One of the other pieces of news from Borders was that an additional # of stores would be closing besides the 16ish that had been announced and which have been having their clearance sales in recent weeks. Borders spokesman told Publishers Lunch those numbers would not be commented on, publisher sources say another 10-17.
If you are a retailer, and you are in a cash bind, the very first and most important person you need to pay is your landlord. Your landlord is the one person in the world who can change your locks. And if the landlord changes the locks, you lose access to all of the assets including inventory and fixtures that might have liquidation or sales value for you. The second person, the electric company, because you need the lights on and the cash registers working. Publishers, employees, all of those people need to get paid after you pay the landlord.
If I'm a publisher or possible lendor, a question I might ask is "so how many stores with a lease up from July 2010 to July 2011, did you renew?" It is possible just by random dumb luck chance that indeed there were 25 leases up this year, and none worth renewing. Westwood CA was too big. Chestnut Hill MA in a rare mall where I think the landlord could get a new tenant for considerably more rent. Portland OR downtown seemed even many years ago like a flagship store without quite flagship sales, has to be worse than that now. Especially considering the size and type of box Borders was building 15 years ago for books, music and movies, it is possible good real estate choices were hard to find in this renewal crop.
Getting a good straight answer to that question is crucial, though, because it helps to suggest if there's some chance that Borders can economically renew a superstore lease next year or the year after that, or if even Borders thinks its hard to keep paying the landlord.
I humbly suggest that at none of these closed stores did Borders get any ROI on their rounds of remodels.
Friday, December 31, 2010
The Cold Equations
I'm going to follow up yesterday's Borders post mortem with some numbers.
For the year ending Jan. 30 2010, Borders had 508 superstores at year-end, with average sales of 4.5M at each of those superstores. Jan 2008, same # of stores, average sales more like $5.6M. B&N thru early May 2010, average store $6M in sales, more like $6.5 three years earlier. So, Borders had a 20% loss in average per store sales over two years, and dropping from being 15% off your average competitor's average store to being 25% off the pace of the competition. We go back far enough, we will find a day when sales Borders vs B&N were near parity for the average superstore.
To achieve this, Borders has invested considerable sums in remodels. I have been in some that have gone through each of these three rounds:.
1. 2000/2001, the ones where the diagonal lines were taken out and Kohls-like central "racetrack" aisles added to make the stores more shoppable. Not a big expense, mostly moving stuff around.
2. 2005. It was August 13, 2004 when Borders announced it would start to rebrand its coffee shops in 2005 to sell Seattle's Best. A lot of these were the major remodels where they pretty much took out everything in the center of the store, did away with the old-style shelving, often took down the partitions between the books and the music/movie sections. These had to cost some real money, can we say $500K/store? And these remodels ended up being done to almost all of the pre-existing store base, easily 200+ stores.
3. 2009 was a busy and expensive time as Borders spent lots of money to get rid of the music department and try and make stores look attractive with 20% of the square footage uprooted and gone.
If you spend $500K remodeling your typical store that does $6.5M in business, how long a time frame are you going to have to pay off that spend? Considering that music sales have been on the decline for the past decade and book sales kind of flat, a good result for those remodels might have been flat sales. a 5% sales increase amazing. Where's the sense in spending so much money on that? And to me, I can only say that each new round of remodels made the stores less interesting. We can say it's just me, but when you look at those sales results, I'm not sure we should.
Some of the remodel money needed to be spent. Music and movies had to be reduced in size. The Seattle's Best remodels I think did pay off reasonably. B&N was selling Starbucks and Cheesecake Factory, Borders was selling "Borders Cafe Espresso."
And how much does inventory cost?
If you took the crappiest Borders like Commack NY with very bad selection and just put in 10,000 more mass markets to window dress, $7.99x.55x10K is $44K in extra inventory sitting in the store. Forget about all that talk about their slow supply chain and slow reorder cycles, just go back in time and spend an extra $10M in inventory investment across the chain, that's so little vs. what they spent on remodels make it $20M even. Borders would be way, way healthier today. And because that is so much less money than was actually spent on remodels, maybe could have made the supply chain more efficient, invested in web site or other digital initiatives, done other things more productive than spending money so you could have the hardcovers and the mass markets on the same shelves in the sf and mystery sections.
Well, that's not what happened.
I hope for a turnaround. Maybe there's some ray of hope hiding in the holiday sales numbers to justify major publishers extending payment terms, maybe Jeff Bezos is doing that "Steve Jobs thing" where "nobody reads anymore" means "iBooks coming soon," and will want 300 good Borders stores cheap.
I hope. I have felt that the people who've been at the Borders helm since George L. Jones was belatedly fired in late 2008 have been doing some good things within the cash-poor constraints they've had, and I will say again that on balance both this holiday season and last I've preferred the Borders offerings of JABberwocky fare to those at B&N. But the customers haven't been coming back yet, may not have a chance to. It's hard when you look at how hard Borders has fallen in recent years to see where the silver lining will be found.
To compare with another company I like... Whole Foods made mistakes. Built some stores that were too big, too fancy, had a bad value image going into the economic meltdown. But they reacted quickly and sanely. That sit-down cafe space in the Fairfax store was too much, close it off. Talk value, value, value as much as you can. And remodel in sane ways. Just in DC, they poured money into huge remodel efforts. Upper Georgetown, Arlington, Tenleytown, P Street. Whole Foods has poured money into these stores, some of them not even all that old. The difference is that those remodels have always made Joshua Bilmes happier to walk in, given him more ways to spend money in good ways for Whole Foods. I don't know what the payoff period is, these remodels have to cost a fortune. But I can see all the time how it's money well spent. But other than bribing me with Borders Reward coupons, Borders hasn't done much for all of its money and decisions to make the stores clearly and inarguably better places to spend my money. B&N hasn't either, for that matter. Wake me up when they finally realize how icky a fixture the "octagon" is. But B&N hasn't spent money at the store level doing frivolous things. Borders has. For years. In quantity.
For the year ending Jan. 30 2010, Borders had 508 superstores at year-end, with average sales of 4.5M at each of those superstores. Jan 2008, same # of stores, average sales more like $5.6M. B&N thru early May 2010, average store $6M in sales, more like $6.5 three years earlier. So, Borders had a 20% loss in average per store sales over two years, and dropping from being 15% off your average competitor's average store to being 25% off the pace of the competition. We go back far enough, we will find a day when sales Borders vs B&N were near parity for the average superstore.
