70 always extremely interesting and rather excellent and of high quality. (My personal favorite score of theirs is 70, GIRLS, 70-- at the moment, at least. The show makes no sense, but it has a darling and wonderful collection of songs.) Then there's CHICAGO, which is dazzling, and THE ACT, which is a guilty pleasure. WOMAN OF THE YEAR can fall into that category, too, though there's some merit there. THE RINK is wonderful. SPIDER WOMAN has never thrilled me as a whole, and I think probably works best in the theater, although there are numerous gorgeous moments-- "Marta", "She's a Woman", "Dear One", and "Where You Are." 

I find it appalling, in any event, when major critics are dismissive towards the likes of Kander and Ebb or Sondheim. (i.e. ROAD SHOW's reviews) Compared to sh*t like MEMPHIS and KINKY BOOTS, I'll take THE ACT any day. 

 

[Auggie27]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 7:56pm

Reading Eric's post, I dipped into my copy of "Colored Lights" (pp. 85-94) and was reminded anew that Hal Prince came up with the idea for the bouzouki circle before the show was even written.  Before the script, before a single song.  He used it to pitch the novel's stage adaptation to Kander and Ebb.  And thus sold them on it. It was integral to the storytelling from the very start, not an added motif, but part of the story proper, that critical point of access I talked about in my earlier posts.  The Leader's narrative ominiscience was organic, because she knew the ending, not because she was an earth mother Cassandra, as it likely reads now.  Prince, in an insert in the book, makes a persuasive case that ZORBA is a masterwork, that it was first performed perfectly as an integrated musical.  But then along came the Cacoyannis revival, built around (mostly) Quinn recreating his screen interpretation, and the bouzouki circle and the leader's innate position and role in the proceedings was stripped of the context for everything she said and did.  

If I've read the post correctly I take slight exception with Eric's point that the revisal is more "naturalistic." If anything, the bouzouki concept was the reality-based conceit that grounded the evening in a modern point of view.  The revised text, removing the Leader as a present-day character and substituting a mysterious mystical presence, takes contemporaneity out of the show and builds it on an abstraction. I don't read anyone in "Colored Lights" suggesting that the bouzouki was darker,  only a more developed and fully incorporated theatrical idea.  The lyrics were lightened, as we know, but assigning the observations and analysis to a symbol rather than a real woman didn't make the show less dark. 

Updated On: 5/8/15 at 07:56 PM

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 8:15pm

I don't own a coy of Colored Lights (though, I really should,) and it's been a while since I read that, so I appreciate you going over what was actually written.

My point, which was not clear, was removing the framing device in general seems, from various things I've read, to have been done because they felt it distanced the audience (adding the meta layer of it being a story being told, in a way,) if that makes sense, although that's a brilliant point that making the Leader into some sort of presence really in its way removes any "reality" of what's on stage anyway (particularly as, from what I can tell from various bootlegs--I own a copy of the published original libretto but haven't seen the revised one--there is no added context as to why there is this mystic woman narrator, whereas of course, there was a context for The Leader being ever present.) 

It may not have been in Colored Lights, but elsewhere where I read Ebb felt the original was too dark.  Certainly some people did--thugh to me it seems brilliant, and I always think it's too bad that it is so often glossed over when people discuss the achievements of Prince in particular ("He did Cabaret, and then we jump to Company, Follies..." etc)

[Auggie27]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 8:40pm

I believe we're on the same page now.  You're right, in "Colored Lights" they definitely address the widespread belief that the show was too dark. Thus the lyric change. But it wasn't tied to the Leader/bouzouki conceit.  I still watch the original Tony footage, and it sends chills.  As it did in the theater. Both Kander and Ebb talks about it in "Colored Lights," the curtain rising on a smoke-filled stage -- all the characters smoking cigarettes, as in a bar -- the instruments, the boisterous abandon. I cannot quite explain why it was stunning and what took place was so magic.  It was unlike anything I'd seen, and still haven't seen duplicated. It was very raw, seemingly filled with improvisation (albeit edited by a master director) and it unfolded with effortless spontaneity, something missing since, the sense of unrehearsed improvisation, and the opposite of what Mazzie is being asked to do in her Mt. Olympus drag.   

