Big Fish Preview Thread — Page 5

I am not seeing it because it will be a great piece of theatre, I want to see THREE WORDS Norbert Leo Butz.I have not seen him on Broadway yet nor have I seen Idina on stage. They are really good actors and deserve my attention.

Saw this tonight. Awful partial view seat that was not labeled partial view, but I moved.

I'll break it down simply:

Actors: Norbert is brilliant. Just brilliant. He is giving 110%. His big notes were very forced and I'm sure doing this show while also rehearsing it during the day has got to be grueling for him. He's on stage the whole time, and if he's not on stage I'm sure he's running around backstage.
Kate Baldwin is beautiful and she had the only real stand out song for me in ACT 2 (I don't have my Playbill next to me.) She doesn't have a ton to do, but she's so great.
Billy Staggart (or Steggart?) was okay. I mean his character is tough because he's the straight man. He just was always mean or skeptical and that's about it. His voice is NOT MY THING. The shaking head, the weird head voice, just not my cup of tea. But he was a fine actor.

Book: I really enjoyed the book scenes more than the music numbers, especially in Act 2 when the plot became piecing together his father's life.

Music: Besides the mother's song, I didn't really feel like I came out remembering or caring about the music. It's all just so blah. I really love Lippa's Wild Party but everything since then has been so bland. Where's his musical style? I don't think I could hear a song and know that Lippa wrote it. I liked the orchestrations with the banjos and whatnot, but the actual songs? Not so much.

Direction: She over-directed the show. There's no need to have people jogging through Central Park or having like 8 mothers with babies walking by. It's distracting. This show might seem like a big show, but it's honestly got a lot of smaller moments in it, and she doesn't trust that. Even the scene with the son and the other lady at the end and the trees are like blossoming. The projections are just distracting cause you get wrapped up in that and not in what's going on. The choreography was just horrible. Nothing new or interesting. When they started doing the jazz squares in the opening number I about threw in the towel. I mean, c'mon? That's like community theater stuff.

Design: Design was cool, I guess. I don't really get why we were going for this whole like "old barn" look. And for a show that's so big on the Southern Gothic storytelling and what's truth and what's not, etc. I felt like the design was so lackluster. There was no "wow" moment for me. I thought there would be these big moments, but Stroman just isn't an imaginative director. She's very old-school, which is why she worked so well with "The Producers," but this needed a director who could figure out the visuals.

It was packed, and people seemed to like it.

Did anyone else find it odd that the sole black girl ensemble member was relegated to "servant" at the wedding? Made me feel icky.

It's Alabama in the present day and the family is clearly fairly progressive.

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Are there any new developments on my previous question?

Saw it last night. There is much to admire. The sets, the costumes, the staging, the musical numbers, Norbert Leo Butz,. Those elements are not the problem.

You can change a witch number or a cowboy number or a fire girl and that will not solve the musical's problems. These numbers are all staged fine.


The problem with the show is the structure. I didn't know it was about a father son relationship until somewhere in Act Two. I think I need to have this information much earlier. Also making the son so unlikable and so stiff made me not care as much as I could have. You need to make the audience care from the get go. I want to say to the creatives it's fine to dazzle the audience with spectacular bull**** but where is the heart?

Norbert is terrific, charming and working very hard. But as JaxandMci pointed out, he monopolizes things to much. It should not be the Norbert Leo Butz show. It is not his story. It is the son's story. Or at the very least the a story about a father and son relationship. And you simply don't care about the son because he is written and played so stiffly and unlikeable. It is too late to try and make me care in Act Two. The authors and the director (stager in this case) should flesh out How did the father's story negatively effect the son's life to make hims such a curmudgeon.? And does he have to be such a priggish curmudegeon?


As for the rest: I didn't love the score. It was serviceable at best. Kate Baldwin is gorgeous. I did find myself watching the projections more than the actors. The sets and projections and some staging are so busy that they take me out of the heart of the story. The musical isn't directed...it is staged. There needs to be more balance between the elements of spectacle and simplicity of story.

Trying to dazzle us while not committing to the heart of the story is the problem with this musical Creatives need to seriously examine the structure and the poorly written son.

People around me seem to love it. I thought it was problematic at best.

Updated On: 9/14/13 at 03:24 PM

Well I didn't see it in Chicago but Act One still meanders. Act two brings more into focus the father son relationship. The meandering is indeed a problem. Witches and Cowboys and Circus giants. Oh My!

I really wanted to love this show, but it was Much Ado About Nothing.

I agree that the biggest problem is that it is the son's (Bobby Steggart's) show, story wise, and he is written to be a rather annoying little snit. Norbert worked his tail off, but the story isn't really about him, it's about his son's reaction to him.

Poor Kate Baldwin was stuck with one of the most underwritten females ever. Her Act 1 song was very interesting, but got cut off halfway through and no applause break. Her 2nd act number was lovely, but didn't do much for her character development, as it was mostly repetition of information we already knew.

The sound design was atrocious. I was sitting in row H, in the dead center of the theatre, and I could only make out half of the lyrics.

Also, there's a big problem with the Neil Simon. The house is barely raked at all. I'm extremely tall (and I apologize for the person sitting behind me who probably saw nothing). The way to fix that is do what Hairspray did, and rake the stage severely. They didn't. There was this whole river thing going on over the orchestra pit, which I couldn't see from row H of the orchestra. That's a problem. In fact, the whole thing looked like it was staged on a much bigger stage, and every cheerleader, clown, giant and mermaid was trying desperately not to step on each other at the Simon.

