Tarzan Reviews

Financial Times Review

Tarzan, Richard Rodgers Theatre, New York
By Brendan Lemon
Published: May 10 2006 17:30 | Last updated: May 10 2006 17:30

Just as some New Yorkers revile Disney for smoothing away the theatre district’s rough creative edges, so I suspect they will greet Jane’s buff-up of the ape-man in Tarzan, its latest Broadway musical, with polite revulsion. But in neither Edgar Rice Burroughs’s ageless tale, adapted by David Henry Hwang from a recent animated movie, nor in Disney’s chronicle is civilising the savage the whole story. The narrative of Tarzan – orphaned as an infant, raised by primates – is only one aspect of rainforest literature, and Disney’s live extravaganzas are not the only outposts in Manhattan’s theatrical territory.


The audience will not find the transcendent thrills of The Lion King. They will not even find the resonant spiritual grace of Aida. For this third of Disney’s screen-to-stage transfers set in Africa the emphasis is on decor. The book scenes are often awkward devices to get us from plot point to plot point, and the evening’s chief effect is that of an illustrated songbook, with the usual Disney family themes in place.


But what stagecraft! Bob Crowley, who directed as well as designed the sets and costumes, is a wizard, but he has met the challenge of the cramped Rodgers with more than his customary skill. Tarzan begins with a shipwreck, washes us up on a beach, then lowers us into a jungle habitat, where most of the show unfolds in front of a lush vegetative curtain.


If the effects are less magical than those of The Lion King, the technicians more than compensate with their high-wire trickery. Pichon Baldinu, of De La Guarda fame, did the aerial design, and all I have space to say is that we are a long way from Peter Pan.


The actors – Josh Strickland and Jenn Gambatese are Tarzan and Jane – are secondary, and Phil Collins’s songs are pretty much what you would expect. But Tarzan is the only show of the season that places us joyously in a world of wonder.


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http://news.ft.com/cms/s/33f3ccc6-e042-11da-9e82-0000779e2340.html#

Financial Times Review? Doesn't seem like they would cover theatre, just by the name of the publication.

Did he say that Aida was a "screen to stage" transfer?

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I hear their next musical will be Death On The Nile:Kiss My Asp!

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If possible, could we denote at the top of the overall positivity in the article? (IE: Rave, positive, mixed to positive, mixed, mixed to negative, negative etc)

Wow. The Financial Times. I can't wait to see what the New England Journal of Medicine has to say about it.

i believe The Financial Times is a MAJOR London newspaper...

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It's definitely mixed. I mean, it kinda boils down to basically a" singing the set" review. So it actually made the "money shot" tag a surprise.

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Lonon has to rave due to the politics of it. Bob Crowley is from London, therefore the have to give him a good word to those on the West End.

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The Dallas Morning News (I don't know, ask Google News, which gave it to me when I searched) is negative (and describes part of the shipwreck scene, so if you don't want to know what it looks like, don't read the review).

http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/stories/DN-tarzan_0511gl.State.Edition1.1b76e8da.html

"King of the bungle
Monkeys at typewriters could write a better show than 'Tarzan'"

"The Disney organization spent a rumored $15 million to $20 million to bring Tarzan to the stage. And what they have to show for it is a wimpy, shifty-eyed, lost little boy.

The new musical, based on the 1999 animated version with a bevy of fresh tunes by Phil Collins added to the original five, opened at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Wednesday, the official final night of the 2005-06 Broadway season. It was a dispiriting last curtain to a year without a great new musical.Not that Tarzan is likely to flop. With a built-in audience of families who have already seen The Lion King once or twice, it could well run forever, as have both previous theatrical adaptations of Disney animated features. But the goal here, clearly, was to follow the model that made The Lion King a critical as well as popular hit. They just went about it all the wrong way."

...

"What we get instead is a lot of singing and talking gorillas. These might thwart even the most experienced director. A novice probably had no chance to make them convincing – and Meryl Tankard's crude choreography makes things all the harder. Still, Shuler Hensley and Merle Dandridge almost succeed in making us care about the great apes who adopt a human baby; they're the best things in the show.

Librettist David Henry Hwang makes the central theme of this Tarzan a child's search for his human roots. The target audience would seem to be adopted kids who think their parents no better than a monkey's uncle. This take no doubt motivated casting Josh Strickland, seen on TV momentarily as an American Idol wannabe, in the title role. He is the show's worst miscalculation." (He also says, "Mr. Strickland does have the pipes for the songs, but Mr. Collins hasn't given him anything memorable to sing.")

(I feel weird doing this.)

Oh, that's right - this is the last show of the season. Does that mean we are going to have to wait until fall for the next "Reviews" thread? These are some of my favorite threads.

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It's Disney, for God's sake. The thing will have legs no matter what the critics say.

Theatremania is Negative:

"You Tarzan, me disgruntled -- but not as disgruntled as someone else would be if he were still alive. A chronology contained in a 2006 edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan and the Apes notes that, when the first films adapted from Burroughs's books were released in 1918, the author was "frustrated by the simplistic way Hollywood treats Tarzan." Well, if he was irked by those flicks, he'd throw spears at the new musical that has been perpetrated in his name -- or sort of in his name, since "Edgar Rice Burroughs" appears only in minuscule type on the program's title page.

There, it's acknowledged that the live show Disney has fashioned from the company's 1999 animated feature film is "based on" the first book in the Burroughs series, the above-mentioned Tarzan of the Apes. It doesn't say "loosely based," which would be more accurate. It's hardly jolting to realize that certain jungle-bred aspects of Tarzan's character have been expunged from this musical. In that first blockbuster book, Burroughs writes of his existentially free hero, "To kill was the first law of the wild world he knew. Few were his primitive pleasures, but the greatest of these was to hunt and kill....That he joyed in killing, and that he killed with a joyous laugh upon his handsome lips betokened no innate cruelty."

Librettist David Henry Hwang has downplayed such character traits, as did so many previous adapters. This in itself isn't reprehensible in a libretto that, if it has any message at all, wants to say something about so-called civilized conduct as differentiated from so-called savage behavior. We live in a time when the peace-loving protagonist is favored over the jingoistic warrior, and this Tarzan reflects that mentality, which is probably the right commercial choice on Disney's part. The loose-adaptation is much more of a problem in terms of the musical's helter-skelter storytelling, stock characterizations, and scatterbrained dialogue.
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Now that the property has been transferred to the stage, Collins has supplemented his Oscar-winning "You'll Be in My Heart" and four other songs from the film with nine new numbers; unfortunately, he has not come up with the kind of character songs that a stage musical requires.
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If spectacle alone were enough to make a good musical, as many producers mistakenly believe nowadays, this Cirque du Soleil-influenced entry would be a great one. But spectacle doesn't, and this isn't. Disney's Tarzan will leave many audience members wondering: Where's Johnny Weissmuller when you need him?


http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/8231

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Updated On: 5/10/06 at 09:55 PM