| re: More Than You Deserve - Time Magazine | |
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steven_stuart 03:05 am UTC 08/24/13 |
| In reply to: | re: More Than You Deserve - Time Magazine - steven_stuart 02:53 am UTC 08/24/13 |
| From Jim Steinman Wiki: When it came time for the actual production, however, the axis of creative power, for whatever reason, tilted in Steinman's direction. As Meat Loaf puts it, "Jim talked Michael Weller into turning it into a full-blown musical. It's not that the music wasn't any good, but Jim was trying to make it into something bigger than it was. [...] They brought in all these people, black gospel singers, dancers, a choreographer. It was insane." Indeed, many cooks were beginning to spoil the kitchen. Many of Weller's lyrics were getting the axe in favor of Jim's material, and an additional lyricist in Papp's employ, Ray Errol Fox, was being assigned to help Jim with them as well. Though ultimately Fox produced no results, and he and Jim collaborated on a different show instead, this was turning into a show that Weller did not want to be a part of, something that had spiraled further away from what he had intended it to be, due in no small part to the director, Kim Friedman. As he put it, "I had to trust a great deal to Kim's judgment. She was very young (right out of N.Y.U.), lively and ambitious, and a great great sales-person. What she was not was a good director. And she was (I now realize) frightened to death of what she'd taken on, knowing at some level she was unqualified to deal with it. [...] by that time I had distanced myself from the whole thing as far as possible. [...] I had moved on to other plays, and felt it best to leave the experience behind me." By the time the show opened in November 1973, on opening night, Weller had no idea what to expect. What he saw was less than brilliant in his eyes. "It was a painful show to watch. [...] Others walked out with comments like 'This is the worst show I've ever seen,' 'Who allowed such a disgusting play to get on stage,' and so on. [...] I was crushed that my original concept had gone so far astray. We ended up with something funky, weird, slapdash, and by turns appealing and repellent..." Even more insulting, ticket sales were good enough that Papp approached him with an offer he wanted no part of. Says Weller, "When the play was about to close at the Public Theatre, Papp called me to his office and suggested that he might re-mount it uptown at Lincoln Center, which he had just taken over. I told him I wouldn't allow such a thing to happen under any circumstances - if the show was to be done again, it would have to be as I had envisioned it both stylistically and musically. I explored possible legal remedies to do with 'separation of rights' [...]" | |
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