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(More customer reviews)"The best way I know to resuscitate the theatre is to produce dangerous new works," says Stuart Ostrow in his very slim (154 pages, double spaced with wide margins) new memoir of his producing career. However he does not define "dangerous new works." From reading the book, it seems his definition of "dangerous new works" is whatever is being touted by the Village Voice. (Richard Foreman, homosexuality, multiculturalism, Tom Eyen, etc.) Stuart Ostrow has a story, but he is looking at it from the wrong point of view. The way he sees it, he was producing quality innovative stuff that the world conspired to make fail. Another way of looking at it would show a talented young producer who, after producing big hits with 1776 and PIPPIN, went pretentious and politically correct with his subsequent shows and understandably failed.
His damnation of Mel Brooks is unjustified since Ostrow himself says that he has not seen THE PRODUCERS. Well, Stu, I have news for you. THE PRODUCERS was a dangerous new work. It was a slap in the face at political correctness and pretentiousness. It single-handedly killed the bloated Euro Musical that had dominated Broadway for twenty years and paved the way for outrageous, unpretentious shows like HAIRSPRAY and THE WEDDING SINGER. THE PRODUCERS resuscitated the American musical and Ostrow missed it.
Ostrow also badmouths WICKED claiming it was dependent upon special effects and spectacle. If that were true, DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES would still be running. The spectacle of WICKED enhances its compelling story, unlike the all the additional sets and extra players gratuitously inserted into the boring LA BETE.
Ostrow seems to think that problems can be solved by creating yet another bureaucracy to choose the artists who shall be anointed. Evidence has show that the bureaucratic method produces pretentious work like that of Michael John LaChiusa and Jason Robert Brown, which the public doggedly refuses to embrace.
Ostrow tells some good anecdotes, but I wish there had been more of them. There's the germ of a fascinating book in this volume and in Ostrow's previous memoir (also extremely brief and shares some material with this volume). But at this point, there's still not a real book between the two of them.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Present at the Creation, Leaping in the Dark, and Going Against the Grain: 1776, Pippin, M. Butterfly, La Bete, & Other Broadway Adventures
"The best way I know to resuscitate the theatre is to produce dangerous new works." - Stuart Ostrow.Producer Stuart Ostrow's manifesto of how intelligent life might be restored to the theatre is also a unique personal memoir of the producer-creator relationship and an evaluation of the essentials that can make a show fly, or remain earthbound. As a solo producer, Ostrow's many productions include M. Butterfly, which won the Tony Award for Best Play; Pippin; and 1776, which received both the New York and London Drama Critics Awards as well as the Tony Award for Best Musical. He produced the original Broadway production of the critically acclaimed La Bete, which won the Olivier Award in London for Best Comedy. Ostrow was brought in to fix the original production of Chicago, collaborated with Anthony Hopkins on a London production of M. Butterfly, that was not meant to be, and even had his own play, Stages, directed on Broadway by the avant-garde theatrical pioneer Richard Foreman. He riffs about the heroes and heels he's met along the way and that great cast includes Frank Loesser, Meredith Willson, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse, David Geffen, Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Henry Hwang, John Kander, Fred Ebb, and many more.
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