TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112690/1126410.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.7 KB | 121 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 104

Sailing Through the Storms


James Clavell's troubled musical Shogun arrives on Broadway

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/
New York


    Lasers embroidered the curtains with bursts of aquamarine
and white to simulate lightning. An electronic hiss and crackle
conjured up thunder. Billows of cloth suggested wind and rain,
then fell away to reveal the swaying prow of a tempest-tossed
Renaissance ship. Its captain shouted orders, wrestled with the
wheel, tumbled into a make-believe sea and emerged a moment
later as if dragging himself onto shore. He cried in triumph,
"Sweet Jesus, I'm alive!"

    The relieved laughter and sustained applause that greeted
Philip Casnoff as he spoke that line were partly to honor the
melodramatic stage effects. But much of the response was to
salute the actor for his brave return to the stage on what was
to have been opening night of the year's biggest Broadway
musical, Shogun, the Musical -- an $8 million extravaganza of
sword fights and fireflies, earthquakes and snowstorms, based
on James Clavell's best-selling novel and TV mini-series. In
a preview two days before the scheduled opening, as he readied
himself to sing the second-act number Death Walk, Casnoff was
struck on the head and knocked to the stage by a 30-lb. scenic
screen that broke loose from 18 ft. overhead. The performance
was immediately canceled. Fortunately, if astonishingly to
onlookers, Casnoff suffered only superficial injuries and took
just one day off before resuming previews for this week's
opening. Some of the metaphysically inclined credited his
survival to the producers' having brought in five Shinto
priests from Japan, before performances started, to purify the
Marquis Theater amid the neon honky-tonk of Times Square.
Skeptics complained that the blessing should have averted the
freak accident altogether.

    The same Shinto ritual might have been helpful at the
Kennedy Center in Washington, where tryouts began in August.
At that point the show ran almost 3 1/2 hours. Its plot was
virtually impenetrable, in part because 85% was sung rather
than spoken, in part because in its conspiratorial milieu --
the warrior era of 17th century Japan -- good guys quite often
turned into clandestine bad guys, or vice versa. Critics were
harsh, but audiences were more forgiving. Thanks to word of
mouth, the show averaged nearly $400,000 a week at the box
office -- almost, but not quite, enough to cover weekly
operating costs for a 35-member cast, 350 costumes, 150 wigs
and 140,000 lbs. of sets and equipment.

    Meanwhile, producer Clavell and his team --
director-choreographer Michael Smuin, adapter-lyricist John
Driver and composer Paul Chihara -- hacked away an hour of
running time, primarily pageantry. A funeral procession was
eliminated. A 3 1/2-minute ballad about the hero's adulterous
love was compressed to 30 seconds. A formalized yet rousing
12-minute battle scene was fought and won in five. Musical
exchanges between a Portuguese trader and a Jesuit missionary
became clearer and quicker as dialogue. Almost every show in
tryout undergoes revision, but few weather change of this
magnitude.

    On top of all else, the creators recast the leading role,
a marooned English seaman who must make a life in Japan.
Clavell originally wanted a Briton and hired Peter Karrie.
Mounting discontent with him led the creators to turn to
Casnoff, 37, who had sung the role ably at an informal audition
but at the time struck them as too young, little known and
American. Casnoff took the job but wanted further changes: "I
was kind of outspoken because they had so much work to do in
so little time. They were between an opera and a book musical,
neither fish nor fowl."

    Nothing in the theater is ever a sure bet, but Clavell
always believed Shogun was close to it. The 1975 novel sold 15
million copies worldwide. The 12-hour TV version, seen by more
than 130 million in the U.S., was the nation's fourth most
watched mini-series ever, and proved just as popular in Japan
(whence came the bulk of the musical's financing).  Says
Clavell: "It's got a love story and, obviously, opportunities
for high adventure. In production values it should compare
quite favorably with Les Miserables and The Phantom of the
Opera." So he financed the start-up and even now remains a
principal investor. He explains, "My attitude, and my wife's
attitude, has been that we don't gamble in the stock market or
anything, we gamble on us."

    It's too soon to tell whether the gamble will pay. Shogun
shrewdly combines the spectacle of recent British-import
musicals with the romantic story line and charming set pieces
of Broadway tradition. It will have passionate enthusiasts for
its bold theatricality and epic sweep; it comes with a built-in
constituency. But it may make few new converts. Unless one
knows the book or TV show, the plot is hard to get involved in,
especially in the breakneck opening minutes. The love scenes,
although competently acted, are so flatly written that they
lack emotional intensity, a defect that the lush, quasi-operatic
score only partly makes up for. In the script's soap-opera
view of life, sexual passion and jealousy drive even political
revolutions. And there are echoes of the worst musical of the
1980s, the Shroud of Turin howler Into the Light, in the
finale: red-and-gold-robed chorines try to explain the Asian
religious concept of karma in lines seemingly lifted from a
Southern California bumper sticker ("Karma is the way you never
die"). One leaves the theater wondering if those Shinto priests
read the script.