To achieve this, Borders has invested considerable sums in remodels. I have been in some that have gone through each of these three rounds:.
1. 2000/2001, the ones where the diagonal lines were taken out and Kohls-like central "racetrack" aisles added to make the stores more shoppable. Not a big expense, mostly moving stuff around.
2. 2005. It was August 13, 2004 when Borders announced it would start to rebrand its coffee shops in 2005 to sell Seattle's Best. A lot of these were the major remodels where they pretty much took out everything in the center of the store, did away with the old-style shelving, often took down the partitions between the books and the music/movie sections. These had to cost some real money, can we say $500K/store? And these remodels ended up being done to almost all of the pre-existing store base, easily 200+ stores.
3. 2009 was a busy and expensive time as Borders spent lots of money to get rid of the music department and try and make stores look attractive with 20% of the square footage uprooted and gone.
If you spend $500K remodeling your typical store that does $6.5M in business, how long a time frame are you going to have to pay off that spend? Considering that music sales have been on the decline for the past decade and book sales kind of flat, a good result for those remodels might have been flat sales. a 5% sales increase amazing. Where's the sense in spending so much money on that? And to me, I can only say that each new round of remodels made the stores less interesting. We can say it's just me, but when you look at those sales results, I'm not sure we should.
Some of the remodel money needed to be spent. Music and movies had to be reduced in size. The Seattle's Best remodels I think did pay off reasonably. B&N was selling Starbucks and Cheesecake Factory, Borders was selling "Borders Cafe Espresso."
And how much does inventory cost?
If you took the crappiest Borders like Commack NY with very bad selection and just put in 10,000 more mass markets to window dress, $7.99x.55x10K is $44K in extra inventory sitting in the store. Forget about all that talk about their slow supply chain and slow reorder cycles, just go back in time and spend an extra $10M in inventory investment across the chain, that's so little vs. what they spent on remodels make it $20M even. Borders would be way, way healthier today. And because that is so much less money than was actually spent on remodels, maybe could have made the supply chain more efficient, invested in web site or other digital initiatives, done other things more productive than spending money so you could have the hardcovers and the mass markets on the same shelves in the sf and mystery sections.
Well, that's not what happened.
I hope for a turnaround. Maybe there's some ray of hope hiding in the holiday sales numbers to justify major publishers extending payment terms, maybe Jeff Bezos is doing that "Steve Jobs thing" where "nobody reads anymore" means "iBooks coming soon," and will want 300 good Borders stores cheap.
I hope. I have felt that the people who've been at the Borders helm since George L. Jones was belatedly fired in late 2008 have been doing some good things within the cash-poor constraints they've had, and I will say again that on balance both this holiday season and last I've preferred the Borders offerings of JABberwocky fare to those at B&N. But the customers haven't been coming back yet, may not have a chance to. It's hard when you look at how hard Borders has fallen in recent years to see where the silver lining will be found.
To compare with another company I like... Whole Foods made mistakes. Built some stores that were too big, too fancy, had a bad value image going into the economic meltdown. But they reacted quickly and sanely. That sit-down cafe space in the Fairfax store was too much, close it off. Talk value, value, value as much as you can. And remodel in sane ways. Just in DC, they poured money into huge remodel efforts. Upper Georgetown, Arlington, Tenleytown, P Street. Whole Foods has poured money into these stores, some of them not even all that old. The difference is that those remodels have always made Joshua Bilmes happier to walk in, given him more ways to spend money in good ways for Whole Foods. I don't know what the payoff period is, these remodels have to cost a fortune. But I can see all the time how it's money well spent. But other than bribing me with Borders Reward coupons, Borders hasn't done much for all of its money and decisions to make the stores clearly and inarguably better places to spend my money. B&N hasn't either, for that matter. Wake me up when they finally realize how icky a fixture the "octagon" is. But B&N hasn't spent money at the store level doing frivolous things. Borders has. For years. In quantity.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Borders, Post-Mortem
At this point, it's hard to see that Borders isn't on the verge of a bankruptcy filing, the best case scenario would be a Chapter 11 that would reorganize into a much smaller company that might have a go if focusing on stores that actually make money, but even that, I can't be real optimistic because same store sales are dropping so fast that a store which makes money today might not in two years. Though we live in a country that does allow companies to spend lots of time going bankrupt and doing it on multiple occasions, witness the airline industry.
So what happened?
OK, mid 1980s, Borders is one of the best stores around and starting to spread out in Michigan a little and lend out its inventory system. It's a good system. It lets stock sell down, then reorders. One day you might have 0 copies of The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers on the shelf, the next day they'll get 3 in. So everytime you go to Borders, even if it's once a week, you might see a slightly different but always excellent selection. It encourages you to keep going back. And again, it's a really good system, and stores that use the system generally prosper.
Late 1980s, early 1990s. As Borders starts to slowly spread across the country, and in fact does so before Barnes & Noble starts to open superstores, each new opening is a major occasion. The stores have well tailored massive inventory, they are architecturally distinct, they have book people who have to pass a book test working in them, they are wonderful places to go to. Eventually K-Mart buys Borders, merges it into Waldenbooks, the mall stores generate cash to fund the superstore expansion, and in the early years of Borders as a publicly held company we are told that it is selling much better per square foot than the competition, i.e. B&N. And they have this great inventory system, that carefully tailors a large selection to each individual store on a constant ongoing basis. It isn't uncommon for a Borders to be voted the best bookstore in those local newspaper year's bests, and I would say much more common for that honor to go to a Borders than to a B&N.
Mid to late 1990s. B&N invests in a major improvement in their inventory systems. For new books, the store-specific Borders inventory system was pretty much unique through 1995, I first noticed in 1996 when The Kiss was published that B&N was starting to do the same. B&N also develops a quick replenishment system, so if a store is supposed to carry a book and sells it, another copy will be on hand in a week or ten days in most instances.
Late 1990s. Against a more competitive B&N, the creaks in the vaunted Borders inventory system become apparent.
