Re-Conceived production of PIPPIN!

[W45stNYC85]

Posted: 4/12/12 at 10:48am

Its Pippin like you've never seen it before!

Its been re-orchestrated, re-conceived and given a fresh perspective on the material. It's now set in an army hospital, with Pippin and Leading player combined into one single character! The show has been completely re-imagined for today's audiences.

If you get a chance to get out to McCarter Theater/Princeton University this weekend or next weekend, I highly recommend this production.
Pippin at The Berlind Theatre/ McCarter Theater center

[newintown]

Posted: 4/12/12 at 11:01am

Sounds tame. My favorite Pippin had only one actor, an orchestra comprised solely of 22 kazoos, and was set in the Ladies Lounge of the Titanic. Great characters from other works made cameos, such as Blanche DuBois, Oedipus Rex, and Carrie White.

Too bad your imagination is so limited...

[wicked_beast4]

Posted: 4/12/12 at 11:24am

W45stNYC85, do you happen to know if the prospective students attending the Princeton Preview from the 19-21 would be able to see it? Pippin has always been a favorite show and it'd be great to see a production of it at my future school!

[W45stNYC85]

Posted: 4/12/12 at 12:05pm

Yes, as far as I know they will be attending one of the performances. From what I've been hearing its going to be a phenomenal production.

[Unknown User]

Posted: 4/12/12 at 12:11pm

Sounds great -- but I'm really curious about how merging the two roles into one works.

[PattiLover]

Posted: 4/12/12 at 2:11pm

Holy moly - Looks completely joyless. Where's the "magic to do?" Where's the comedy? Where's the sex? These pictures tell me they sucked all the fun out of it.

Years ago I saw a great production of Pippin using tarot cards as backdrops, pentacles and sexy Chicago/Cabaret Revivals type costumes.

Yah, the Fosse commedia dell'arte reaks of 70's kitsch, but you can keep Pippin current without sucking the life out of it and turning it into a Brecht play.

This is a senior thesis? As far as Marketing goes, this artwork is an F.

[PattiLover]

Posted: 4/12/12 at 2:15pm

from the link: In an unusual casting move, one actor, senior Adam Hyndman, will play the roles of both Pippin and the Leading Player, a sort of master of ceremonies in the play. “In proposing this show as my senior thesis project,” explains Hyndman, an anthropology major, “I was interested in the underlying struggles that post-traumatic stress can trigger. The two characters are sometimes allies, sometimes enemies, and represent the two halves of the soldier’s fractured brain. His addled mind has created a deep rift between the innocent self and jaded, broken self. This production is the exploration of how to come to wholeness. Playing both parts is incredibly exciting, terrifying, and disorienting all at the same time.”

GAG ME. Yah, let's run and get tickets to a musical comedy we that's political and makes us think.

[darquegk]

Posted: 4/12/12 at 2:35pm

If nothing else, I M curious.

[SueleenGay]

Posted: 4/12/12 at 2:40pm

Meh. Let me know when you do Annie combining Annie and Hannigan. Now THAT I would pay to see!

[PattiLover]

Posted: 4/12/12 at 2:47pm

Ooh, I like one actress playing Annie and Hannigan.

Waiting for the inevitable Cabaret, set in a Dachau - with one actor playing the Emcee and Sally Bowles.

[darquegk]

Posted: 4/12/12 at 3:23pm

There was a tour of Cabaret, I believe, where Ernst Ludwig was the emcee.

[hyperbole_and_a_half]

Posted: 4/12/12 at 4:35pm

I'll only go if On The Right Track is performed a la Jekyll & Hyde's Confrontation, hair flips and snap lighting cues included.

[temms]

Posted: 4/12/12 at 4:56pm

I'll only go if On The Right Track is performed a la Jekyll & Hyde's Confrontation, hair flips and snap lighting cues included.

Get out of my brain! That was my exact thought when I read this.

"On the..."
(HAIR FLIP)
"Uh-huh"
(FLIP)
"..right track"
(FLIP)
"Take it eeee-"
(FLIP)
"On the..."
(FLIP)
"-eeeee-"
(FLIP)
"right track:
(FLIP)
"-zeee honey"
(FLIP)
"On the..."

and so forth.

EDITED TO ADD:
I've often thought that more Anthropologists should act.

Updated On: 4/12/12 at 04:56 PM

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 4/12/12 at 9:30pm

This actually is kinda an interesting concept when I read the reasoning behind it... Except. This is Pippin. I love Pippin (at least the Fosse Pippin), but I really don't see how it can handle this kind of treatment and not just be laughable/boring. Especially merging those two characters--as others have said, what happens to half the dialogue and score? As campy as it probably would be, it would make a lot more sense to just give Pippin DID (Multiple Personalities) and have him act completely different for each scene and then somehow meld them together for the finale. The material propbably couldn't handle that either, but... That said I'd love to hear from anyone who saw it.

[South Fl Marc]

Posted: 4/13/12 at 7:31am

"GAG ME. Yah, let's run and get tickets to a musical comedy we that's political and makes us think."


Yes, heaven forbid you should see a show that makes you think. It's much better to see Wicked for the tenth time or a show you already know the plot and score.

This is the reason why Broadway audiences are some of the stupidest people on earth.

[Famebroadway2]

Posted: 4/13/12 at 8:31am

Wait, is this legal? How can you change settings and combine characters?

[newintown]

Posted: 4/13/12 at 9:25am

"This is the reason why Broadway audiences are some of the stupidest people on earth."

Wait, you're from Florida?!? How did I forget that Ft. Myers is the epicenter of sophistication and intelligence?

