“Reward the lord for ‘Tammy Faye,’” Matt Wolf cheered in The New York Times when the Elton John musical opened in London in 2022. The display, Wolf added, “has a center as giant because the identify personality’s bouffant hairdo.”
Two years later, reviewing the Broadway switch, Elisabeth Vincentelli begged to fluctuate. “Disjointed, surprisingly bland,” she wrote, also in The Times. Looking to move “in the back of the masks of this sophisticated, outsize lady,” she argued, had made her “smaller than lifestyles.”
Critics, even those that are colleagues, disagree, now and again diametrically. That’s a part of the excitement of complaint — and of theatergoing. However pans of English transfers had been too pervasive of overdue to be random. The brand new musicals “Tammy Faye” and “Again to the Long run,” in addition to contemporary revivals of “Cabaret” and “Sundown Side road,” are simply a number of the presentations warmly reviewed in London to be greeted on Broadway by way of a chilly New York slap.
I’m regularly one of the most slappers. Take “Again to the Long run.” The Telegraph gave the London production 5 stars and referred to as it “a feelgood triumph.” I gave the Broadway version a difficult time: “Much less a full-scale new paintings than a semi-operable memento.”
Or take, please, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cinderella.” “It provides up not to such a lot a ball as a blast,” Chris Wiegand wrote in The Mother or father of the 2021 London premiere. My take when it crossed the Atlantic after converting its identify, daringly, to “Dangerous Cinderella”? “Unusually vulgar, sexed-up and dumbed-down.” And that used to be gentle. In “Time Out,” Adam Feldman described the new title as “a minor victory for fact in advertising and marketing.”
Greater than the adjective used to be added when the display moved to Broadway, however I doubt a couple of contemporary songs and a revised script have been elements within the virtually common essential brickbats. Nor does a distaste for hand-me-downs provide an explanation for the variation; the similar trend applies irrespective of the place a manufacturing starts. Closing month The Guardian called “The Lightning Thief,” an American musical that transferred to London, “adorable, boutique, unique”; when I saw it on Broadway in 2019, it had “all of the allure of a rigidity headache.”
So what does provide an explanation for the variation? Are American critics simply more ill-tempered than their English opposite numbers?
In all probability there’s a bit of that. West Finish productions was the gold usual for high-class dramas and tournament musicals. In some instances, they nonetheless are: “The Lehman Trilogy,” “The Hills of California,” “Six” and “& Juliet” have been all greeted on Broadway with reward that perceived to justify their transfers. However recalling a long time by which London imports flooded the marketplace — Broadway within the Nineteen Eighties used to be stated to be struggling a “British invasion” — critics now not hesitate, and now and again even appear keen, to refute the concept no matter comes from the land of Shakespeare will have to be worthy.
That’s very true when London presentations take on stateside topics. “Again to the Long run,” even though constructed by way of American citizens and in accordance with considered one of Hollywood’s maximum a hit franchises, had a distinctly English accessory on Broadway, as though put via a couple of mistranslation bots. “Tammy Faye,” concerning the closely made-up Minnesota-born televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, overlooked the Midwestern boat solely, with its cool, flat satire of an overheated character.
Each presentations have been remodeled for New York, it appears now not for the simpler — and with out the good thing about intervening productions to stress-test the adjustments of content material.
Adjustments of scale topic too. Shifting “Tammy Faye,” which had performed the 325-seat Almeida Theater in London, to the 1,650-seat Palace in New York, used to be “madness,” Wolf informed me. “Inside the intimacy of the Almeida, it in point of fact landed, however I feel everybody knew it used to be nevertheless a piece in growth and wanted nurturing. Why, then, catapult it to an enormous Broadway area all weapons blazing?”
In all probability now not all weapons. Andrew Rannells, who performed Tammy Faye’s husband Jim Bakker within the London manufacturing, incomes an Olivier award nomination, dropped out before Broadway, bringing up contract disputes. (Christian Borle took over, taking a look a bit sheepish.) “Dangerous Cinderella” used to be utterly recast, most commonly unconvincingly. But uploading the West Finish stars too can import issues. “Again to the Long run” retained Roger Bart as Document Brown and Hugh Coles as George McFly, each giving massively overstated performances. The remainder of the corporate, all new, performed it higher by way of taking part in it straighter.
Straighter for Broadway, anyway. American critics, if now not at all times audiences, have normally most well-liked naturalistic interpretations. Whether or not in performs or in musicals, we — OK, I — need to see how “better than lifestyles” characters were given that means, in line with details of circumstance and soul. I’m within the drama of recognizably human conduct, now not in goofy, pratfalling ciphers or unmediated, born-that-way monsters.
London theater, with its longer and relatively other historical past, seems to have a better tolerance for stylistic extremes. The West Finish “Cinderella,” Wolf stated, used to be “obviously a part of the thriving panto custom right here, and observed as a amusing and frivolous addition to it.”
Likewise, expressionistic interpretations of naturalistically conceived characters are extremely praised in London. Because the pale silent-movie big name Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd’s filmic staging of “Sunset Boulevard,” Nicole Scherzinger spent as a rule taking a look comatose in a slip. In Rebecca Frecknall’s environmental “Cabaret,” Jessie Buckley did a lot the similar. But each gained Oliviers, and so did the intentionally alienating productions, designed within the Brechtian way to stay you at an emotional distance.
Purpose accomplished. When “Sundown Side road” and “Cabaret” got here to Broadway, with Gayle Rankin changing Buckley, critics have been extremely divided. I used to be now not. I spent much less time at each and every display feeling related emotions than questioning which genius underwear corporate had snagged the lingerie concession.
Wolf, a New Yorker who has lived his whole skilled lifestyles in London, favored each. Once more, he sees the variation in essential response as an artifact of nationwide personality, expressed in most well-liked theatrical kinds. “Brechtian distance is by no means a subject for U.Okay. observers, who’re much more likely to chafe at overt emotionalism,” he informed me. Actually, he added, “I’ve heard many a U.S. hit play derided in London for sentimentality and so-called particular pleading.”
Level taken. The Times of New York will have given “Slave Play” raves however The Times of London discovered it indulgent. Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning works by way of Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, Terrence McNally and Donald Margulies have all been pushed aside in a foreign country.
And but I’ve to invite myself how a lot of “nationwide personality” is in point of fact simply non-public style. There are many “trustworthy” English presentations, and quite a lot of expressionistic American ones. For that topic, maximum critics are aesthetic chameleons. Their reactions to presentations recommend no trend in any respect, or a trend too sophisticated to be discerned with the bare eye. Style is a fingerprint.
Additionally it is a scar. (In faculty, the place I directed performs and Wolf reviewed them, he as soon as gave me a blended understand.) There’s no fact to complaint past loving what we like and licking our wounds. That London presentations are regularly panned in New York is, past that, inexplicable. Bring to mind it as a supranational marital spat: Everybody’s proper and no person is aware of why.