Problem #1: that sell-down and reorder thing from 1985 doesn't work so well now. Borders will order Pocket backlist once every x weeks, and for some books that don't sell as well maybe reorder them once every y cycles. And once ordered, books take much longer to move from the publisher to the Borders warehouse to the Borders store than to move through the supply chain at B&N. If a Borders and a B&N are both supposed to carry Deathstalker, as an example of a typical must-have JABberwocky book in 1998, and both sell on the same day, the B&N will have a new copy ten days later, the Borders might be back in stock six weeks later.
Problem #2: especially in genre fiction, you need to invest in inventory because it's very hard to sell book #4 in a series when you can't find the first three books, or to sell #1 to somebody who notices #4 when it comes out and says "hey, let me try this series out." The Borders inventory system can't cope with this. By focusing on performance at each individual store, it would delete an earlier book in a series that maybe hadn't sold in a year, and then that store would have trouble as the series progressed because it would have all sorts of strange inventory gaps. That wasn't a problem when you had only 28 really fantastic locations, it gets to be a problem when you have 82 locations and some don't do well in sf/fantasy. B&N on the other hand would keep books on hand for core series at most all stores even if some particular stores weren't sellling them. I could go to the Evanston IL Borders, see all these books they should have but didn't, then go to the B&N across the way and see them. They were yellowed copies from sitting on the shelf and a printing behind because they hadn't reordered in a year, but they were there.
Which brings us to Problem #3, lack of brand consistency. At any large chain whether its Home Depot or Express or Costco you have bigger stores and smaller stores with varying selection. But at Borders, the computer would happily reorder lots of older titles forever and ever at the best stores that sold one or two copies a year at those very best stores while cutting even core titles by reasonably important authors at inferior stores. The wonderful store #89 in Columbia, MD was really like a completely different store than the quiet #179 in Commack, NY. One could have twice as many items as the other, 35 vs. 80, let's say, circa 2000. A B&N might be 45 vs. 65, not that there wasn't a gap but it wasn't near as big in percentage terms, and the B&N was more likely to have the core backlist titles like all the Deathstalker books by Simon Green or all the Blood books by Tanya Huff.
These problems were apparent for a long, long time.
But whatever problems the heads of Borders would solve, it wasn't these.
Maybe it was a real problem that all of that strange quirky store architecture with all kinds of weird diagonally places shelving lines was hard to navigate. And one CEO said this was so, and remodeled all the character out of all of the old stores and made all the lines nice and straight.
Some other CEO from supermarkets, he felt Borders needed category management like in supermarkets where the big supermarket chain would partner with a marketshare leader like Procter & Gamble to plan how the detergent aisle would look.
Or, now that Borders was a national chain, we need to function like a national chain selling our display space in the front of the store and getting our managers to put their endcaps up when they are supposed to instead of still acting like it's 1992 and you actually have local color.
Then we got more remodeling, replacing those character-filled shelves where the hardcovers and mass markets were shelved separate in the genre categories and huge amounts of excess mass markets could squeeze in right behind (sometimes books could get lost back there, I loved going through the entire on-shelf backstock and finding them) with unified hardcover and mass market shelving. This was a disaster. The remodels were very disruptive to the stores, and the new shelves were less efficient, so stores would run out of space and return books at their whim which would then not be replenished for several weeks which would exacerbate the whole out-of-stock thing.
One of the things you might notice is that the charm of Borders in its best days at its best stores was that it had carefully tailored inventory unique to each store, and each store felt like it was in and of its community instead of being just another Borders. Many of the changes made in the first decade of this century slowly took away bits and pieces of the best characteristics of the best Borders.
You may notice that none of the changes all these CEOs were doing sped up the supply chain. Even after Borders put in a reorder for a backlist book, it would still take two to four times as long for that book to make its way back to the store shelf. It could still be weeks after a book sold before the reorder was even placed. There were some efforts made by the sf/fantasy buyer in 2006 to rationalize the sf/f section so that A stores had a full A range selection thus doing away with some of the weird gaps that had developed over the years, but this didn't help much at the D or E store range to reduce the overall inconsistency of the brand.
Sometime when Borders tried to solve a problem, like getting a new inventory system for its mall stores in the mid 2000s, it managed to fail. Now, really, all the inventory management software that has to exist in 2005, and Borders manages to buy something that doesn't work? How, how, how, could they manage to do that?
And then somehow or other, everyone at Borders failed to notice that the mall store business was no longer generating cash and had become an albatross. George Jones was the CEO when the company first announced it had cash issues in the first half of 2008, which was just about the same time that the company unveiled his pet project of a new store concept. As I have blogged about, this is the one unforgivable thing, to either not notice the company is running out of cash because you're fiddling with your new concept or to still fiddle while you run out of cash. And what happened after was more unforgivable still. He cut back title counts. So all those books, the Hot Blood anthologies in their Kensington reissues a good example, that were on sale at the best Borders and not too many other places, were cut. Well, people noticed. The best Borders were no longer appreciably better than the best B&Ns, the worst Borders were still worse. They did try and remedy this some in Fall 2009.
The odd thing is that the new concept store George Jones fiddled with in 2008 was focused on digital initiatives. What if Borders had gone out to an all-out embrace of the Sony Reader then, and not fallen behind so miserably on e-readers? Christ, what if Borders had realized it needed a website, instead of being a hopeless third, then ceding to Amazon, then investing a fortune to try and regain all that lost ground.
I can forgive Borders some of its recent transgressions. The feeble Area E attempt at selling eReaders is justified when you are losing same store sales quickly, don't have cash, can't afford to have dedicated staff standing at the front of the store. I was upset, but I can forgive that. But I can't forgive idiots who think it's OK to go ten years taking eight weeks to replenish a book that your closest competitor can replenish in eight days. That's dumb-ass, and it was allowed to perpetuate under many CEOs for many years.
And I did write letters to Borders CEOs over the years to discuss some of these things.
Let me be clear, I want Borders to survive. As I've explained, we need more than one big chain. This week's case study: Brandon Sanderson's THE WAY OF KINGS was the #7 fantasy hardcover on Nielsen Bookscan last week, a major impressive showing four months after publication. As of a few days before Christmas, B&N put this title on to "No Replenishment" and has sent out the call to all their locations to return all of their copies. Now, do I want the fate of every one of my clients tied in brick-and-mortar to what B&N is doing? God, no, please, anything but. Poor Jig, in a B&N world, Jig is dead. Hard to even know if Jig's creator would have had a chance if Jig had been relying on only one major chain.
