All dolled-up and hysterical, an audience of producers and producers’ friends greeted Thursday’s official opening night performance of the new Broadway musical “A Tale of Two Cities” like the Second Coming. While the crowd was cheering and screaming, however, terrible reviews were being printed in all of the newspapers that were distributed this morning.
The critics had seen one of the final previews of the multi-million dollar musical adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic so they were not there to be swayed by the tumult last night.
“A Tale of Two Cities” turned out to be one of those very rare Broadway shows with across the board pans.
From The New York Times on down, “Tale” was taken apart and roasted in this morning’s papers as an inferior copy of “Les Miz” (indeed, some of the critics started their screeds by noting that they didn’t even like “Les Miz”).
The inept WOR radio critic David Richardson — who peppers his reviews with factual errors and rarely has a discouraging word for any Broadway show — was shockingly negative this morning.
The show is blandly generic and what you might call a public domain musical — it’s in the tradition of all of those bombastic Frank Wildhorn shows like “Jekyll & Hyde” and “The Scarlet Pimpernel” and “Dracula” which took melodramatic (and copyright-free) classics and over-heated them for the stage.
Normally, I see a show before or after the official opening, so it was fascinating to watch all of the decked-out “friends” of the production displaying their support for the musical and anticipating the big party at Cipriani afterwards.
Even up in the farthest reaches of the balcony — where I was sitting — most of the men were in tuxes and the women were dressed to kill. (It was quite a treat to observe a summer-time Broadway audience that wasn’t wearing sweats and jeans and flip-flops!)
“A Tale of Two Cities” arrived from a sucessful staging at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Fla. last fall.
Most of the producers behind the transfer are neophytes who probably had no idea how brutal Broadway can be to ambitious outsiders.
In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t have an invitation to the party after the show, where word must have begun to circulate about the killing notices that were about to come in.
