I'd love to hear from anyone who did see the O'Horgan production. The designs in this 8 minute Tony clip are certainly... interesting. I wasn't there, but I did have the pleasure of conversing with Tom at the start of my career (he was a creative consultant on one of our productions). Being a huge JCS fan, I asked him what exactly was going on with that production. He explained that they'd been trying to get him for the gig for a long time off the back of his success with
Hair, and he repeatedly told Robert Stigwood "no." So they engaged Frank Corsaro, an opera director who had experience with multimedia and envisioned a much simpler production using projections and television screens to underline Tim Rice's themes of celebrity and stardom. Corsaro chose the creative team (Robin Wagner designing sets, Randy Barcelo costumes, and Jules Fisher lights, all of whom came up with ideas based on Corsaro's concept that had to be scrapped and re-designed in three weeks when O'Horgan came in), asked for alterations in the opera because it was far too short by theater standards ("Could We Start Again, Please?" and the additional material in the Trial scene about "respect for Caesar" and so forth was the result), and oversaw auditions. So, first things first, when O'Horgan came in, he inherited a team, a work, and a cast that had already undergone considerable development without him.
When Corsaro got in the car wreck that prevented him from proceeding with the show, the calls began again in earnest, and O'Horgan still said "no." Playwright and friend Robert Patrick was witness to the moment when O'Horgan was finally offered so much money to do the job that it would have been an absurdity to refuse. When a director cares more about the dollars and cents they're earning than the work they're doing, the result is going to be less than artistically pure.
As for the explanation of the designs, they expected a whole new concept from the wunderkind, so O'Horgan first tried getting ALW and Rice to write a few additional numbers to help the piece flow better. When they didn't get much farther than what they'd already developed for Corsaro, he felt he'd have to mask the flaws of the work with eye-popping spectacle given his limited schedule. "I had gone to the Museum of Natural History, and there was a whole thing about insects when I was in the process of putting it together. So I thought, maybe I would do this piece as if a further civilization of evolved insects looked back at this primitive society's myth and decided to make a version of it. I don't think anybody ever got that. But if you look at the costumes, for instance, Judas is resurrected as a butterfly, and Christ comes up out of the ground in a chrysalis, and it breaks open and becomes a great moth." A very bizarre,
Planet of the Apes-esque approach.
It just goes to show that the piece works in an infinitely transmutable way because it's just lyrics and song titles with no distinct document telling you how to do it.
Formerly gvendo2005
Broadway Legend
joined: 5/1/05
Blocked: After Eight, suestorm, david_fick, emlodik, lovebwy, Dave28282, joevitus, BorisTomashevsky, Seb28
which I like a lot