But if you're wondering why it seems very likely that Borders will be seeking court protection in the weeks or months to come, I think this post is as good an explanation as you will find, anyplace.
It's hard to even know whether to encourage people to shop at Borders when they need the business but maybe will never be able to pay the publisher or reorder a copy if they can't get credit arranged, or to just throw in the towel. I've been shopping at Borders for almost 30 years, 225 of their superstores, and it's a damn shame.
So what happened?
OK, mid 1980s, Borders is one of the best stores around and starting to spread out in Michigan a little and lend out its inventory system. It's a good system. It lets stock sell down, then reorders. One day you might have 0 copies of The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers on the shelf, the next day they'll get 3 in. So everytime you go to Borders, even if it's once a week, you might see a slightly different but always excellent selection. It encourages you to keep going back. And again, it's a really good system, and stores that use the system generally prosper.
Late 1980s, early 1990s. As Borders starts to slowly spread across the country, and in fact does so before Barnes & Noble starts to open superstores, each new opening is a major occasion. The stores have well tailored massive inventory, they are architecturally distinct, they have book people who have to pass a book test working in them, they are wonderful places to go to. Eventually K-Mart buys Borders, merges it into Waldenbooks, the mall stores generate cash to fund the superstore expansion, and in the early years of Borders as a publicly held company we are told that it is selling much better per square foot than the competition, i.e. B&N. And they have this great inventory system, that carefully tailors a large selection to each individual store on a constant ongoing basis. It isn't uncommon for a Borders to be voted the best bookstore in those local newspaper year's bests, and I would say much more common for that honor to go to a Borders than to a B&N.
Mid to late 1990s. B&N invests in a major improvement in their inventory systems. For new books, the store-specific Borders inventory system was pretty much unique through 1995, I first noticed in 1996 when The Kiss was published that B&N was starting to do the same. B&N also develops a quick replenishment system, so if a store is supposed to carry a book and sells it, another copy will be on hand in a week or ten days in most instances.
Late 1990s. Against a more competitive B&N, the creaks in the vaunted Borders inventory system become apparent.
Problem #1: that sell-down and reorder thing from 1985 doesn't work so well now. Borders will order Pocket backlist once every x weeks, and for some books that don't sell as well maybe reorder them once every y cycles. And once ordered, books take much longer to move from the publisher to the Borders warehouse to the Borders store than to move through the supply chain at B&N. If a Borders and a B&N are both supposed to carry Deathstalker, as an example of a typical must-have JABberwocky book in 1998, and both sell on the same day, the B&N will have a new copy ten days later, the Borders might be back in stock six weeks later.
Problem #2: especially in genre fiction, you need to invest in inventory because it's very hard to sell book #4 in a series when you can't find the first three books, or to sell #1 to somebody who notices #4 when it comes out and says "hey, let me try this series out." The Borders inventory system can't cope with this. By focusing on performance at each individual store, it would delete an earlier book in a series that maybe hadn't sold in a year, and then that store would have trouble as the series progressed because it would have all sorts of strange inventory gaps. That wasn't a problem when you had only 28 really fantastic locations, it gets to be a problem when you have 82 locations and some don't do well in sf/fantasy. B&N on the other hand would keep books on hand for core series at most all stores even if some particular stores weren't sellling them. I could go to the Evanston IL Borders, see all these books they should have but didn't, then go to the B&N across the way and see them. They were yellowed copies from sitting on the shelf and a printing behind because they hadn't reordered in a year, but they were there.
Which brings us to Problem #3, lack of brand consistency. At any large chain whether its Home Depot or Express or Costco you have bigger stores and smaller stores with varying selection. But at Borders, the computer would happily reorder lots of older titles forever and ever at the best stores that sold one or two copies a year at those very best stores while cutting even core titles by reasonably important authors at inferior stores. The wonderful store #89 in Columbia, MD was really like a completely different store than the quiet #179 in Commack, NY. One could have twice as many items as the other, 35 vs. 80, let's say, circa 2000. A B&N might be 45 vs. 65, not that there wasn't a gap but it wasn't near as big in percentage terms, and the B&N was more likely to have the core backlist titles like all the Deathstalker books by Simon Green or all the Blood books by Tanya Huff.
These problems were apparent for a long, long time.
But whatever problems the heads of Borders would solve, it wasn't these.
Maybe it was a real problem that all of that strange quirky store architecture with all kinds of weird diagonally places shelving lines was hard to navigate. And one CEO said this was so, and remodeled all the character out of all of the old stores and made all the lines nice and straight.
Some other CEO from supermarkets, he felt Borders needed category management like in supermarkets where the big supermarket chain would partner with a marketshare leader like Procter & Gamble to plan how the detergent aisle would look.
Or, now that Borders was a national chain, we need to function like a national chain selling our display space in the front of the store and getting our managers to put their endcaps up when they are supposed to instead of still acting like it's 1992 and you actually have local color.
Then we got more remodeling, replacing those character-filled shelves where the hardcovers and mass markets were shelved separate in the genre categories and huge amounts of excess mass markets could squeeze in right behind (sometimes books could get lost back there, I loved going through the entire on-shelf backstock and finding them) with unified hardcover and mass market shelving. This was a disaster. The remodels were very disruptive to the stores, and the new shelves were less efficient, so stores would run out of space and return books at their whim which would then not be replenished for several weeks which would exacerbate the whole out-of-stock thing.
One of the things you might notice is that the charm of Borders in its best days at its best stores was that it had carefully tailored inventory unique to each store, and each store felt like it was in and of its community instead of being just another Borders. Many of the changes made in the first decade of this century slowly took away bits and pieces of the best characteristics of the best Borders.
You may notice that none of the changes all these CEOs were doing sped up the supply chain. Even after Borders put in a reorder for a backlist book, it would still take two to four times as long for that book to make its way back to the store shelf. It could still be weeks after a book sold before the reorder was even placed. There were some efforts made by the sf/fantasy buyer in 2006 to rationalize the sf/f section so that A stores had a full A range selection thus doing away with some of the weird gaps that had developed over the years, but this didn't help much at the D or E store range to reduce the overall inconsistency of the brand.
