Thoughts on Jerry Zaks? — Page 2

I'll try my best to give you two an answer. It was ill-received to people (and me) because the revival felt like it was going through the motions and not giving any spark of theatrical punch nor memorability when it came to the cast and crew in comparison to the wonderful 1983 original production. Only Daniel Davis giving his best as Georges, the Cagelles, and William Ivey Long's beautiful costumes we're the only things that kept the revival from being a bad mess. Gary Beach wasn't right for the role of Albin and seeing his disjointed, uncomfortable performance certainly didn't help. There was some debate about whether or not that Davis either quit or was fired due to him fighting with Beach or wanting to do a different show, but either way, Jerry Zaks did the best he can by hiring Robert Goulet as Davis' replacement but in doing so was one of the final nails in the revival's coffin. Despite winning the Tony for Best Revival of a Musical in a very weak season, it didn't boost ticket sales and the show got a closing notice soon afterwards.

Basically, the revival failed to live up to it's huge expectations to a good amount of people. It only took the cast and crew of the scaled down 2010 revival years later to bring that spark back to a beautiful old-fashioned musical that pulled off the smallness beautifully well.

Jerry Zaks's dry spell isnt as dry as some have made it sound. One cannot forget that he spent 5 years directing tv shows like Everybody Loves Raymond and Frasier. Shows like Capeman, Addams family and even Sister Act, had been flawed by original people working on the productions until Jerry Zaks was asked to save the flailing shows. In my opinion it seems as though he did as good a job as possible with what he had to work with and the time he had to do it in.

I thought Sister Act was an improvement over London as well, and I'd blame Lippa, Brickman/Elice and those designers-turned-directors in Chicago all before Jerry Zaks for the Broadway version of Addams Family.

The Civil War as presented on Broadway was completely different than what the writers wanted, and he came in and made MAJOR structural changes that made it worse. To be fair, it's a hard piece to stage without looking like a concert.