*Enron* fizzled

Lucy Prebble's inventively (gaudily?) staged play about an American financial crisis (no, not last year's -- the one from a decade ago) is closing quickly on Broadway, despite being a success in London.

('Muricans don't much like having snooty Brits poke fun at our red, white and blue shortcomings, evidently, along with our other moral failings.)

Some take-aways from Michael Billington's analysis:
1. Musicals can be expressionistic, but plays should be realistic. This is not only false, but it endangers theater's future. Serious, or serio-comic non-musical plays that use dream-like, imagination-prodding theatrical effects are the future. Let movies do spectacle and novels grab individual readers — but you-are-there, psychological immediacy ... that's what theater can deliver like nothing else.

2. And two points from near the end of Billington's article:
"If Enron's melancholy saga proves anything, it is Broadway's irrelevance to serious theatre. ... at heart, Broadway is a big, gaudy commercial shop-window, where fortunes are won and lost."
What's commercial isn't cutting-edge. What isn't cutting-edge will be lost — in a generation, possibly two — to oblivion.

3. Chicago is generating more exciting theater than N.Y. (In general, a tip of the cap to America's regional theaters.)

[ photo: Lucy Prebble, from bargaintheatre.com ]

Spielberg musical; Enron play

Steven Spielberg is partnering with the team that created *Hairspray* and helped him create *Catch Me If You Can* (both the movie and the new musical, now playing in Seattle) for a Showtime TV series about the making of an actual new musical, followed by the actual production of that musical on Broadway, Variety reports.


*The Guardian* took five non-theatrical financiers to a performance of Lucy Prebble's *Enron,* which recounts the 2001-02 scandal, to get their reactions to this financial piece of theater. It's all the rage over there, and it's intriguing how video, puppets, ventriloquists, etc., are apparently used to depict the likes of Jeff Skiling and Ken Lay.
[ photo: Lucy Prebble's *Enron* at Chichester Festival Theatre, July 2008 ]