Updated On: 5/8/15 at 08:40 PM

[Mr. Nowack]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 9:40pm

For anyone who hasn't seen it:

[jv92]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 9:57pm

Why won't anyone trust Hal Prince's concepts anymore? Clearly, they weren't all that bad. 

 

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 10:40pm

Auggie--yes, that is clearer than what I was trying to say, but in total agreement. 

JV 'm trying to think of one example of a show Prince did that worked better in a production not by him...

It must be a little frustrating (although I get the impression he doesn't care all that much, and realizes the nature of theatre,) that you have other visionary directors whose work is often acknowledged as being as important as the work of the other authors, and sometimes even kept (for good and bad,) as the standard for revivals (ie Bennett and Chorus Line, Robbins and WSS and Fiddler,) but yet Prince, perhaps because he didn't choreograph, often isn't given the same credit.  This is a tangent--but I know this was different in the 70s when the musicals he worked on often used his name as their main selling point.

Afterall, it was Prince, not Masteroff or K&E who conceived of how to make Cabaret work, as Auggie said came up with the idea for the musical of Zorba, basically initiated Company, even reshaped Evita himself to make the concept album work on the stage.  In those cases, and perhaps others IMHO, he's at least as much a co-creator as Jerome Robbins, for example, is for WSS. 

Of course there's a problem with productions becoming tired or museum pieces when restagings of, say, Chorus Line or Fiddler or WSS are endless, uninspired attempts to copy the original.  But...

[RippedMan]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 11:21pm

I saw this tonight from the balcony - which was pretty much empty. Kind of nice to spread out and whatnot, though. 

I quite liked it. It's an interesting story in the sense that there isn't really a story. It's kind of a character-study style musical. The leads not being able to sing didn't bother me. They acted the crap out of their roles and were living those characters for me. With the exception of Elizabeth A. Davis. Her singing was...a struggle. I don't even understand how she could get cast? You couldn't find me another young white girl who could sing the crap out of her two big songs? And those songs are SO GOOD. And she's in a trio with Marin Mazzie and Santino Fontana, so step it up girl. And her character is basically non-existent. There's not a lot to work with, so I would have enjoyed SOME choices being made. But alas. 

 

And I wish the show had been darker throughout. The second is very dark, but it still didn't feel like they were reaching very deep. But there were some great Kander and Ebb tunes and moments. I'd say it's worth seeing. Sure the leads can't sing, and he can't count in his patter songs, but it's not that bad. 

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 5/8/15 at 11:47pm

"For anyone who hasn't seen it:
"

 The mine dance was performed wonderfully on Sullivan as well.  Of course SOFA Entertainment had it removed--I have a VHS copy but it's really too bad how things like that are so obscure now.

[best12bars]

Posted: 5/9/15 at 8:09am

I still love Debbie Shapiro's version of "Life Is" from the 1983 revival. Her voice is so rich and lusty! :)

 

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 5/9/15 at 12:21pm

People are commenting on Tarturro's voice. The original Zorba (which I saw) was Herschel Bernardi. His only other musical was Bajour. The roles do not call for great voices

A bit of  trivia re Bernardi. He is probably best remembered as Lt. Jacoby on Peter Gunn.Craig Stevens who played Gunn also tried Broadway earlier in Here's Love. His voice is , I believe, not even heard on the cast album

[wickedfan]

Posted: 5/9/15 at 12:48pm

"People are commenting on Tarturro's voice. The original Zorba (which I saw) was Herschel Bernardi. His only other musical was Bajour. The roles do not call for great voices"

 Not true, Bernardi also played Tevye on Brodway on three separate occasions. Twice in the original production and headlined the '81 revival at the NY State Theatre. While Bernardi was no John Raitt (who did star in a touring production with Chita Rivera as the leader), he had a very pleasant and strong voice with wonderful musicality. 

 

Here he is as Tevye in the '81 revival: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9Q8xW4UgVs 

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 5/9/15 at 12:51pm

Love that Tony clip.  I was so excited to see this in the Encores season and am disappointed to hear the tepid response.  Wish I could have seen Prince's version (and what's HE doing these days???)

Ethan Mordden called it an "evil, life denying piece of s**t"?  Jesus.  Calm down, queen!