Dave Malloy speaks on comet controversy- Page 4

[haterobics]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 5:43pm

There were no winners.

[haterobics]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 5:55pm

Hmm, does it take two bumps to get BWW to create a new page now?!

[schubox]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 5:57pm

haterobics said: "Hmm, does it take two bumps to get BWW to create a new page now?!"

Yeah I noticed it a few weeks ago. Pretty annoying 

[VintageSnarker]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 6:09pm

OK, yeah, but more importantly...

HOW DO I BUY TICKETS TO THIS?

https://www.nytw.org/show/ghost-quartet/

[bear88]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 6:09pm

haterobics said: "There were no winners."

Oh, I know. But as someone who saw the show in the spring and will be getting the cast recording as a birthday present later this month, I still feel like I won.

Dave Malloy, Rachel Chavkin, the cast... they're winners. The producers lost money and made a bunch of mistakes, but they financed a wonderful musical. There are a lot worse things rich people can do with their cash.

 

[haterobics]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 6:14pm

VintageSnarker said: "OK, yeah, but more importantly...

HOW DO I BUY TICKETS TO THIS?

https://www.nytw.org/show/ghost-quartet/"

Wait until they go on sale and then purchase one?

 

[poisonivy2]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 6:18pm

There are a lot of winners. 

Dave Malloy - composed a beautiful, memorable score for a musical, led it through to the end, through good and bad, got to finish the show.

Josh Groban - spent months preparing and immersing himself in the "family" and acted with total professionalism and not an ounce of divo stardom

Rachel Chavkin - directed a show with so many moving parts in different venues and made it work each time

Denee Benton, Lucas Steele, Brittain Ashford, Amber Gray, Grace McLean, Nicholas Benton, Scott Stangland, etc. etc. - names that weren't well known before the Great Comet but certainly are now!

The fans of Great Comet - if you saw the Instagram stories you saw Cometeers who truly went above and beyond making so many keepsakes and gifts for the cast, and giving them so much love during the final weeks

Leo Tolstoy - I know I started reading War and Peace because of this musical

[Liza's Headband]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 6:20pm

poisonivy2 said: "The show had a number of POC as swings and musicians. It wasn't just the singing/dancing ensemble.

I think those going over the finances of the show's viability aren't taking into account the theater fan's perspective, which was that it was one of the most beautiful shows I've ever experienced. I don't really care that it didn't recoup. Neither did Follies nor a number of classic musicals."

 

You may not care, but the people who actually put up their own $$ care. Without them and the remote possibility of financial viability, you wouldn't have the opportunity to NOT care. This is commercial, for-profit theatre we're talking about... you have to care to some extent, friend. 

[PaulWom]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 6:24pm

Liza's Headband, you're avoiding what the poster was actually saying. I think the point is, there's a reason we don't have a thread about how sad it is that the investors of Groundhog's Day lost their investment (they actually lost more than Comet). It's because a ton of shows fail to recoup every year. That's not what this controversy was about

Updated On: 9/8/17 at 06:24 PM

[binau]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 6:31pm

Hearing Oak misrepresent situation on Twitter and also like Diva quit the show when offered again makes me a little frustrated. 

Hearing that when ensemble members were replaced they went for the most talented and this wasn't good enough for some makes me frustrated. 

The goal of racially diverse casting (and I say racially diverse intentionally because people drop the racial qualifier as if diversity is just about race) should be to remove discrimination from casting decisions so that roles are cast on talent. It's not about trying to turn Broadway into Hamilton. 

[trpguyy]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 6:48pm

SDV said: Of course they're more diverse that the rest of Bway (with the exception of Hamilton). Kind of a low bar there. They were still well over 50% white."

This is one of the dumbest things I've read regarding the whole situation, and that says a LOT. Nearly 77% of the US population is white.

Updated On: 9/8/17 at 06:48 PM

[HogansHero]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 6:58pm

I am mildly amused to see my name invoked a few times in this thread, and to note how much those invocations misapprehend anything I have said. First of all, the article does not have very much new stuff except perhaps a bit of nuance on the fault line between Oak and the creative team. I'm not sure what "spin" I would put on it because it does not need spinning. Dave is the real deal, always has been and wears his heart on his sleeve. Secondly, I have never been happy when a show closed, because I don't celebrate failure. ever. I posted a bunch of FACTS in this thread, and it interfered with some folks' narrative and other folks' delusion. So I got some push back. Not surprised. I loved this show.  That doesn't mean I'm going to fantasyland with anyone. 

[mar6411]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 7:44pm

haterobics said: "I've heard it is already considered one of the most controversial, embarrassing flops in all of Broadway history!"

^FTW.  One of my most favorite posts ever.

[bear88]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 10:08pm

I have tried to stay out of the Onaodowan stuff because I wasn't there, and a lot of it has felt like backstage gossip that no one would care about under ordinary circumstances. Even now, I can't say anything definitively, and I am well aware that Onaodowan was set up to fail in one respect, in that it was silly for Howard Kagan to think he could come close to matching Josh Groban's box office drawing power.

But something about reading Dave Malloy's comments about Onaodowan's lack of preparation,  and his attempt to shift blame to the show, and his apparent refusal to talk to Malloy (after Malloy reached out as everything fell apart), just hit me wrong.

Malloy comes across, mostly, as perplexed and hurt when discussing the end of the show. I don't know Malloy (or any of these people), but he has always struck me as honest to a fault, even when that honesty probably wasn't in the interest of his show, or now that it can provoke hostile reactions from prominent actors of color and their fans - again.