Sometime when Borders tried to solve a problem, like getting a new inventory system for its mall stores in the mid 2000s, it managed to fail. Now, really, all the inventory management software that has to exist in 2005, and Borders manages to buy something that doesn't work? How, how, how, could they manage to do that?
And then somehow or other, everyone at Borders failed to notice that the mall store business was no longer generating cash and had become an albatross. George Jones was the CEO when the company first announced it had cash issues in the first half of 2008, which was just about the same time that the company unveiled his pet project of a new store concept. As I have blogged about, this is the one unforgivable thing, to either not notice the company is running out of cash because you're fiddling with your new concept or to still fiddle while you run out of cash. And what happened after was more unforgivable still. He cut back title counts. So all those books, the Hot Blood anthologies in their Kensington reissues a good example, that were on sale at the best Borders and not too many other places, were cut. Well, people noticed. The best Borders were no longer appreciably better than the best B&Ns, the worst Borders were still worse. They did try and remedy this some in Fall 2009.
The odd thing is that the new concept store George Jones fiddled with in 2008 was focused on digital initiatives. What if Borders had gone out to an all-out embrace of the Sony Reader then, and not fallen behind so miserably on e-readers? Christ, what if Borders had realized it needed a website, instead of being a hopeless third, then ceding to Amazon, then investing a fortune to try and regain all that lost ground.
I can forgive Borders some of its recent transgressions. The feeble Area E attempt at selling eReaders is justified when you are losing same store sales quickly, don't have cash, can't afford to have dedicated staff standing at the front of the store. I was upset, but I can forgive that. But I can't forgive idiots who think it's OK to go ten years taking eight weeks to replenish a book that your closest competitor can replenish in eight days. That's dumb-ass, and it was allowed to perpetuate under many CEOs for many years.
And I did write letters to Borders CEOs over the years to discuss some of these things.
Let me be clear, I want Borders to survive. As I've explained, we need more than one big chain. This week's case study: Brandon Sanderson's THE WAY OF KINGS was the #7 fantasy hardcover on Nielsen Bookscan last week, a major impressive showing four months after publication. As of a few days before Christmas, B&N put this title on to "No Replenishment" and has sent out the call to all their locations to return all of their copies. Now, do I want the fate of every one of my clients tied in brick-and-mortar to what B&N is doing? God, no, please, anything but. Poor Jig, in a B&N world, Jig is dead. Hard to even know if Jig's creator would have had a chance if Jig had been relying on only one major chain.
But if you're wondering why it seems very likely that Borders will be seeking court protection in the weeks or months to come, I think this post is as good an explanation as you will find, anyplace.
It's hard to even know whether to encourage people to shop at Borders when they need the business but maybe will never be able to pay the publisher or reorder a copy if they can't get credit arranged, or to just throw in the towel. I've been shopping at Borders for almost 30 years, 225 of their superstores, and it's a damn shame.
Funny Book Round-up
I was surprised just how much I enjoyed DCU Legacies #8. This one dealt with some crazy things I'd tried to forget, like the aftermath of Superman's death at the hands of Doomsday when the Superman books split up to show 4 different of them doing their thing. Maybe I'd forgotten because we're starting to get into comics from 1994 and 1995 when my post-JABberwocky hiatus from reading comic books began due to time constraints. Even now, I read only a third or a quarter of the # of books I was reading in 1993, so the forthcoming issues of the series will cover a lot of stuff that I've skipped over these past many years. Like the whole Hal Jordan not being Green Lantern thing. After covering the death of Batman (he died then, too, wow!), we get into Parallax, introed from 1994, all new to me. I know Len Wein is doing good scripts, and Jerry Ordway and Dan Jurgens excellent art for this issue, but will this all be more or less interesting as we move forward?
Teen Titans: Cold Case wasn't a bad one-shot, I read all of it with mild interest even based on the script by Mark Sable. But no great shakes, either. Do we need this, did I need to spend my $4.99? Doesn't help that the art by Sean Murphy is inconsistent. Look at the top of page 6 (or don't if you would have to buy the book in order to do so), and there's Robin from profile, and apparently he has a very small mouth since you can't see the lips from the side view. A very very very small mouth. Then panels five and six of Robin getting dressed are actually quite good, looks like somebody took good notes during his anatomy classes in drawing school. But then move four pages past the center staples and there are panels of Robin in costume that don't look very good at all.
The lead story in Bart Simpson #57 is a delightful tale by indie comic person Carol Lay. Not unlike the Homemade Heroes contest by Peter V. Brett, Lisa decides to take her Malibu Stacy and make her Egyptian for a school project, only Mattel gets wind of it and comes out with their own Egyptian version. Come judging day, all the girls are going to school with projects that look just like Lisa's, and it's up to Bart to provide the moral. The story comes complete with a mini two-page Itchy and Scratchy in ancient Egypt. The back half not worth talking about so much, happily the Carol Lay story is alone worth the price of admission.
My final comic of the year, DC Comics Presents THUNDER Agents, which I was curious to see after reading (well, part-reading) the first issue of the revival. These comics are from 1966 and clearly influenced by James Bond and his ilk. The evil Warlord plots against the THUNDER agents. It's hard to critique these the way you might a modern comic, no on-story art credits to say who wrote or drew what. It's not a superhero team book like we know it today. The agents do act together, but they're as likely to be in a story where the focus is entirely or primarily on one agent instead of on the team. One actually dies, and even stayed dead. The idea being played up in new revival that the powers can kill the heroes is not a big thing here, one of the heroes has a belt that can't be used for too long without repercussions, which is a very different concept. Final analysis, these were old-fashioned fun. In some ways not as "good" as modern comic books are, but on the other hand, I was able to read every page of this and couldn't finish the first issue of the new revival.
Teen Titans: Cold Case wasn't a bad one-shot, I read all of it with mild interest even based on the script by Mark Sable. But no great shakes, either. Do we need this, did I need to spend my $4.99? Doesn't help that the art by Sean Murphy is inconsistent. Look at the top of page 6 (or don't if you would have to buy the book in order to do so), and there's Robin from profile, and apparently he has a very small mouth since you can't see the lips from the side view. A very very very small mouth. Then panels five and six of Robin getting dressed are actually quite good, looks like somebody took good notes during his anatomy classes in drawing school. But then move four pages past the center staples and there are panels of Robin in costume that don't look very good at all.
