Riedel on the Rebecca civil trial

"Thibodeau was onto something — the man who invented their phantom investor is now in jail — but Sprecher and Forlenza say they could have saved the show if Thibodeau hadn’t 'demolished' their efforts with e-mails filled with 'venom and lies.'"

I can't wait to hear the song "Venom and Lies" from the eventual musical adaptation of this drama.

Could this get the Indecent treatment? Sections of the show played out, while we learn about the drama behind the scenes.

I don't live in Germany, but I'm fairly certain all theatre-goers there are not beer-swilling.

Similarly, I'm expect not all New York gossip columnists are racist, egotistical w*nkers.

The big three theatre landlords invest in shows so they will be able to see the books. Sometimes the investment is not direct; examples being covering the union bonds and their own theatre bonds.

I wouldn't say beyond recognition...

* Starting with the most obvious bit, they kept the title.
* Bearing in mind that the recitative disappeared in order for a more conventional (for lack of a better term) book to occur, except for parts of the first act, the score was largely the same.
* Plot specifics (names of characters, the roles they filled, the overall story in general) were intact enough that you could show a Tanz fan -- or for that matter a fan of its source material -- DOTV and they could identify the vast majority of it.

I also wouldn't say that Tanz isn't comical (I know, you technically didn't, but talking about it getting all twisted out of shape and framing that in terms of the comedy implies it). I mean, yes, compared to what we got in America (perhaps especially compared to it), the European version could be considered a dark, brooding opera with sensual and Gothic elements, sort of the Anne Rice to its American cousin's Mel Brooks, but it was never not funny. The humor was just approached very differently -- namely, choosing to be (infinitely) more subtle and dark, and not to bash one over the head with a broad, silly punchline (like the approach the show received in New York).

The late George Abbott, Broadway's greatest all-time musical comedy director, once said, "If you play it for comedy, it won't work. If you play it for real, it will." When one compares the two versions of the show closely, one realizes how right he was. Tanz is actually downright hilarious. (Think about it -- after all, this is the show that asks you to take that all-time kitsch fest "Total Eclipse of the Heart" seriously at the top of Act Two, as a love duet between a vampire and his potential victim no less.)

Updated On: 4/26/17 at 02:06 PM

They said it was altered beyond recognition; I'm just taking them at their word.

But thank you for your kind words about the humor. Speaking purely for myself, it took me a long time to realize that Tanz was also funny, just in a different way, partly because everybody in the Tanz fan community over-stresses the darkness in comparing the two. Once I realized that, it made the failure of the American variation that much harder to take; one didn't need to be a rocket scientist to understand how to massage it for Broadway audiences.

The lyrics that you cite in particular from the English version actually make for a great example of the main problem DOTV had. I've always said that sticking with the original book would've been fine, and going for a wholly comic approach that involved more than building a jokey book around the preexisting score could also have worked, but instead, too much of both the serious and silly approaches were present in the final product, making it seem like the show was suffering from an identity crisis.

In this case, the German lyrics to the Act Two finale were about the triumph of the vampires over humanity (or, more generally, darkness over light), where "Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young" (in its original form rather than the very lightly rewritten Broadway version) is lighter by comparison, quite literally celebrating the joys of being young and dreaming of one perfect night, and really only bears relation to the moment in that it is celebratory and shares the same melody. One could have gone completely in the direction of "triumph of darkness over light," or one could have gone totally "celebratory," and either would have been a valid approach, but the Broadway version of the finale was a clunky combo of the two that served only to baffle its audience.

I still envy your Berlin experience. I'd love to have a similar one with the show someday.

Updated On: 4/26/17 at 03:23 PM

Kunze wasn't that much involved with Broadway Dance with Vampires either until VERY late into the game...



The only musicals I can think of that were done by non-Americans abroad that tried to go to Broadway or the West End would be Napoleon (Canadian writers, tried out in Toronto then tanked on the West End); The Ten Commandments (French, w/ Val Kilmer and Lauren Kennedy in LA from the French production - such a disaster never even made it to Broadway); Notre Dame de Paris (French, flopped on the West End)... Any others that tried?

Notre Dame de Paris (French, flopped on the West End)

I think Notre Dame has been very successful internationally, especially on tour.

Stylistically, Tanz simply struck the perfect balance of light and dark, often letting the Gothic setting and Brach and Polanski's story provide the camp naturally whereas Dance attempted to layer over-the-top campy lines, overt sex and grotesque visuals on top of the existing material. It was overkill. And with Crawford's performance and involvement, the whole thing came off as a vanity project making a lame attempt to take credit for someone else's work without ever trying to understand it in the first place. It was like they hadn't actually SEEN a production of the original.

After telling my parents about the show, they flew to Berlin the following year just to see it and even though they knew little about it and didn't speak a word of German, they LOVED it. There seemed to be an idea that it was some sort of cultural thing regarding the tone or the humor, but it's not true. It was freaking brilliant.

Well, the testimony today seems to suggest that Sprecher knew about the fake investor before he claimed.

https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Scoop-REBECCA-Trial-Update-Testimony-Today-Throws-Timeline-Into-Question-20170426

Maybe Kunze gave the note that it looked like a mish-mosh of ideas up there and it might be easier to just reintroduce the old choreography, but I doubt he was directly responsible for that particular change; a writer, especially one who was basically roundly ignored until it was too late, is not all that likely to wield much influence on staging, or else we would have seen his idea of the Act Two finale long before this.

(Which, incidentally, is vampires taking over the world today, but not a dystopian Times Square as in New York or a dance in front of [your city here]'s skyline with the show's logo smeared over it as in Euro revivals; he has wanted really blunt metaphors in line with the show's points about greed, like vampires working in the stock exchanges and banks and wearing business suits. Just goes to prove why some writers shouldn't direct, if you ask me.)

To say Steinman intended to do a straight translation is also a misnomer; for all his disclaimers about how the show he loved was still running in Europe and how much he hated what happened in NY, scripts going back to the May 2001 workshop for theater owners already have an uneven mix of (awful) jokes and eroticism, much of the new structure for Act One (the prologue including "Angels Arise" was already there, for example), and patches of dialogue recycled from his long-gestating Neverland project (which is now finally limping across a stage in Manchester as Bat Out of Hell: The Musical, best described in a sentence as "the red-headed stepchild of We Will Rock You meets a bastardized Starmania," with a grab-bag of Steinman dialogue heard on his albums over the years and jokes exhibiting a similar sense of humor to that on display in DOTV; critics seem to be loving it there, but how many shows have we seen go like gangbusters out of town and then become a popcorn fart on Broadway, I ask you).

Was the dictum "five jokes on every page" responsible? Maybe. But would we have gotten something much different? I'm hard pressed to think so after seeing Bat.

Updated On: 4/27/17 at 08:00 AM

Not picking on you, sunset; you're just providing the link.

But if a blogger is going to cover a trial, s/he should know one is found "liable" not "guilty" in a civil case.