M. BUTTERFLY Previews — Page 3

When has Taymor gotten a great performance out of anyone? Never. She is a visual artist who thinks she belongs in theater; she'd be better suited at creating her own style of performance.

Beats me why someone would give someone like her such a character driven piece to work with.

Most recent revivals of plays from the 1980s on Broadway have left me questioning the enduring quality of the plays themselves: SIX DEGREES, THE REAL THING, and now M. BUTTERFLY all felt pretty underwhelming. I wonder how CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD will fare...

Someone needs to start a theatre company in New York called "The Redemption Playhouse" which can stage first rate productions of plays we've written off because of bad Broadway revivals.

Along with THE REAL THING and MADAME BUTTERFLY, I'd add THE MIRACLE WORKER and BYE BYE BIRDIE to the inaugural season.

Ugh, that Miracle Worker revival in the round was awful! I spent half the evening staring into the side of a door. If Roundabout's recent Hedda was the first time you had seen the play, I can't imagine you would ever give it another chance.

This is an interesting topic- how much damage does a bad revival do to a property/playwright/composer? Do people just say, "Oh, that was a bad production," or does the harm go deeper?

In the opera world I don't think I've ever lost faith in the material after a bad production. My love of sonnambula wasn't shaken just because some director foisted a misguided staging on the piece. Plays don't seem to be given that same luxury though. They shoulder some of the blame when revivals go wrong. Roundabout loves to revive certain shows that probably don't deserve a Broadway revival (e.g. The Road to Mecca), but what about hits like M. Butterfly. This won Best Play, was nominated for the Pulitzer and ran for 777 performances! I realize most plays are limited runs these days, but how do things go so wrong?

There also just doesn't seem to be interest from the public to see these plays again, unless a Denzel is cast in a starring role. Before anyone knew how bad The Real Thing revival was no one was buying tickets to it. The original Miracle Worker ran for 719 performances and the revival ran for 28. I realize there are many factors at work here, but how can a former hit play, turned hit movie, have so little interest with the general public that it can't sell an advance for more than a month?

The Miracle Worker revival was baffling to me too. I mean, I think the reason it didn't run is that it was very poorly done: miscast, badly directed and ill-conceived in the round (would this play ever work in the round?) but I would have thought there would be some audience for it, beyond a three week run.

I do think audiences have an intuitive 'hunch' when a revival is going to fire on all cylinders. Take the recent HELLO DOLLY revival. It's not that the public was clamoring for a revival (and I don't think the announced revivals with Patti LuPone and Kristin Chenoweth would have been anything big at the box office) - but the perfect combination of Bette Midler in Hello Dolly directed by Jerry Zaks sounded like a winner.

That said, I would have though that a Julie Taymor directed M. BUTTERFLY would be a stunning affair, a perfect combo --- so who knows...

I forgot Marianne Elliott (prior to her big successes at the RNT) directed the Hilary Swank production of THE MIRACLE WORKER which closed on the road a couple years before the Allison Pill / Abigail Breslin staging. A quick look at those reviews sounds like it was equally ill-conceived.

And yes, I do feel those two bad productions have damaged the reputation of the play. Which is a shame, as I think THE MIRACLE WORKER is a truly, wonderful play. Somebody eventually will come along and do a first rate revival, with the right star, and it will be seen as revaletory again. Hopefully its just not done at the Roundabout Company.

Updated On: 10/11/17 at 10:33 AM

I'm surprised she didn't just direct all around M.BUTTERFLY then. There are virtually no stage pictures and the opera sequences are even flat. Maybe she tried here to put her usual visual flair aside to 'direct a play' -

I mean we can take shots at her all we want, but she's got that Lion King money still rolling in, and that show does have some gorgeous moments. I mean, her and her team did figure out a way to tell that story on stage, and it works.

I'm a big fan of hers. I'm such a big visual person, so I know, at least going in, that we're going to get something interesting or cool to look at it. So I'm bummed to hear this is such a dud. I'm still wondering how this show cost upwards of $7 million?

Ripped, I have always found Lion king to be very schizophrenic. On one hand it tells a Disney story and it is then laced with Taymor art installations and stage pictures. Yes, it is still raking it in. Good for Disney, Good for Taymor. Personally I found it, after the first 10 minutes and a couple of scenes throughout, to be quite boring. I might be alone in this. I found her earlier off-Broadway work much more appealing.

SNAFU said: "Ripped, I have always found Lion king to be very schizophrenic. On one hand it tells a Disney story and it is then laced with Taymor art installations and stage pictures. Yes, it is still raking it in. Good for Disney, Good for Taymor. Personally I found it, after the first 10 minutes and a couple of scenes throughout, to be quite boring. I might be alone in this. I found her earlier off-Broadway work much more appealing."

I agree. "Circle of Life" is, of course, stunning. But other than that... I'm hard-pressed to recall much of its inflated running time.

RippedMan said: "I'm a big fan of hers. I'm such a big visual person, so I know, at least going in, that we're going to get something interesting or cool to look at it."

Inexplicably, my husband and I were somehow convinced to purchase heavily discounted tickets to Spiderman: Turn off the Dark. The only redeeming value of that show was the opening spider-women sequence with the unfurling golden silk streamers, which I understand was designed by Ms. Taymor. It bore absolutely no resemblance to the rest of the show, which we thought was inane and a complete waste of two hours.

I am among those enthralled by Dexter's original production, the clean simplicity with which that complex, profound story was told being in perfect balance. This is not a play that wants fussy conceptualization imposed upon it, which is why I thought Tamor was a strange choice from the start. And I do believe a poor production can damage the reputation of good material. Unlike many on this board, most theatergoers are not aficionados, able to discern between a bad play and a bad production. There are folks who, after seeing an inept high school production of Gypsy, will say, "I hate that show. It was terrible." and will never see another production of it. Of course high profile failures are more destructive. When someone tells their pals who don't regularly go to the theater, "I saw that on Broadway and it sucked," none of them are likely to attend your community theater production or a tour coming through town.

I saw this tonight and I, personally, adored it. The sets are a bit clunky but I felt they worked for the most part. If I didn't know Taymor directed this and someone told me after, I probably would have thought they were lying. It's very "simplistic" for her. But the fantastic performances overshadowed everything else for me. I really really enjoyed it.

FutureDirector said: "GavestonPS,It's not the testimony Song gives in the court that's we'll stage (the staging of that looks rather high schoolish actually), its the one that he gives to the chineese government before being sent to the labor camp."

Then, technically, that is an "interrogation", not a "trial". (The two words may be synonyms in English dictionaries, sometimes, but they are distinct elements of jurisprudence in a Communist country.)