Andrew Lloyd Webber and the director Jamie Lloyd might seem like an odd couple at first glance — the literal baron of musical melodrama and the heavily tatted, working-class-raised stripper-down of classics . But despite their divergent aesthetics, both director and composer are Lloyds in search of effect. They want an audience breathing hard, and they trust that feeling hard will follow; thinking hard is a distant third priority.
Both these blokes rub me the wrong way. Lloyd Webber for all the reasons my colleague Andrea Long Chu brilliantly enumerated in her critique of the enduring, insidious spell cast over Broadway by The Phantom of the Opera . Lloyd on more complicated grounds: It can be difficult to feel unalloyed excitement for the parade of male auteurs produced by Europe and the U.
K. — directors with piles of accolades and severe stylistic signatures (sophisticated shticks but shticks all the same), whose work lands on Broadway or at the Park Avenue Armory or the Shed like a flash bomb. It may as well be purpose-built to dazzle Americans with the wonders that can be produced with actual government funding and a lasting apprentice-to-master pipeline, at least where promising young men are concerned.
Or maybe I’m just still riled by the director’s dumb response to a game of “F*ck, Marry Kill” (Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov edition) that Playbill imposed on the company of A Doll’s House last year: “Chekhov might be a bit of a bore ...
All those plays are .