The Vilification of Julie Taymor - Huffington Post

[uncageg]

Posted: 4/6/11 at 2:35am

Just read this. Did a search and didn't find it:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-lennix/the-unjust-vilification-o_b_844939.html?ref=fb&src=sp

[Yero my Hero]

Posted: 4/6/11 at 8:22am

I was almost with him until he started crying sexism.

She may be a genius, visionary director that people love to work with, but she absolutely sucks as a book writer and would not accept help, especially after nearly every review called out the book as the show's biggest problem.

If the producers could have fired her as a book writer and kept her as a director, they probably would have, but they couldn't.

Also, he can't really argue that she did not have an ego in 1994, therefore all the articles must be wrong. 1994 was before THE LION KING, which would have been the show to give her an inflated ego. I'm not saying she absolutely has an ego and what he says about her being a joy is wrong, but people change. Using an experience from nearly twenty years ago before her giant blockbuster success is not convincing me otherwise.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/6/11 at 8:23am

Attention should have been paid:

Let me add this: Julie has employed so many black actors from around the world, in The Lion King alone, that she very likely holds the record on Broadway for creating work for the black theater community.

The reaction to her work on Spider-Man has been bewildering to many of us here who remember her work PRE-Lion King: experimental, creative, counter-cultural, political, leftist, feminist, transgressive--and famously collaborative.

That was then. What IS now?

Whether the millions she made on Lion King turned her into the megalomaniacal monster she was portrayed as during Spider-Man--OR whether she was abandoned by the theater community and the critical community precisely because of some or all of those beliefs--is something that we cannot answer here and now. It will have to be answered by theater historians of future generations.

But I would urge every poster here who portrayed her as a "egotistical crazy woman" to spend a few moments reading the links below about her 1996 revival of her 1988 JUAN DARIEN, revived just at the moment when Taymor was about to take on The Lion King for Disney, and ask yourself, "Doesn't this sound way cool?" "Doesn't this sound like something I would respect and admire and enjoy?":



http://www.donshewey.com/theater_articles/julie_taymor.html

http://theater.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?html_title=&tols_title=JUAN%20DARIEN%20%28PLAY%29&byline=By%20BEN%20BRANTLEY&pdate=19961125&id=1077011430456

Updated On: 4/6/11 at 08:23 AM

[uncageg]

Posted: 4/6/11 at 8:54am

"In their minds, the fault couldn't possibly lie with an untested Broadway producer, or the two all but absent rock star composers whose notoriety is derived from a completely different medium."

I have posted this before. I am assuming Bono and The Edge set aside time to work on the show prior to their world tour. The show was scheduled to open before their tour started so I figure that any changes to the score would have happened then. Yes, their noteriety is derived from another medium and they had to tend to those thousands of fans who bought tickets to see them live. I would also assume that they didn't expect the mess that this has all become.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 4/6/11 at 10:47am

PJ, I remember when The Lion King was announced as Disney's new Broadway venture, I thought, "Swell. More theme park shows in the Big Apple." Then they announced Julie Taymor would be directing and, having known of her work, thought, "What the WHAT? I want to go to there." The first two times those phrases were ever uttered together.

I applaud you for reminding us of those perspectives she brings to her work. Or, brought to her work and will bring again one day.

[newintown]

Posted: 4/6/11 at 11:03am

Or she and her pals could just say, "oops, this one was a failure." It's not like she isn't still a millionaire, or that no one will ever go see her shows again.

So few people have the self-confidence to admit failure and move on.

[Idiot]

Posted: 4/6/11 at 11:49am

I think it's extremely important to use words like 'sexist' and 'racist' when there's actual sexism and racism afoot. The wrongs that these words represent are too important to be diluted by crying wolf.

STOTD was not trashed because of Taymor's gender.

As to the artist's ego, I've never met her but I'm sure she has one (I have worked for her). I've never met a decent artist who didn't. She had a vision that made sense to her - just not many others. It takes time to come around to such a thing. She'll get there, but it may take years.
Updated On: 4/6/11 at 11:49 AM

[SNAFU]

Posted: 4/6/11 at 12:27pm

I worked with Julie on many productions pre LION KING. The ego was there then, as were the other traits she is now being criticized for. They weren't as magnified but they were there.
Those productions had very much the same problems she is being torn apart for now but there was a lot less at stake and not quite the same glare of media spot light.

[best12bars]

Posted: 4/6/11 at 2:32pm

Thanks for that insight, SNAFU. I think the biggest "oops" with Julie Taymor in this case was that she was creating a story, rather than telling one already written. With Lion King, she had an established plot, songs, and characters. She added her own development to them, but she wasn't trying to figure out the ending to the show while she was directing it. And also with Lion King, she couldn't stray far off the path as far as the plot goes. She had established boundaries, and she could "play" and create and dream big, within that structure.

Spider-Man had no boundaries. No rules. No established plot. No established songs. And no ending. Not enough structure for her. And for someone with her personality to rigidly "hold her own" while everyone else was still trying to explore new options and establish the path, it was a big mistake.

[bwayfan7000]

Posted: 4/6/11 at 2:53pm

I think a big problem with Taymor and Spider-Man is that, for a very long time, there wasn't anyone there to tell her "no". When she was working on shows with smaller budgets, she made them work with what she had, because she really is a visionary. After Lion King, the sky became the limit for her, and so she just kept going with Spider-Man, even when she should've stepped back and toned it down a bit. I don't think this is a problem unique to Julie; it's an issue many creative people have, but with those other people, there's usually someone to tell them that isn't a good idea. No one really stepped in to keep Taymor in check on Spider-Man, so she went wild with it. I think that if the show initially had a different bookwriter, a brilliant one, and if the music Bono and the Edge had written was very good, or if there were different composers involved, and Taymor was merely directing and creating masks and other visual elements, it could've been amazing, and this wouldn't have become a problem at all.

[SNAFU]

Posted: 4/6/11 at 3:22pm

Bwayfan, yes that is very much the problem. Even back in the eighties Julie had problems with her visions and budgets. Always going well over them. She always managed to find someone to write a check to cover it. It is quite different now where those checks a tens of millions rather then tens of thousands.

[hyperbole_and_a_half]

Posted: 4/6/11 at 3:29pm

Julie Taymor's creativity is like ivy: if given proper foothold, structure and boundary, it can turn even the most mundane and static of objects into a beautiful organic mass; if unchecked, it becomes an impenetrable, writhing knot that threatens to choke out any semblance of life that happens to come near it.