When I was lucky enough to interview the great John Raitt several years ago, he made the following cogent observation about Nicholas Hytner's direction of the mid-'90s revival of Carousel, the Rodgers and Hammerstein masterwork in which Raitt had created the leading male role in 1945: "One minute, you're watching the show and thinking, 'That's a great idea." The next minute, you're thinking, 'What did they do THAT for?!'"
The same might be said of Luc Bondy's new production of Puccini's Tosca for the Metropolitan Opera, but let's be clear from the outset that the director's ludicrous misjudgments outnumber his sensible innovations by about 50 to 1. Bondy was roundly booed when he took a curtain call on opening night. I wasn't there to add my voice to the chorus on that occasion -- I saw the third performance, a week later -- but I certainly agree with the sentiment expressed.
Booing is far less common in the theater than at the opera -- practically unheard of, in fact, at least in the U.S. This is partly because, generally speaking, theatergoers are not quite as passionate as opera buffs about the art form they love. But the main reason for the disparity is that, on opening nights, opera productions grant curtain calls to stage directors, designers, and composers (if living!), who almost always bear the primary responsibility for any debacle that may have occurred. On Broadway, curtain calls for creatives just don't happen, and audience members are presumably reluctant to boo at the conclusion of a bad show because they don't want it to seem that they are unhappy with the efforts of the hard-working, usually blameless actors.
The only show I ever booed was Sunset Boulevard, because I was appalled that such a shockingly bad musical was being showcased on Broadway and was amazed that it had not been universally savaged by the critics. In my opinion, it's more acceptable to boo a bad show if it's the work of established artists rather than neophytes. Glory Days was dreadful, but it would have seemed pointlessly cruel to direct catcalls at a musical that represented the efforts of very young writers and should never have been brought to Broadway in the first place. (The show closed on opening night.) At the other end of the spectrum, if anyone seated near me at Twyla Tharp's The Times They Are A-Changin' had chosen to boo -- or, for that matter, to throw ripe tomatoes at the stage -- I wouldn't have been shocked in the least.
What of the actors? If someone is terrible in a role, should we blame the performer or the person(s) responsible for his/her casting? I didn't get to see Jerry Springer during his recent turn as Billy Flynn in Chicago (if you blinked, you missed him), but a friend of mine who did said that Springer was painfully ill-equipped for the assignment in terms of both his singing and acting ability. So, should he himself be reviled for having had the temerity to set foot on stage in a role created by Jerry Orbach? Or should producers Barry and Fran Weissler, whose penchant for stunt casting is well known, be the focus of the audience's aesthetic rage? And if that's the case, how do you boo producers?
Then there are directors, specifically those who have committed felony crimes against theater classics from Macbeth to The Glass Menagerie to Guys and Dolls. I doubt that anyone actually booed Des McAnuff's G&D, but word of mouth was so poisonous that this revival of a normally fool-proof show ran only four months. If theatergoers feel that Arthur Laurents and Robert Longbottom have respectively wrecked West Side Story and Bye Bye Birdie, two beloved musicals that have played like gangbusters in countless school and community theater productions over the decades, what's the best way to express their feelings?
Finally, in my book, the shows that unquestionably deserve boos are those which are morally reprehensible. They don't come along very often, thank heaven, but I can think of two recent examples: Sarah Kane's Blast, seen at Soho Rep last year, and Daniel Goldfarb's The Retributionists, which somehow made it to the stage of Playwrights Horizons last month. The former sucker-punched audiences with its ultra-graphic depictions of male-on-male anal rape, a baby's corpse being cannibalized, and other disgusting behavior, while the latter trivialized the Holocaust by turning a story of Jews seeking revenge on Germans during the years immediately following WW-II into a turgid, boring soap opera about who was sleeping with whom. I refrained from booing when I saw these shows, but only because they were both in small theaters and I didn't want to cause a scene. So please allow me now to boo them retroactively. BOO! That feels better.
Luc Bondy
