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Broadway flops were brought to national attention with Mel Brooks’ film The Producers, in which a producer, Max Bialystock, and his accountant Leo Bloom set out to produce the worst Broadway show possible.  The idea is that it is possible to make more money with a flop than with a hit.  Of course, their master plan crumbles quickly when the show, Springtime for Hitler, enjoys unexpected success.

There have been many composers and lyricists who have accomplished Max and Leo’s goal without even trying.  This year, two of these enormous flops are receiving eagerly-anticipated revivals in New York.  There is an entire subset in theatre culture that is obsessed with big flop musicals.  There was even a book written about these shows, called Not Since Carrie by Ken Mandelbaum.  The title refers to possibly the most famous flop, and one of the two musicals that is being remounted, Carrie.  Yes, that Carrie.  It is a musical based on the novel-turned-movie by Stephen King about a troubled telekinetic teen.

When Carrie was first on Broadway in 1988, it ran for a total of 16 previews and 5 performances.  On this blog, I have often alluded to the innate smallness of the theatre community.  Word of mouth alone seems to have ruined this musical.  It was doomed from its out of town try-out in Stratford, where the public was up in arms that the Royal Shakespeare Company was putting on this show.  Unlike most shows, as Carrie moved forward in development and got closer to its Broadway debut, it got worse.  The revisions and directorial choices weakened the show.  Rather than juxtaposing Carrie’s inner angst and outer powers with a relatively normal society, the show put Carrie’s classmates in costumes that resembled Grecian goddesses and workers at a leather bar.  Carrie’s powers were barely even hinted at, so by the Act One finale, when her hands were literally on fire, members of the audience unfamiliar with the movie or book were perplexed.

While the show failed commercially, it immediately became a camp classic.  Secretly recorded video and audio circulated the theatre community, and those who were not at the show wished they could have witnessed the wreck.  Even now, some salvaged clips remain on YouTube for those fans who never thought this day would come.  They day they can finally see Carrie for themselves.  Mandelbaum says that the thing that separates Carrie from the other flops in his book is that it was so hot and cold as far as quality is concerned.  The mother’s big ballad, “Open Your Heart,” is still held up to be a beautiful piece of music, but there was also a song (which the 2012 review hints may have been cut, or at least pared down) about the pig slaughtering, with genius lyrics like “kill the pig, pig, pig” while oinks resonate through the theatre.  And did I mention the show ended with Carrie ascending an enormous stairway to Heaven?

MCC’s production of Carrie was successful before it even began.  This is the definition of a cult musical.  You go to be able to say you went.  There are those who are avid fans of the pirated cast recording from the 80s, but many audience members just want to see what everyone has been talking about for the past nearly 25 years.  The New York Times review praises Marin Mazzie who plays Carrie’s religious fanatic mother, but otherwise gently condemns the musical.  Many positive changes have been made since the 1988 disaster, but it seems that Carrie is just not one of those shows that works.  Regardless of reviews and actual merit, the production has already extended its limited run an extra four weeks.  Everyone wants to see the world’s most famous flop.  I know I would.

The second revived flop of 2012 is a little more tragic.  Merrily We Roll Along was a show written by Broadway God Stephen Sondheim and originally directed by the equally terrific Hal Prince in 1981.  The show followed the professional and personal journeys of three best friends backward from 1980 to 1955.  This show had a bit more success, but about the same amount of chance as Carrie.  It ran for 52 previews and 16 performances.  And unlike Carrie, Sondheim and Prince made significant improvements to the show during their time on the Great White Way.  However, word had already gotten out and the show was really doomed before it began.  There are tales of walk outs from the first preview, audience members who left completely confused about what story they just watched and who the characters on stage were.  After closing on Broadway, Sondheim continued to make revisions to the show with librettest George Furth.  So when the show opened at New York City Center through its Encores! program this year it was a very different show than that first preview in 1981.

