On Rebecca

The Rebecca billboard on Broadway

So my heart has been ripped out by the recent events surrounding Rebecca: Das Musical's troubled and ultimately aborted transfer to Broadway. That link is a pretty good rundown of what happened, but basically the producer, Ben Sprecher, was probably the victim of an audacious financial scam that left his production 4.5 million short of its budget. So now Rebecca's Broadway opening has been postponed indefinitely, and several hardworking theatre people are out of work.

I love this musical, in all its incarnations. In the past three years since I became acquainted with it, I have been longing for a production that was closer to where I live than Austria or Japan. There were myriads of rumours and workshops and aborted productions in the English-speaking world, but this was the closest an English production came to actually opening.

Yeah, I do feel betrayed. It's a vicarious betrayal, perhaps, but it hurts all the same. I can't even imagine the disappointment of those who had bought tickets to this show or those whose bread and butter were depending on its premiere and run. It's a gigantic loss.

I feel that anger is the only acceptable emotion to have towards the debacle, both towards the person or persons who perpetrated this despicable fraud and towards Ben Sprecher. The situation was severely mishandled by Mr Sprecher. There were livelihoods and reputations running on his decision-making, and he played fast and loose with them.

Though I try to be an optimist when it comes to the inevitable disappointments in theatre, the things that have happened lately serve only to upset me. An English-language production of this wonderful show seems unlikely now. I would not blame anyone if they decided to drop this project, and frankly the fact that Mr Sprecher wants to try producing Rebecca again isn't heartening.

Colourblind Casting One: The Streetcar and I

As someone who is not a part of a visible minority, I'm pretty sure I'm not qualified to talk about this, but lately this has been bothering me a lot, because there have been a lot of cases where colourblind casting (or hell, even colour-conscious casting) has been received with a mindset that is less than modern and far less than enlightened. Though the US and Canada that generally pride themselves on being open on issues of diversity, there are still embarrassing and primitive fails.

(I'm not talking about the Hunger Games issues. I am so late to the party on that one it isn't funny. The twitter shitstorm that followed the release of that movie was a problem that stems from idiots reading a book but blocking out what they don't want to here. Rue is clearly black in the books, and while it isn't a huge part of her character, it was definitely the right choice to cast a black actress in the movie, especially if that actress was someone of such screen presence as Amandla Stenberg. Case closed. Idiots are idiots, and should have their rights to the Internet restricted if not outright revoked.)

What I'm talking about is the treatment of actors and actresses of colour in theatre, not film and television. Tentatively this subject will be covered in more than one post.

The Post-Flop Era of Broadway

'Don't you understand, Mama? Everything's not a sin!'
-Actual line from this piece of crap. <3

So, in 1988, the infamous musicalised version of Stephen King's Carrie opened to hisses and boos and disastrous reviews. After almost a week, it closed to a huge financial loss and an infamous history that would bury it in the eyes of serious commercial theatre forever...

Until the fanboys attacked, that is.