ZORBA @ CITY CENTER/ENCORES — Page 2

Well perhaps overly harsh, I appreciated NYMag/Vulture's review commenting on the changes since Hal Prince's production.

"Well, that’s how it’s supposed to work, and if you watch even a blurry YouTube clip of the original cast performing the opening number (“Life Is&rdquo at the 1969 Tony Awards, you get a sense of what that might have felt like. Unfortunately you won’t get that feeling at City Center. For this production, following changes made earlier in the show’s history, the frame device has been jettisoned, and along with it the recitative verse of “Life Is;” the “leader” (Marin Mazzie) now has nothing to lead and simply reappears from time to time as if she wandered in from someone else’s funeral. "

https://www.vulture.com/2015/05/theater-review-zorba-at-encores.html

Those clips and the reviews so far hardly make this seem worth seeing. (And I had seen the Quinn revival and liked the show a great deal, even though it had clearly been re-tooled to accommodate Quinn. Lila Kedrova was really wonderful.) Too bad they chose not to go back to Prince's original concept.

Jesse Green, once again, proves that he's the most perceptive, and perhaps the best, of all the theater critics reviewing shows today, and one who understands (and probably reads) music. To call the score "minor entry" (the usually interesting David Rooney) or "weak" (that moron who doesn't really count anyway, Matt Windman) is to disregard a lyrical, eclectic collection of wonderful theater songs. I love how dismissive theater critics are after listening to a score once. Even Ethan Mordden, who called ZORBA a "life-denying piece of evil sh*t" thought the score was one of K&E's best in his OPEN A NEW WINDOW book about musicals of the 1960s.

The problem here seems to be the production and the casting. Seeing those clips of Turturro-- nasal and embarrassingly off-count-- is making me sort of dread what is looking to be a truly mediocre rendering of a wonderful, underrated score. It's funny how the shows that seemed the clunkiest and most dated-- LADY, BE GOOD! and PAINT YOUR WAGON-- came off best this season.

I guess I'll have to see for myself, and make a judgement on Saturday.

I can't say enough about the brilliance of the Bouzouki circle conceit, how it effortlessly tied a dark tale set in the 1920s to a very different contemporary culture. This handful of disgruntled, slightly bored denizens trying to entertain themselves and find a take-away moral amid hardscrabble lives by conjuring up a shadowy tale. It provided immediate access, tethering something distant and slightly unrelatable to the here and now. And rather than play heightened theatrics, as they seem to have done with Mazzie's muse get-up, they went very gritty. Serabian's shapeless black dress, and indeed the rag-tag look of everyone in (then) modern dress made its own comment on the struggles of the people who needed to hear themselves explain this tragic if spiritually powerful story.

I don't know why Stein, Kander and Ebb abandoned this, because turning The Leader into a contrived whiff of magic realism, rather than a woman in a town leading the storytelling, made the commentary numbers more precious. Serabian was world-weary to the point of cynical, her knowledge of the outcome made perfect sense. The story of Zorba was just that: a tale well told. Now we have a supernatural non-being annotating the plot to explain the theme. The difference is a chasm in terms of unifying style and tone.

Still, I'll reserve my final judgement (yeah right) until Sunday. I am no less excited to see this show, having watched all of the clips. And it looks like Wanamaker is giving one of the wonderful performances of the season.

Updated On: 5/8/15 at 09:02 AM

"I can't say enough about the brilliance of the Bouzouki circle conceit, how it effortlessly tied a dark tale set in the 1920s to a very different contemporary culture. This handful of disgruntled, slightly bored denizens trying to entertain themselves and find a take-away moral amid hardscrabble lives by conjuring up a shadowy tale. It provided immediate access, tethering something distant and slightly unrelatable to the here and now. And rather than play heightened theatrics, as they seem to have done with Mazzie's muse get-up, they went very gritty. Serabian's shapeless black dress, and indeed the rag-tag look of everyone in (then) modern dress made its own comment on the struggles of the people who needed to hear themselves explain this tragic if spiritually powerful story.
I don't know why Stein, Kander and Ebb abandoned this, because turning The Leader into a contrived whiff of magic realism, rather than a woman in a town leading the storytelling, made the commentary numbers more precious. Serabian was world-weary to the point of cynical, her knowledge of the outcome made perfect sense. The story of Zorba was just that: a tale well told. Now we have a supernatural non-being annotating the plot to explain the theme. The difference is a chasm in terms of unifying style and tone.

The reason why K&E&S abandoned the concept, it seems, is they felt it distanced the audience and was one of the reason audiences were put off by it. They discuss this a bit in Colored Lights. However, as Jesse Green's review in Vulture that I linked to pointed out, I think, and other reviews have said anyway, Prince's staging also helped to make some of what now seems sentimental, dark melodrama more effective. Of course Prince came up with the whole storytelling device before Stein was even HIRED--so, like with much of Prince's work, in many ways he was as much an author of the original production as anyone else...

Your analysis I think is spot on--by making it more "naturalistic" (for lack of a better word,) and yet of course not wanting to really rewrite the great Leader's stuff, it just muddles matters really.