However, it still fell flat.  This production had everything– a stellar, super exciting, young but not brand new cast; a great concept; talented musicians, directors, artists– but it was still missing something.  According to reviews, this seems to be one of those shows that people want to work but it just might not be possible.  Personally, my Merrily cast recording is practically worn through I’ve listened to it so many times.  This is a show I want to see succeed.  But I’ve also never seen it in full production.  Critics acknowledge that the music is beautiful.   It’s Sondheim, for God’s sake.  Unlike the writers of Carrie, who were not entirely inexperienced but certainly did not have the breadth of experiences Mr. Sondheim has, Merrily has everything going for it, except for the show itself.

Sometimes there is just a disconnect between what should work and what does.   That is one of the most terrifying and exciting parts of art- seeing what works.  These are just two examples of when things went terribly bad.  But now they have a whole community willing to embrace them and spend hours online developing fan sites, sharing bootleg footage, and devoting all sorts of time to the shows that didn’t quite make it.  I find flop culture quite fascinating.  I first got into it when dramaturging a show called [title of show].  One of the characters, and the writer himself, has a collection of Broadway flop Playbills.  There is a song that names probably fifty flops, and it was my job to look up each title and find as much information as possible.  It’s an interesting phenomenon, especially in this age of super commercial, decade-long running shows, that there are still these fleeting pieces of theatre that run under 50 performances and are never heard from again.  Carrie and Merrily are the lucky ones, but when will the world hear from Buck White again?  Probably never.

And then I think…how did we let Cats happen for so long?

Happy March everyone! And happy end of spring break! My spring break was wonderfully productive and was in no way filled with dormancy.

As we all make the sad, sad transition back into school, I want to talk a bit about my favorite topic, the world of classical music. But! Before you stop reading and write me off as an old fashioned boring old guy in a suit that goes to opera and comments on the divinity and “high class” of the music that I’m listening to! I want to talk about where classical music intersects with popular music, where classical music is TODAY and why YOU should care. Because you should. It’s cool stuff.

So I want to start with how I got into this world of contemporary music by highlighting one of my favorite groups, a new music ensemble called Alarm Will Sound.

Alarm Will Sound could be called something like a “chamber orchestra,” if you wanted to give it a name. It has string, woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments, and they are all arranged around one conductor. It’s a “chamber” group because it has so few numbers: only one or two musicians per part (compared to a full symphony orchestra, which has quite a few musicians playing the same part…). All the musicians in Alarm Will Sound are classically trained—all have graduated with at least one degree in music. In fact, they started as a group of students at the Eastman School of Music. But what makes Alarm Will Sound different, in my mind, in their willingness to explore and be open to all kinds of music. As it says in the intro video above, AWS’s members have experience in all kinds of music, from world music to jazz. And this shows in their output: in 2005 they released an album of Aphex Twin covers, called Acoustica. Go back and read that again. Cover album. Aphex Twin. Y’know! The electronic artist, who made tracks like this…

and Alarm Will Sound’s cover?

This is a “classical” ensemble that sees electronic music as just as valid as anything that has Beethoven’s name on it. It’s such a wonderfully forward thinking strategy! And the things they produce are just really cool.

They also came out with another album in 2009, called A/Rhythmia, a project highlighting rhythmically challenging works. And this is where I first discovered AWS and fell in love with their music. In particular, I really dug this piece, called Yo Shakespeare by Michael Gordon….

But before I start to melt into uncompromising praise for a group of musicians I’ve never seen live, I’ll just take note of what an ensemble like AWS says as to the current state of music. To me, it says that there are no longer any boundaries. Genre is a meaningless term. All music is good music, and all music deserves a listen. So check out this “classical” music and see why I love it so much.

And I’ll leave you with one last video, Alarm Will Sound’s performance of Paul Dooley’s Point Blank. Paul is a doctoral student at the School of Music ,Theatre and Dance. Go Blue.