Then the projections. The set was a clapboard, picket fence kind of thing with spaces between each slat, that they then projected things on. I have nothing against projections, they can be terrific. But don't try to project things on an uneven surface, or worse, on something with two inch empty spaces over the entire set. Perhaps it was an artistic choice, to make his fabulations seem untrue? Whatever. The projections looked awful.

Personally, I really liked the witch number, which was inventive and felt like a real, exciting musical for a minute. Unfortunately, I couldn't understand a word she was singing due to the sound problems.

The whole circus sequence is really unfortunate, because Pippin is doing it so much better a few blocks south. This looked like amateur hour. The elephant dance was fun and inventive, as was the orchestra reveal.

But I thought it was a huge misstep at the end of the first act with the daffodils, and this is nothing to do with the production, it's to do with the advertising. The marquee outside the theatre completely spoils that moment. If we hadn't known it was coming, it would have been spectacular. The problem is we all saw the marquee walking in the door, and knew it was coming. Bad PR team. It's an actual set, not a projection, and I could tell watching it that the production staff is trying its darndest to make this moment work. No matter how much money you throw at that moment, you've already spoiled it. It's a lovely song, terrifically sung, and it's never going to get the "Ah!" moment you want.

Lippa's score had some lovely things. And a lot of hoe-down music that sounded the same.

There were a ton and a half of walk-outs at intermission.

Strohman put together a very professional show, but it was a lot of flash-zam-alacazam put on top of a basic four character story, to the detriment of those four characters, who were all badly fleshed out.

Updated On: 9/18/13 at 12:51 AM

The best part of the Big Fish movie was the ending, it was worth baring through some of the interminable stretches that come before it. Going into Big Fish I was hoping that the creative team felt the same way and would theatricalize the Candide like journey of the story telling father leading us to some type of coupe de theatre which would send the audience out on a spiritual theatrical high. Sad to report that song and dance pro Susan Stroman had a by the book 50's/60's style musical in mind for this special material. You know your in trouble when the show opens with a book scene that leads to a solo in the next scene where the chorus is essentially that - they could have used back up singers. Why we see the entire cast right up front is beyond me. Let the father "tell" his story and then surprise us as the night goes on. The musicalization is uninspired - the songs non-descript - their structure simple. The acting is fine but no better than the material. Butz is in Carolee Carmello's postion this year - as long as the field is limited he's sure to get nominated come awards time. This one needs to go back to the drawing board - can it be saved? Maybe with a 45 minute cut - turn up the Butz star turn and make it a "must see" performance? Not sure how that would be accomplished. Much less of the son's role and Bobby Steggert would be helpful.

Back to the final scene - the sons storytelling and the funeral
"reunion" - it was rushed and disjointed - that scene can be polished more - in the film its a mini-movie unto itself. Here its a pantomime exercise. They've spent their theatrical nut on inconsequential scenes leaving the beginning and end to stand on its own. Short of some amazing reviews I don't see this making it past the New Year. It may be the best new musical of the season but that isn't saying much. The must see dollars will continue to head over to Kinky Boots, Pippin and Matilda.

PS: Colorblind casting is one thing but should not the bride have had some family at the wedding? It was very distracting to see the only other people of color play the doctor and the waitress. Nothing like taking an almost nonexistent part and drawing attention to it for the wrong reasons.

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Updated On: 9/21/13 at 04:07 PM

Can someone explain Sandra's act 2 opening? Why is she at the war?

Good continuity question, if the tales are true she shouldn't be there, if they're not its part of his imagination. The funeral scene suggests they are true so....

That was one of the more poorly staged scenes. An unnecessary orchestra reveal which revealed more wasted dollars. The mermaid scene forced the orchestra out of the pit. The new pit arrangement and their appearance in that scene gives them additional performance and hazard pay and they weren't even costumed to the USO period

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Up In One, that's exactly how I felt about the Big Fish musical.

Stroman's decision to tell the tale in such a conventional musical theater style is baffling. The chorus was used like the stock mass of 'merry townfolk' seen in any high school rendition of Brigadoon and The Music Man. Adding contemporary-style numbers like the witch scene (staged like something from Spiderman) does not change the fact that the show's structure, look and score are very old-fashioned and outdated--and for such a fantastic story!

I love the movie Big Fish. When I first heard it was being adapted as a musical I thought it was a brilliant idea. The theatrical device is already built into it--the small story of a man at the end of his seemingly ordinary life framing the spectacular tales he told. And the built in, musical-ready ending is that the quiet end of his life breaks the frame, and courtesy of his story-hating son in an explosive outpouring of withheld love for his father, becomes the most moving and fantastic tale of them all. That's sort of what Stroman does here, but the framing device and the tales are given equal weight and are not sufficiently distinct from each other. I always imagined that the tales would sing, and the framing device would not, and that the son would sing for the first time (in his life) when he tells his first tall tale to his father at the end.

I'm so disappointed that we'll never get to see a different composer and director take it on. I keep wistfully wondering what Adam Guettel and Alex Timbers might have made out of this. Or Sondheim and Prince, for that matter, who even 40 years ago would have devised a more original concept of storytelling for a musical ABOUT storytelling.

Can someone post the understudies please :)