The lead story in Bart Simpson #57 is a delightful tale by indie comic person Carol Lay. Not unlike the Homemade Heroes contest by Peter V. Brett, Lisa decides to take her Malibu Stacy and make her Egyptian for a school project, only Mattel gets wind of it and comes out with their own Egyptian version. Come judging day, all the girls are going to school with projects that look just like Lisa's, and it's up to Bart to provide the moral. The story comes complete with a mini two-page Itchy and Scratchy in ancient Egypt. The back half not worth talking about so much, happily the Carol Lay story is alone worth the price of admission.
My final comic of the year, DC Comics Presents THUNDER Agents, which I was curious to see after reading (well, part-reading) the first issue of the revival. These comics are from 1966 and clearly influenced by James Bond and his ilk. The evil Warlord plots against the THUNDER agents. It's hard to critique these the way you might a modern comic, no on-story art credits to say who wrote or drew what. It's not a superhero team book like we know it today. The agents do act together, but they're as likely to be in a story where the focus is entirely or primarily on one agent instead of on the team. One actually dies, and even stayed dead. The idea being played up in new revival that the powers can kill the heroes is not a big thing here, one of the heroes has a belt that can't be used for too long without repercussions, which is a very different concept. Final analysis, these were old-fashioned fun. In some ways not as "good" as modern comic books are, but on the other hand, I was able to read every page of this and couldn't finish the first issue of the new revival.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Time Stands Still
Yesterday I spoke about my Next to Normal trip on Sunday. Now to talk about the 2nd part of my theatre day.
With the blizzard on hand, the offerings at the TKTS discount booth were more robust for the Sunday evening shows than might be expected, but I stuck to my game plan and got a seat for the play Time Stands Still, in part because I didn't think it fair to ask another musical to compete with my fresh memories of Next to Normal.
Time Stands Still is a drama with a strong pedigree. Playwright Donald Margulies has a half dozen Tony and Drama Desk nominations, I recollect him best for Collected Stories, an All About Eve protege drama set in the publishing world. Director Daniel Sullivan has been directing high gloss dramas for a long time, my first of his I'm Not Rappaport with Cleavon Little (Blazing Saddles, Tony for Pippin) and Taxi's Judd Hirsch some 25 years ago. It had opened in a limited engagement on Broadway earlier in the year, closed, they decided it was so good and Laura Linney so amazing in her performance that they should give people a second chance to see, and it will end up with around four months playing at the Cort when it closes at the end of January.
So of course this show reflects high quality gloss. The lead is played by Laura Linney, who is a three-time Academy Award nominee, a three-time Emmy winner, a Tony nominee. She plays a war photographer badly injured by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan who is coming home and starting her recovery, her face and limbs shrapnelled, her leg in a major cast, her arm in a sling. She's assisted by her partner and fellow photographer played by Brian D'Arcy James, who coincidentally enough moved into this from having previously played the role of the father in Next to Normal. He's been nominated multiple times for every award Broadway can provide. The photo editor at the magazine they work for most often is played by Eric Bogosian, a winner of multiple Obie Awards and a Drama Desk. And his new gf/fiancee is played by Christina Ricci, whom most of us will know and love from the Addams Family movies. High quality gloss, in great abundance.
And more gloss still, a typically gorgeous set by John Lee Beatty, thirteen times a Tony nominee and twice winning. He tends to be very realistic, and here he's created a dream of a Manhattan loft space.
Now, this glossy go-to director of great plays with a set from the go-to guy for these kinds of sets, all of this acting talent, it isn't being wasted on empty words. No, Daniel Margulies is an impeccable craftsman, and especially in the first act the script is note-perfect, just that mix of helplessness and determination as you'd expect from someone with her job who doesn't like her current circumstances. Christina Ricci's role is wonderfully written. She isn't aware that there was a movie named Brazil and is momentarily confused when the conversation turns to the topic of Brazil. So she gets out a notebook and jots down the movie, and you just know she's probably going to actually rent it or at least read up on it in the way of the person we all know who diligently studies the word of the day on the word a day calendar in the belief this constitutes self-improvement. It skirts perilously close to caricature but never becomes, and Ricci fills the part quite well. Even when the obligations of the script require people to leave the stage at convenient times, it's done without strain. The "who's going to go and get ice cream" ritual is enacted exactly like it would happen if it were happening in real life, as opposed to dramatic purposes. The bathroom visits are perfectly timed. The script is dealing with extreme circumstances but real ones, and doing so in a way that seems utterly real.
I wish the whole play could be as good as the first half hour, but eventually it has to become a play, with complications, where the script is still comfortably better than your run-of-the-mill but starts to show the creakiness. The first creak comes when we find out that Linney and James hadn't both been in Afghanistan when she was injured, he had things he needed to deal with. You know then that if you just wait a bit there's going to be some kind of emotional explosion on stage when we find out what those issues are, though this being a good play I will confess there was a second part of that revelation that I didn't see coming, but which once arrived does play out in the exact ways we would expect. When there's a wedding, you know quite correctly that we won't be seeing a later scene set on the couple's fifth anniversary.
Perfect script, no, but let's be clear that a Jez Butterworth from Mojo could learn some things by studying a consummate professional like Donald Margulies.
Laura Linney deserves her Tony nomination. She hits every line, gets every note, is always emotionally true to what she's saying both when the script is pitch perfect and when it's starting to creak under the mechanics of the play. It's the kind of performance that carries you over and beyond the rough spots in the script. Ricci as I said is perfect in her role. When the second act requires her character to start showing a little more edge, she manages to put that over as well, and you believe the character really has grown or has actually been hiding something beyond that slightly goofball veneer. Eric Bogosian, if you've seen the play or the film of Talk Radio, you'll know he can be a very very strong personality, and I was kind of worried going in that he might overpower. Not at all. In fact, during the quieter moments of the script it's almost like he's set to become the second coming of Tony Roberts, who's always been very successful in Woody Allen movies and in several plays as the guy who's kind of quietly there. But when it's time for Bogosian's character to explode a bit, suffice to say Bogosian explodes, quite convincingly. Brian D'Arcy James was to me the weak link of the foursome. When the writing was at its best, he was, but when the writing requires him to do functional things, he doesn't show the same ability as the other cast members to cover up.