Illness, whether a mental or physical debilitation, has been the subject of countless works of art throughout history.  It has been pictured scientifically, religiously, sympathetically, heroically, and any number of other variations.  In relation to the artistic discourse, the ways in which illness is depicted reflects historical stigmas as well as broad human emotions.  Much of what we know about responses in society to illness, like the Plague, are documented in art but it is often used to evoke an appeal, like in works by Picasso or Basquiat, to universal distress.  To examine this, works concerning illness spanning several centuries will be analyzed, as well as texts related to art in illness and artists that suffer from illness themselves.  In order to do this, it is important to look at these works of art comparatively, thus many works will be compared to others in their same time period and other eras.  Illness is complicated through art because it can take something fairly scientific objective and turn it into a work that is subjective, propaganda, or even just reflect it back objectively.

Though art traces its roots back much farther than the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, some of the most terrifying and prolific images of illness came from these eras.  An example of this would be Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Triumph of Death.  The “Triumph of Death” (or the “Dance of Death”) motif was a common one, arising from medieval times with religious reinforcement.  In the face of the Black Plague, this theme was given ample commissions by the Catholic Church as a memento mori, reminding the public of the pains of Hell and the rapidity that death can come in.  The hysterical lust for repentance during the outbreak and spread of the Bubonic Plague reflected the religious fervor that gripped Europe, and this is partially why the Triumph of Death’s savage depiction of illness is important documentation.  In Bruegel’s painting, finished circa 1562, Death is seen ravaging every social hierarchy, from peasants to emperors.  Some “Triumph of Death” works from this period even went as far as to include Catholic bishops among those being cut down by Death (represented by skeletons).  In relation to illness, this painting shows the intense religious reaction to a fear of sickness.  Through depicting illness and death, Bruegel examines people’s frantic and desperate desire to escape the inevitable but not without religious propagation.

In the same vein as Bruegel’s piece, artists continued to use their talents to the liking of higher authorities.  The subject of illness and death seemed to be a point of supreme sympathy or relatability for the masses because it continued to be the center of many works commissioned by governments or churches, possibly because of its ability to tap into the fears of every person; dying is inescapable for everyone and you’ll be lucky if you don’t suffer greatly while doing so.  In the 18^th Century Neoclassicism began, unlike its state commissioned predecessor Rococo, to use illness to illustrate “civic virtue” in relation to the rise of Republicanism in Paris.  Themes included bodily sacrifice for the state, like in Drouais’s The Dying Athlete, David’s The Death of Socrates, or Regnault’s Liberty or Death.  It was considered a great honor to die for the Revolution and those running it spent lavish amounts of money in order to propagate this ideal.  Jacques Louis David even proposed parading the decomposing body of one of the Revolution’s “martyrs,” Jean Paul Marat, in the bathtub he was murdered in through the streets of Paris (though the body atrophied beyond recognition before this could be carried out).  Unlike the previous religious implementations of illness into art, the Neoclassic and later Romantic usage was meant to display a choice: Republicanism or an un-honorable death, or Republicanism with a heroic death.  However, both religious and Jacobin propaganda stressed

unwavering devotion.  French Revolution artists would have been fools not to draw from Christian artwork though; centuries of blind Catholic following in France was a resource widely tapped into by the likes of David and Ingres.  There was already the perfect model of martyrdom and illness: Jesus.  Probably the most famous work to come out of the 18^th Century was David’s Death of Marat, styled after countless Pietas, most famously by Michelangelo.  Along with the death motif the painter made a point of displaying Marat still in his bathtub.  Marat spent most of his time in that bathtub because he had a very sensitive skin condition, something that increases the perception that this was a cruel murder against a helpless victim.  This shows how, among other things, illness can be manipulated and exploited in art.

