Theater January 1995
Two theaters, fat & thin
On the mega-musicals & one- & two-actor shows that now dominate Broadway.
“It’s never too late to change,” says Mike Ockrent. “We all have it within ourselves to alter the way we approach our fellow man.” Ockrent himself has certainly changed. Until the mid-Eighties, he was a thoughtful stager of Peter Nichols, Willy Russell, and the other stalwarts of British subsidized theater. Then his revival of Me and My Girl at Leicester Haymarket transferred to the West End and New York and suddenly, to Jimmy Nederlander and the other Broadway hit men, he was Mister Showbiz. Today, he’s the most successful musical-comedy director around, mainly because he’s the only musical-comedy director around, excepting George Abbott, who’s almost 108 and not as active as he once was. Me and My Girl is a harmless piece of Thirties jollity about a Cockney sparrer who inherits an earldom. Every now and then, I get Ockrent to explain to me how he approached the show as a Brechtian indictment of...
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