Broadway Smash Hits that got terrible reviews ? — Page 2

How about Miss Saigon ?

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Without the Tony for Best Musical, Titanic would have closed much sooner.

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For Cats, Rich was mixed-to-positive:

"One wishes that ''Cats'' always had so much feeling to go with its most inventive stagecraft. One wishes, too, that we weren't sporadically jolted from Eliot's otherworldly catland to the vulgar precincts of the videogame arcade by the overdone lightning flashes and by the mezzanine-level television monitors that broadcast the image of the offstage orchestra conductor (the excellent Stanley Lebowsky). But maybe it's asking too much that this ambitious show lift the audience - or, for that matter, the modern musical - up to the sublime heaviside layer. What ''Cats'' does do is take us into a theater overflowing with wondrous spectacle - and that's an enchanting place to be."



Rich was also mixed-to-positive for Phantom:

"IT may be possible to have a terrible time at ''The Phantom of the Opera,'' but you'll have to work at it. Only a terminal prig would let the avalanche of pre-opening publicity poison his enjoyment of this show, which usually wants nothing more than to shower the audience with fantasy and fun, and which often succeeds, at any price.

It would be equally ludicrous, however - and an invitation to severe disappointment - to let the hype kindle the hope that ''Phantom'' is a credible heir to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals that haunt both Andrew Lloyd Webber's creative aspirations and the Majestic Theater as persistently as the evening's title character does. What one finds instead is a characteristic Lloyd Webber project - long on pop professionalism and melody, impoverished of artistic personality and passion - that the director Harold Prince, the designer Maria Bjornson and the mesmerizing actor Michael Crawford have elevated quite literally to the roof. ''The Phantom of the Opera'' is as much a victory of dynamic stagecraft over musical kitsch as it is a triumph of merchandising uber alles.

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The melodies don't find shape as theater songs that might touch us by giving voice to the feelings or actions of specific characters. Instead, we get numbing, interchangeable pseudo-Hammersteinisms like ''Say you'll love me every waking moment'' or ''Think of me, think of me fondly, when we say goodbye.'' With the exception of ''Music of the Night'' - which seems to express from its author's gut a desperate longing for acceptance - Mr. Lloyd Webber has again written a score so generic that most of the songs could be reordered and redistributed among the characters (indeed, among other Lloyd Webber musicals) without altering the show's story or meaning. The one attempt at highbrow composing, a noisy and gratuitous septet called ''Prima Donna,'' is unlikely to take a place beside the similar Broadway operatics of Bernstein, Sondheim or Loesser.

Yet for now, if not forever, Mr. Lloyd Webber is a genuine phenomenon - not an invention of the press or ticket scalpers - and ''Phantom'' is worth seeing not only for its punch as high-gloss entertainment but also as a fascinating key to what the phenomenon is about. Mr. Lloyd Webber's esthetic has never been more baldly stated than in this show, which favors the decorative trappings of art over the troublesome substance of culture and finds more eroticism in rococo opulence and conspicuous consumption than in love or sex. Mr. Lloyd Webber is a creature, perhaps even a prisoner, of his time; with ''The Phantom of the Opera,'' he remakes La Belle Epoque in the image of our own Gilded Age. If by any chance this musical doesn't prove Mr. Lloyd Webber's most popular, it won't be his fault, but another sign that times are changing and that our boom era, like the opera house's chandelier, is poised to go bust."

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I can't believe that Rich would be that kind to "Cats".

So much for Rich's Butcher of Broadway reputation.

And in case, people don't get that Sum is joking, The Producers received possibly the most enthusiastic set of rave reviews of any show of the last decade.

Titanic got very mixed, lukewarm reviews.

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Updated On: 1/26/05 at 09:59 PM

Now, now Sum, don't make me have to have Nursie increase the dosage on your medication

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Well, Frank's love letter to "Caroline, or Change" more than makes up for his take on "Cats".

It's never too late sum :)

Indeed, we do ! :)

Nearly everyone was kind to CATS, believe it or not. I think the critics were feeling guilty for giving EVITA such terrible reviews a couple of years prior, and wary of having egg on their faces again.

Kismet. It opened during a newspaper strike and by the time the strike was over and was reviewed (lot of pans) the audience didn't care the show was already a mega-hit.

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Margo,

Do you carry HOT SEAT around with you at all times????



robbie, whose copy is sitting right next to le toilet.

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Didn't Wicked and Boy from Oz get similar reviews? Terrible reviews for the show, but amazing reviews for the leads? I think that counts as pretty poor reviews for the show as a whole.

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