Toward the middle of the 19^th Century state commissioned art began to disappear.  With the restoration of the Bourbon Dynasty in France, less concentration was paid to funding political art in an attempt to disassociate themselves from the still leftist and revolutionary artists prevalent at the time, like Daumier, who was imprisoned briefly for unkind caricatures of Louis Philippe in the form of a sickly, rotting pear (which also caused a nationwide ban on any depictions of pears) or Delacroix.  A new form of bourgeoisie was also in place, one offended by the growing influx of peasants drawn to the city during the Industrial Revolution.  With this brought unclean and unhealthy living environments, along with a fantastic rise in prostitution and an artistic desire to depict these realistically, hence Realism.  Emile Zola, an ardent supporter of Impressionist Realism, remarked upon hearing outcries from the upper classes over Manet’s masterpiece Olympia “Why not be honest?”  Olympia, a sardonic response to Cabanel’s saccharine Birth of Venus, shows a thin, pale, and bold prostitute lacking the typical voluptuous body that was associated with beauty.   This pursuit of the real, an unglorified view of the sickness the Parisian poor were experiencing, became a fixture in Impressionism.  This was done, almost to a grotesque point, by Degas in his sculpture Little Dancer of Fourteen Years ⁹.  Called by one critic the “Flower of the Gutter,” Degas disgusted critics with his bony, often speculated as anorexic, ballerina.  His original sculptures of Little Dancer of Fourteen Years was not a bronze cast as the current ones are but a wax sculpture with genuine human hair  and displayed in a glass case.  Unlike today, displaying a sculpture in a glass case was not common practice for artists in the 19^th Century and was perceived as a reference to medical displays.  This was a scandal; prior to Impressionism artists did not attempt to exhibit realistic interpretations of the lower classes.  Full scale paintings were previously reserved for heroic battle scenes, aristocrats, or works of civic virtue but to devote them to the flâneur and prostitutes, and not kindly done, of Paris was an outrage.  Other then class relations, Realism changed how illness was dealt with.  It was no longer used as a tool to instruct or cause fear for the masses, but was instead a point of power and change in shocking the bourgeoisie.

There are upon this earth a great number of places where there is beauty to be found in the intersection of the human and the natural. There is urban decay, where manmade structures are gradually reclaimed by the elements, the thing around which urban exploration revolves. There is the landscape redefined, modernized, the urban landscape. And then there is something else, something that encompasses that and more, something that is in a way their opposite, at least as a manner of perception. The anthropogenic landscape is one that seems now natural to us. Of course everything has to some degree been touched or altered by human actions; the pristine is now rare, valued, and, in many cases, on its way to becoming commoditized.

Where man has been, it tends to leave an indelible mark (though that too is subject to temporal perspective). It is often on the overlooked fringes of ordinary civilization and in its in-between spaces that the most unexpected things might be found. It’s the sparsely-populated stretches between cities and towns, it’s the desolate-looking land peppered by isolated industrial complexes. It’s the pin-straight best soccer predictions lines of a planted forest, the threads of roads snaking across the desert, the carven bulk of a terraced mountainside. Or perhaps on a smaller scale, it’s where tire tracks appear in gravel or a cluster of rubbish bins sit in a field, where a house sits perched on the top of the bluff.

Anthropogenics curates images of these places, “depicting the human-made, human-marked, post-natural, contemporary landscape,” framing the ordinary in such a way as to make them appear to be more than that. Its collection, it says, is “borne of the belief that “pretty” landscapes lack interest… the appeal of landscapes and photographs of landscapes is in the ways in which humanity has altered, or even created, them, not the ways in which we find them pleasing to the eyes.” While it might not be entirely fair to say that the unaltered landscapes conventionally prized for being aesthetically pleasing “lack interest,” it is undeniable that they receive far more attention than the human-affected. Pristine alpine meadows and city skylines alike have been much photographed in their many iterations. What lies in between often goes ignored, which Anthropogenics seeks to remedy.

The public contributes images through their Flickr pool, where more images can be found.