I look forward to reading what you think of the Encores!

"Jesse Green, once again, proves that he's the most perceptive, and perhaps the best, of all the theater critics reviewing shows today, and one who understands (and probably reads) music. To call the score "minor entry" (the usually interesting David Rooney) or "weak" (that moron who doesn't really count anyway, Matt Windman) is to disregard a lyrical, eclectic collection of wonderful theater songs. I love how dismissive theater critics are after listening to a score once. "

I'll have to pay more attention to Jesse Green--based on your comment and just this review, I agree with you. Of course it helps that I can totally relate with his comment about being obsessed since a kid with the Zorba cast album and trying to find out everything about the original production as possible (which can be frustrating--out of the two decent books written about Hal Prince, not counting his memoirs, one gives a pretty good appraisal of Zorba, and how it divided critics, and the other covers Zorba in one tiny paragraph.)

And yes, I think the thing about Zorba's music that those statements prove is it simply is not that well known. For the record, I think as an overall score, it's at least, and probably stronger, than Cabaret. But Cabaret has several standards, and most ofthe rest of it is known by any theatre critic.

Reading Eric's post, I dipped into my copy of "Colored Lights" (pp. 85-94) and was reminded anew that Hal Prince came up with the idea for the bouzouki circle before the show was even written. Before the script, before a single song. He used it to pitch the novel's stage adaptation to Kander and Ebb. And thus sold them on it. It was integral to the storytelling from the very start, not an added motif, but part of the story proper, that critical point of access I talked about in my earlier posts. The Leader's narrative ominiscience was organic, because she knew the ending, not because she was an earth mother Cassandra, as it likely reads now. Prince, in an insert in the book, makes a persuasive case that ZORBA is a masterwork, that it was first performed perfectly as an integrated musical. But then along came the Cacoyannis revival, built around (mostly) Quinn recreating his screen interpretation, and the bouzouki circle and the leader's innate position and role in the proceedings was stripped of the context for everything she said and did.

If I've read the post correctly I take slight exception with Eric's point that the revisal is more "naturalistic." If anything, the bouzouki concept was the reality-based conceit that grounded the evening in a modern point of view. The revised text, removing the Leader as a present-day character and substituting a mysterious mystical presence, takes contemporaneity out of the show and builds it on an abstraction. I don't read anyone in "Colored Lights" suggesting that the bouzouki was darker, only a more developed and fully incorporated theatrical idea. The lyrics were lightened, as we know, but assigning the observations and analysis to a symbol rather than a real woman didn't make the show less dark.

Updated On: 5/8/15 at 07:56 PM

I believe we're on the same page now. You're right, in "Colored Lights" they definitely address the widespread belief that the show was too dark. Thus the lyric change. But it wasn't tied to the Leader/bouzouki conceit. I still watch the original Tony footage, and it sends chills. As it did in the theater. Both Kander and Ebb talks about it in "Colored Lights," the curtain rising on a smoke-filled stage -- all the characters smoking cigarettes, as in a bar -- the instruments, the boisterous abandon. I cannot quite explain why it was stunning and what took place was so magic. It was unlike anything I'd seen, and still haven't seen duplicated. It was very raw, seemingly filled with improvisation (albeit edited by a master director) and it unfolded with effortless spontaneity, something missing since, the sense of unrehearsed improvisation, and the opposite of what Mazzie is being asked to do in her Mt. Olympus drag.

Updated On: 5/8/15 at 08:40 PM

Why won't anyone trust Hal Prince's concepts anymore? Clearly, they weren't all that bad.

I saw this tonight from the balcony - which was pretty much empty. Kind of nice to spread out and whatnot, though.

I quite liked it. It's an interesting story in the sense that there isn't really a story. It's kind of a character-study style musical. The leads not being able to sing didn't bother me. They acted the crap out of their roles and were living those characters for me. With the exception of Elizabeth A. Davis. Her singing was...a struggle. I don't even understand how she could get cast? You couldn't find me another young white girl who could sing the crap out of her two big songs? And those songs are SO GOOD. And she's in a trio with Marin Mazzie and Santino Fontana, so step it up girl. And her character is basically non-existent. There's not a lot to work with, so I would have enjoyed SOME choices being made. But alas.

And I wish the show had been darker throughout. The second is very dark, but it still didn't feel like they were reaching very deep. But there were some great Kander and Ebb tunes and moments. I'd say it's worth seeing. Sure the leads can't sing, and he can't count in his patter songs, but it's not that bad.

I still love Debbie Shapiro's version of "Life Is" from the 1983 revival. Her voice is so rich and lusty! :)

"People are commenting on Tarturro's voice. The original Zorba (which I saw) was Herschel Bernardi. His only other musical was Bajour. The roles do not call for great voices"

Not true, Bernardi also played Tevye on Brodway on three separate occasions. Twice in the original production and headlined the '81 revival at the NY State Theatre. While Bernardi was no John Raitt (who did star in a touring production with Chita Rivera as the leader), he had a very pleasant and strong voice with wonderful musicality.

Here he is as Tevye in the '81 revival:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9Q8xW4UgVs