So I believe him. By his own admission, Malloy wasn't around when Onaodowan was fired. So maybe Kagan and everyone else treated him horribly. But that seems less likely.

What seems more likely is that Onaodowan, angry about being fired after two weeks following a difficult experience in which he didn't prepare for his job, decided Great Comet could just burn down. Yeah, sure, he told the New York Times that he knew the producers wanted Mandy Patinkin because he's a Broadway legend and not because he was white. He could have played along, as Brittain Ashford did, but why not go down as a victim of racism?

Part of me understands the anger from black performers and others concerned with how they are treated. But it's one thing to write one angry tweet when the surprise news first came out. It's another thing to wage war on a show, the most diverse new musical on Broadway, over one person. Rafael Casal and Cynthia Erivo decided to take down the show, and because it was so vulnerable, they succeeded with ease. The one time Malloy sounds angry is when discussing their goals. They either wanted to kill the show prematurely, or they irresponsibly didn't understand that they could. It's hard to escape that conclusion, and the after-the-fact excuses that the musical would have died fairly soon anyway doesn't excuse their behavior.

What's especially galling is that the attacks are coming from artists. Onaodowan is a young actor with a decent resume and will always be part of the original cast of Hamilton. Casal is excitedly finishing up a film he co-wrote and is starring in with his close friend Daveed Diggs. Erivo is pursuing a film career. These are talented people, whose future work I would ordinarily be very interested to see.

But given their disrespect for the work of Dave Malloy, Rachel Chavkin, Denee Benton, and the rest of the cast of Great Comet, I guess I am a lot less interested. I don't expect entertainers to always be nice people, much less perfect ones. But I expect them to respect the work of other artists.

Updated On: 9/8/17 at 10:08 PM

[Call_me_jorge]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 10:27pm

Buhbuhbilly where are you?

[ChildofEarth]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 10:35pm

Bear88 - bravo. That summed up how I feel at this point.

[sm33]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 10:44pm

Very succinctly put, Bear88, that is exactly how I feel about it as well. 

[HogansHero]

Posted: 9/8/17 at 11:21pm

another great post bear88. Keep this up and we'll put you in charge of the department. 

[uncageg]

Posted: 9/9/17 at 12:48am

I am with Bear and Dave on this.

I didn't follow this all from the beginning and had to do some backtracking. Quite honestly I think I am still a little confused over how it actually started.

I never saw this as a race thing and my thought is that those who started all of this were jumping on a bandwagon too late and not in a proper way.  This was obviously a thing to save the show. I think this would have happened to any actor of any color who was not a big name/draw. He happened to be black and people didn't think before they reacted. I have to say I have lost some respect for Erivo. Just my random toughts.

Updated On: 9/9/17 at 12:48 AM

[VintageSnarker]

Posted: 9/9/17 at 1:34am

haterobics said: "VintageSnarker said: "OK, yeah, but more importantly...

HOW DO I BUY TICKETS TO THIS?

https://www.nytw.org/show/ghost-quartet/"

Wait until they go on sale and then purchase one?

"

You've been a great help. It's a month away. When will the tickets go on sale? Are they part of the regular season? Right now it's not listed as one of the shows included in a membership. 

[haterobics]

Posted: 9/9/17 at 1:39am

VintageSnarker said: "When will the tickets go on sale? Are they part of the regular season? Right now it's not listed as one of the shows included in a membership."

It was just sort of tossed together last minute, so aside from the dates, nothing else is known yet.

[gypsy101]

Posted: 9/9/17 at 4:09am

trpguyy said: "I'm sure it was just a typo, but Nicholas *Belton. "Benton" is someone else. I suspect he would have left for greener pastures, everyone involved knew that Comet wasn't going to run for much longer.

Also, again, nice of Dave to confirm things I wrote here many many weeksago."

Denée Benton was the actress that played Natasha.

[Dave28282]

Posted: 9/9/17 at 5:06am

bear88 said: "He could have played along, as Brittain Ashford did, but why not go down as a victim of racism?"

Exactly, it's not only a great way to draw attention from the fact that he was being unprofessional/being unprepared, being a victim looks better on your resume than being the bad guy. And it's of course the easiest way to have something you can blame the producers for. Or to blame anything in life for really.


bear88 said: "....when discussing their goals. They either wanted to kill the show prematurely, or they irresponsibly didn't understand that they could."

Oak (and Cynthia and Casal) drew attention to race while it wasn't about that, or at least didn't speak up to it when it conveniently happened. So it was false injustice. That is dangerous to society, equality and in this case, to a show. If they are unaware of that it is even worse. It shows how clueless they are.

Like I have said before, this racism can come from an upbringing that is too race focused. If they have never learnt how to deal with any situation without bringing in race (starting with fights with kids in primary school), it's very hard to make them understand things like this in later life.

 

Updated On: 9/9/17 at 05:06 AM

[trpguyy]

Posted: 9/9/17 at 6:44am

gypsy101 said: "trpguyy said: "I'm sure it was just a typo, but Nicholas *Belton. "Benton" is someone else. I suspect he would have left for greener pastures, everyone involved knew that Comet wasn't going to run for much longer.

Also, again, nice of Dave to confirm things I wrote here many many weeksago."

Denée Benton was the actress that played Natasha."

Yes, hence my post.