[JoanBennett]

Posted: 4/13/12 at 10:07am

I do like the idea of an Annie with combined characters... maybe it all takes place in her mind...
And the little girls play instruments...

Updated On: 4/13/12 at 10:07 AM

[newintown]

Posted: 4/13/12 at 10:13am

Do students ever worry about bourgeois considerations like rights and royalties?

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/13/12 at 11:05am

Did he get the rights?

It says so right there on the graphic:

===

Presented through special arrangement with Music Theatre International (MTI). All authorized performance materials are also supplied by MTI. 421 West 54th Street, New York, NY 10019 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone]. MTIShows.com

[hyperbole_and_a_half]

Posted: 4/13/12 at 11:25am

I hear that Mimi doesn't come back to life at the end.

[South Fl Marc]

Posted: 4/13/12 at 2:47pm

I would love to see this. Theatre should challenge, should excite, should make people think. If he manages to do this with a show like Pippin ... Great!
For those who want to see the old version, rent the video.

NewInTown - I lived most of my life in NYC and probably have forgotten more shows than you have seen. If I were to list my top 50 theatrical experiences, only a handful would be from Broadway and those would be from over ten years ago.

I stand by what I said. Broadway has become a theme park and the people who can afford it are some of the stupidest people. They want to see the same shows over and over again rather than something new, different or challenging.

Pity.

[PattiLover]

Posted: 4/14/12 at 9:25pm

Oh please, South Fl Marc, pretentious people are some of the stupidest people on earth too. Anyone who takes a fun show and jackhammers themes, morals and politics into the audience's skulls doesn't know jack about musicals - or marketing. Pippin is supposed to be fun, not moody and cerebral. Do you even know anything about Pippin?

BTW, you're not winning any arguments by bashing Wicked in a thread about another show by the same composer.

[PattiLover]

Posted: 4/14/12 at 9:35pm

JoanBennet, there was a Trinity Rep production of Annie that reconceived the show to make it quite bleak. I don't have the link, but I have the article about it:

June 13, 2003 -- TRINITY Rep, a self- described "populist theater," recently shook things up in sleepy Providence, R.I., with a tough, unsparing and gritty new revival of - I'm not kidding - "Annie."

Not for Trinity the standard-issue "Annie" - that overly familiar one about the spunky orphan who escapes the clutches of the evil Miss Hannigan, teaches Daddy Warbucks a thing or two about compassion and helps FDR rally the country during the Depression with "A New Deal for Christmas."

Not on your bottom dollar.

Applying what the theater, on its Web site, likes to call the "creative Trinity makeover," director Amanda Dehnert created an "Annie" that emphasized the poverty of the Great Depression and the callousness of the Hoover administration.

This "Annie" opened with a stage populated by homeless people, all slow dancing to a dirge-like version of "Tomorrow."

The ending, written especially for this production by Dehnert, was a stunner, a real coup de théatre, said one person who saw it.

Annie woke up back in the orphanage and realized that her happy life with Daddy Warbucks was only a dream, and that she would never escape poverty, loneliness and despair.

Brave, tough, anti-capitalistic stuff!

Unfortunately, gritty "Annie" didn't go over very well with many parents who, thinking they were getting happy "Annie," flocked to the theater with their children.

A lot of the kids, especially the girls, were baffled and disturbed by the ending, and one Trinity subscriber reported that some of the children were crying.

They weren't the only ones upset.

Tipped off by a friend in the company that certain liberties were being taken with his baby, "Annie" creator Martin Charnin attended a performance and was not pleased.

"It was a very WPA, Group Theater, Clifford Odets-y kind of thing," he told The Post.

After a four-hour meeting with Trinity executives, he convinced them that Dehnert's production was "not true to the spirit of the show," he says.

They agreed to drop the dream ending, and the show, now a bit more upbeat than before, runs through Sunday.

"They told me they thought 'Annie' was a classic, like Shakespeare, so they could reinterpret it," Charnin said.

"I told them there's one difference: Shakespeare is dead; I'm not."

Dehnert said her It-Was-Nothing-But-a-Dream ending was "simply a framing device" that was "just my honest response to the piece."

People who thought Annie was back in the orphanage were mistaken, she said - in fact, Annie had wandered into an abandoned theater of the 1930s.

"She is cold, wet and tired," Dehnert said. "She falls asleep and, in her dreams, invents Daddy Warbucks. When she wakes up, she realizes all these wonderful things could still happen to her. In that sense, I think the production is true to what the show is about - hope."

Dehnert admitted she may have taken a few too many liberties with "Annie."

"It was our naiveté not to have realized the framing device would be an authorial issue," she said.

Still, she insisted that she and Trinity Rep "won't stop trying to reinvestigate material" because "all theater would suffer if everybody stopped doing that."

In that spirit, let's imagine our own tough, gritty, realistic endings for famous Broadway shows that surely would benefit from the "creative Trinity makeover."

* "Oklahoma!": Curly, whose cowboy pants were always a bit too tight, comes out of the closet (or the grain elevator) and admits it wasn't Laurie he was in love with - it was Jud.

* "Hairspray": Tracy Turnblad may have stamped out racism on the Corny Collins show but not at home. It turns out Wilbur Turnblad has a secret: He's the Grand Wizard of the Baltimore chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

* "The Pajama Game": Union activist Babe Williams, along with a hundred other female workers, is killed in a Triangle Fire-like disaster at the pajama factory.

* "Nine": Guido Contini goes blind from an untreated venereal disease. He has infected Claudia, Carla, Louisa and even Lilian La Fleur.

[Matt2]

Posted: 4/14/12 at 11:34pm

How about Anything Goes with the ship blowing up at the end?
Oh wait, that actually was the original ending!