Sadly, it's very difficult for plays like this to succeed without stars in today's Broadway. It's even hard with a good musical like Next to Normal or for a budding young talent like Kyle Dean Massey to have a kind of development system, where you'll write a role for the young star or look forward to a new Tom Kitt the way you once anticipated the new Sondheim. But every once in a while, they manage to come along.
With the blizzard on hand, the offerings at the TKTS discount booth were more robust for the Sunday evening shows than might be expected, but I stuck to my game plan and got a seat for the play Time Stands Still, in part because I didn't think it fair to ask another musical to compete with my fresh memories of Next to Normal.
Time Stands Still is a drama with a strong pedigree. Playwright Donald Margulies has a half dozen Tony and Drama Desk nominations, I recollect him best for Collected Stories, an All About Eve protege drama set in the publishing world. Director Daniel Sullivan has been directing high gloss dramas for a long time, my first of his I'm Not Rappaport with Cleavon Little (Blazing Saddles, Tony for Pippin) and Taxi's Judd Hirsch some 25 years ago. It had opened in a limited engagement on Broadway earlier in the year, closed, they decided it was so good and Laura Linney so amazing in her performance that they should give people a second chance to see, and it will end up with around four months playing at the Cort when it closes at the end of January.
So of course this show reflects high quality gloss. The lead is played by Laura Linney, who is a three-time Academy Award nominee, a three-time Emmy winner, a Tony nominee. She plays a war photographer badly injured by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan who is coming home and starting her recovery, her face and limbs shrapnelled, her leg in a major cast, her arm in a sling. She's assisted by her partner and fellow photographer played by Brian D'Arcy James, who coincidentally enough moved into this from having previously played the role of the father in Next to Normal. He's been nominated multiple times for every award Broadway can provide. The photo editor at the magazine they work for most often is played by Eric Bogosian, a winner of multiple Obie Awards and a Drama Desk. And his new gf/fiancee is played by Christina Ricci, whom most of us will know and love from the Addams Family movies. High quality gloss, in great abundance.
And more gloss still, a typically gorgeous set by John Lee Beatty, thirteen times a Tony nominee and twice winning. He tends to be very realistic, and here he's created a dream of a Manhattan loft space.
Now, this glossy go-to director of great plays with a set from the go-to guy for these kinds of sets, all of this acting talent, it isn't being wasted on empty words. No, Daniel Margulies is an impeccable craftsman, and especially in the first act the script is note-perfect, just that mix of helplessness and determination as you'd expect from someone with her job who doesn't like her current circumstances. Christina Ricci's role is wonderfully written. She isn't aware that there was a movie named Brazil and is momentarily confused when the conversation turns to the topic of Brazil. So she gets out a notebook and jots down the movie, and you just know she's probably going to actually rent it or at least read up on it in the way of the person we all know who diligently studies the word of the day on the word a day calendar in the belief this constitutes self-improvement. It skirts perilously close to caricature but never becomes, and Ricci fills the part quite well. Even when the obligations of the script require people to leave the stage at convenient times, it's done without strain. The "who's going to go and get ice cream" ritual is enacted exactly like it would happen if it were happening in real life, as opposed to dramatic purposes. The bathroom visits are perfectly timed. The script is dealing with extreme circumstances but real ones, and doing so in a way that seems utterly real.
I wish the whole play could be as good as the first half hour, but eventually it has to become a play, with complications, where the script is still comfortably better than your run-of-the-mill but starts to show the creakiness. The first creak comes when we find out that Linney and James hadn't both been in Afghanistan when she was injured, he had things he needed to deal with. You know then that if you just wait a bit there's going to be some kind of emotional explosion on stage when we find out what those issues are, though this being a good play I will confess there was a second part of that revelation that I didn't see coming, but which once arrived does play out in the exact ways we would expect. When there's a wedding, you know quite correctly that we won't be seeing a later scene set on the couple's fifth anniversary.
Perfect script, no, but let's be clear that a Jez Butterworth from Mojo could learn some things by studying a consummate professional like Donald Margulies.
Laura Linney deserves her Tony nomination. She hits every line, gets every note, is always emotionally true to what she's saying both when the script is pitch perfect and when it's starting to creak under the mechanics of the play. It's the kind of performance that carries you over and beyond the rough spots in the script. Ricci as I said is perfect in her role. When the second act requires her character to start showing a little more edge, she manages to put that over as well, and you believe the character really has grown or has actually been hiding something beyond that slightly goofball veneer. Eric Bogosian, if you've seen the play or the film of Talk Radio, you'll know he can be a very very strong personality, and I was kind of worried going in that he might overpower. Not at all. In fact, during the quieter moments of the script it's almost like he's set to become the second coming of Tony Roberts, who's always been very successful in Woody Allen movies and in several plays as the guy who's kind of quietly there. But when it's time for Bogosian's character to explode a bit, suffice to say Bogosian explodes, quite convincingly. Brian D'Arcy James was to me the weak link of the foursome. When the writing was at its best, he was, but when the writing requires him to do functional things, he doesn't show the same ability as the other cast members to cover up.
Sadly, it's very difficult for plays like this to succeed without stars in today's Broadway. It's even hard with a good musical like Next to Normal or for a budding young talent like Kyle Dean Massey to have a kind of development system, where you'll write a role for the young star or look forward to a new Tom Kitt the way you once anticipated the new Sondheim. But every once in a while, they manage to come along.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Next to Normal
I ventured into Manhattan on a blizzardy day to see some Broadway shows that are closing in the coming weeks. January is always full of closings as shows attempt to cash in on the big Christmas week crowds and then get out of Dodge before the winter doldrums.
I quite liked the number from Next to Normal on the June 2009 Tony Awards show and decided I needed to see, it took only 18 months and a closing notice to get around to do it. In the end, instructive to see in the same week a show that won a Pulitzer Prize and lasted 700 performances with Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which lasted maybe 17 weeks. There are reasons.
For one, an emotional component. Next to Normal is about a family trying to deal with a mother's mental illness. She can't let go of the memories of a son who died young, to the extent that she has a hard time dealing with her daughter. The daughter is struggling to have a relationship with a boy she met at school within the context of a crazy mother who isn't there for her in the ways mothers of teen-age girls are supposed to be, and the father is struggling to keep things in the house on an even keel. Lots of emotional meat.
