A look back: Tokyo’s Prince of Broadway
I see they’re going ahead with Prince of Broadway, the long-aborning retrospective of producer/director Harold Prince’s estimable career in the theater. While noting (and hoping) that the show may have been dramatically transformed since then, I recall that the preliminary version that played in Tokyo in October 2015, reviewed here, was mainly a succession of I-produced-this-I-directed-that musical scenes plucked from his various shows and recreated with little or no context. It was like a Wikipedia entry on stage, a list of disembodied names and songs. As I noted then:
The numbers are nearly all famous songs presented with costumes and scenery reminiscent of their shows but no background whatsoever. So we get an old guy with a milk cart wishing he were rich, a painted emcee welcoming us to a nightclub, a woman in a chair pouting about clowns, a gravelly voiced woman who wants to propose a toast, a man in a prison cell babbling about dressing up mannequins, and so forth. Not remotely interesting to anyone who doesn’t know these shows and songs…and not particularly interesting to me, a big musical buff who’s seen this all before.
sekenbanashi 