Daily News is Negative:
"'Tarzan': Me, critic; you lame!
I found myself consulting my watch frequently during "Tarzan," the Disney musical that brings the current Broadway season to an inglorious close.
The show, with a book by David Henry Hwang and score by Phil Collins, gets off to an impressive start with the enactment of a shipwreck in which the English parents of the lad who will become Tarzan float through water and then walk around dazed on an unknown shore - we watch them from above, the stage being used ingeniously, as if it were a movie screen, by director-designer Bob Crowley.
Soon, however, the novelties get boring. By 8:20, I noted, I was already tired of gorillas swinging over the audience. By 8:45, they were climbing the proscenium, which was briefly amusing. At 8:50, the stage was full of elegantly designed jungle butterflies and other exotica, but the scene was static - like the music. After the intermission, the gorillas did some bungee jumping, also briefly amusing.
Between these attempts at creating visual excitement, there is a modicum of plot.
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Crowley, who has done some amazing sets (like his 1994 "Carousel"), seldom gets beyond bland - either as designer or director.
Ever since "Cats," which turned the Winter Garden into a gigantic haunted house, musicals have become increasingly amusement park rides, focusing on scenic thrills rather than solid storytelling. "Tarzan" wouldn't make the grade as a ride at Disney World. On Broadway, it seems merely a tourist trap."
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/theater/story/416542p-351919c.html Bergen Register is Negative:
"If a kid gets a new toy, you have to expect he'll want to play with it, hour after hour.
So when the folks at Disney hooked up with Argentinian "aerial designer" Pichon Baldinu, you might have predicted where it would lead.
Baldinu, who put together the De La Guarda troupe's long-running off-Broadway acrobatics show "Villa Villa," rigged up an elaborate system of "flying" for Disney's "Tarzan," which opened Wednesday night at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.
And the creators of the chaotic, lightweight, all-around-disappointing mega-musical can't get enough of it.
Performers, hanging from bungee cords attached to body harnesses, bounce and soar through the air, walk on walls and slowly descend from the top of the theater nearly close enough to touch audience members' heads.
The imaginative thrust of the production seems to have been: How many ways can we get the actors off the ground?
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There's a fleeting sense early on that book writer David Henry Hwang and director-designer Bob Crowley intend a dramatic story of Tarzan's journey, from nurturing by gorillas after his parents are killed to a growing sense of being different to the realization he's from another world.
But it soon becomes clear that -- beyond the flying -- a meaningful telling of the classic story is not on the menu. The production is said to be based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel "Tarzan of the Apes" as well as Disney's 1999 animated film version, but the show is formula Disney all the way.
There is, yet again, the hero's smart-mouthed animal pal. The character is essentially the same from film to film, show to show and species to species.
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Crowley designed better scenery than costumes (and did both better than he directed), including a particularly lovely panorama of colorful, exotic plants that Jane discovers in the jungle. But like much else in the show, it seems stuck in for the heck of it rather than as part of an organic concept.
There's also the required Disney message, which is that families may be different, but they're all to be valued.
Another message delivered by "Tarzan," unspoken and unintended, is that if you put a Broadway musical together like a theme-park show, the result is likely to be a bummer.
http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkxNjcmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTY5MzI2NDAmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk3 New York Sun is Negative:
"The loincloth and fur-covered actors may spend much of "Tarzan" gliding through the air, buttressed by an array of harnesses, wires, and bungee cords. But with the exception of an eye-catching opening, Disney's latest foray onto Broadway lands on the Richard Rodgers Theatre with all the artistic grace of George of the Jungle, Tarzan's cartoon counterpart, slamming into that tree.
After aiming low and scoring big with its risk-free stage adaptation of "Beauty and the Beast" in 1994, Disney rolled the dice and hired visionary director Julie Taymor to rethink "The Lion King." The result was a visually rapturous event that continues to dazzle kids and adults alike.
The overamplified, underimagined "Tarzan" awkwardly straddles these two approaches, aping the 1999 film while attempting to translate its gravity-flouting visual scheme for the stage. It largely fails on both counts, somehow managing to feel both bloated and anemic, despite director/designer Bob Crowley's ambitious visual approach and a handful of actors determined to transcend the libretto's tired monkey business.
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Mr. Collins has augmented the film's five songs, which range from mildly engaging ("Two Worlds") to blandly bombastic ("Son of Man"), with nine new ones. With the exception of a pleasant love duet for Kerchak and Kala (the very talented Merle Dandridge, whose ringing alto and empathic presence salvage a number of scenes), these are considerably less impressive than his original batch, and Jane's first song, in which she rattles off Latin genus and species names while actors in body stockings grope her, stands out as a low point.
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And so "Tarzan" turns out not to be a predictable train wreck but rather a mediocre adaptation of a mediocre film, which has solved some but by no means all of the adaptation problems with an impressive cast and technical crew to put it over.
But is this what we've been reduced to? Hailing a Broadway musical for having a coherent plot and a handful of good performances, plus some cool stage effects? No matter how many harnessed actors take flight in the stage's upper reaches, this production sees to it that their efforts remain dispiritingly earthbound."
http://www.nysun.com/article/32521?page_no=2 Journal News is Mixed-to-Negative:
"But the Crowley-Baldinu partnership doesn't gel to make magic.
Each time the anticipation folds away to make room for a scene with live actors talking, the show's magic quickly fizzles.
As sublime a set designer as he is, Crowley seems uncertain as soon as he must actually direct a scene. And book writer David Henry Hwang is at fault too. His dialogue is as flat as Crowley's visual concepts are elaborate, and the director is left with little to craft into musical theater.
Aided by lighting designer Natasha Katz, Crowley has more than one visual stunt like this up his sleeve, and each is deployed with a sense of momentous theatrical excitement that's hard to resist.
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Josh Strickland, the grown-up Tarzan, inexplicably has the body of a 90-pound weakling. Even the logo Tarzan who appears on the Playbill and on T-shirts for sale in the lobby of the theater is plainly better built than Strickland.
At first sight, after the grown-up Tarzan emerges from a somewhat lame sequence of giant finger-shadows, our first reaction is: Have a milkshake. The man's too skinny!
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Instead of the fascinating meeting of species across the divide, Hwang needlessly stresses a much smaller theme that little Tarzan feels "different" from the other kids. In trying to make the story contemporary, he makes it banal. This should not come as a surprise: Hwang co-wrote the book for the musical "Aida."
Actually, the kids who get to see "Tarzan" might well feel different from other kids. They'll have to be richer. The top ticket goes for $111.25 each.
Meryl Tankard's choreography is severely limited by the fact that most of the characters are dancing primates. And Crowley's unquestioned gift for creating breathtaking visual tableaux comes awry here, because shows are about live people, performing.
Those, he hasn't quite gotten the hang of yet.
http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060511/LIFESTYLE01/605110420/1031
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
[http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/]
"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
Updated On: 5/11/06 at 12:32 PM