And more even than that. The mother's vision of the son is himself a character, and a very likable character at that. If the mother becomes "normal," she'll lose this presence in her life. The son is a temptress, a hunky male version of Lola from Damned Yankees, trying to cling to its/his existence by getting the mom to give him what he wants.
Better songs. Not hummable, but I feel like some Sondheim that I could start to find some that last with another go or two at the score via the cast album or repeat visit. Is it good or bad that I could sometimes see the rhyme coming? On the one hand, suggest this isn't quite as clever as the very best lyrics could be, on the other hand in mass entertainment there is something comforting about the familiar.
Given this good material, the cast knocks it out of the park. This isn't even the original cast, which won the Tony for the female lead. An actual husband and wife team of Marin Mazzie (maybe first saw her in Sondheim's Passion) and Jason Danieley have genuine chemistry on stage, not always a given (see Tom and Nicole in Far and Away).
But the revelation is Kyle Dean Massey as the son. I haven't seen as magnetic a stage performance as this in a few years, since watching Matthew Morrison command the Atlantic Theatre stage in 10 Million Miles. Morrison went on to take the lead role in Glee, I wonder what is in store for Massey... He's what every mother would want their son to be. Great looking, plays jazz band before school and football after. His performance is a work of art. A high wire act of the vulnerability in knowing that he disappears whenever the mother decides to let go of him, but also a cockiness that he'll never go anywhere. Just watch the way he pulls at his jacket, almost Travolta like, in one scene. But all the layers are there. He sings with passion and brio, in wonderful duets and triplets. I wanted him to go so badly because it wasn't good for mom to have this guy around, I wanted him on stage every minute.
One of the great things about the musical is that it satisfies all of this in the end, manages to send everyone home happy, but without being trite or saccharine in the process.
Benjamin Walker is good in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, but the star in the making should be Kyle Dean Massey.
Next to Normal closes on the 16th January. Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey are the main creatives, and the production is directed by Michael Greif, whose many other credits include Rent.
I quite liked the number from Next to Normal on the June 2009 Tony Awards show and decided I needed to see, it took only 18 months and a closing notice to get around to do it. In the end, instructive to see in the same week a show that won a Pulitzer Prize and lasted 700 performances with Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which lasted maybe 17 weeks. There are reasons.
For one, an emotional component. Next to Normal is about a family trying to deal with a mother's mental illness. She can't let go of the memories of a son who died young, to the extent that she has a hard time dealing with her daughter. The daughter is struggling to have a relationship with a boy she met at school within the context of a crazy mother who isn't there for her in the ways mothers of teen-age girls are supposed to be, and the father is struggling to keep things in the house on an even keel. Lots of emotional meat.
And more even than that. The mother's vision of the son is himself a character, and a very likable character at that. If the mother becomes "normal," she'll lose this presence in her life. The son is a temptress, a hunky male version of Lola from Damned Yankees, trying to cling to its/his existence by getting the mom to give him what he wants.
Better songs. Not hummable, but I feel like some Sondheim that I could start to find some that last with another go or two at the score via the cast album or repeat visit. Is it good or bad that I could sometimes see the rhyme coming? On the one hand, suggest this isn't quite as clever as the very best lyrics could be, on the other hand in mass entertainment there is something comforting about the familiar.
Given this good material, the cast knocks it out of the park. This isn't even the original cast, which won the Tony for the female lead. An actual husband and wife team of Marin Mazzie (maybe first saw her in Sondheim's Passion) and Jason Danieley have genuine chemistry on stage, not always a given (see Tom and Nicole in Far and Away).
But the revelation is Kyle Dean Massey as the son. I haven't seen as magnetic a stage performance as this in a few years, since watching Matthew Morrison command the Atlantic Theatre stage in 10 Million Miles. Morrison went on to take the lead role in Glee, I wonder what is in store for Massey... He's what every mother would want their son to be. Great looking, plays jazz band before school and football after. His performance is a work of art. A high wire act of the vulnerability in knowing that he disappears whenever the mother decides to let go of him, but also a cockiness that he'll never go anywhere. Just watch the way he pulls at his jacket, almost Travolta like, in one scene. But all the layers are there. He sings with passion and brio, in wonderful duets and triplets. I wanted him to go so badly because it wasn't good for mom to have this guy around, I wanted him on stage every minute.
One of the great things about the musical is that it satisfies all of this in the end, manages to send everyone home happy, but without being trite or saccharine in the process.
Benjamin Walker is good in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, but the star in the making should be Kyle Dean Massey.
Next to Normal closes on the 16th January. Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey are the main creatives, and the production is directed by Michael Greif, whose many other credits include Rent.
Monday, December 27, 2010
2010 Theatre, Pt 2
The most recent shows I saw were Mojo, a play from the late 1990s finally getting a full DC production at the Studio's 2nd Stage, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, an unsuccessful transfer from LA's Center Stage/Kirk Douglas and NYC's Public, which closes this weekend.
Mojo was an energetic and well-acted production of a play that isn't so hot, you ask me. Some seedy club, some two-bit singer who might be signing with another club, a dead body of one of the club owners. Important unanswered questions hang over the stage. Lime, how will staying in the club overnight and not reporting the body help the current manager to keep the club Why is this two-bit singer important? All ending on a very strange note of drift. Well, it's worlds better than the inert Parlour Song, also written by Jez Butterworth, but still not good. Butterworth also co-wrote with his brother the rather more successful script for the movie Fair Game, and a newer play of his Jerusalem opens on Broadway in 2011 after an acclaimed run in London. By and large, I don't yet see why Butterworth is considered quite the big thing,but maybe Jerusalem will surprise by being good as it is supposed to be instead of being Enron, which I shall talk on below...
But first Andrew Jackson, which got lots of good reviews during it's run at the Public and which I certainly enjoyed, but at the same time very easy to see why it couldn't cut it on Broadway. Essentially, it's a 100 minutes Schoolouse Rock on President Jackson, only the songs aren't as catchy as Conjunction Junction. We learn lots of good things to know about Jackson, with lots of spoonfuls of sugar to make the medicine go down. As an example, a lot of information about Jackson is relayed by a narrator who rolls on stage in one of those scooters used by disabled people. She gets annoying, so Jackson shoots here, but she isn't actually dead and comes back a bit later, then Jackson goes after her again and she returns, and she may actually be dead the final time she comes on stage, and in the midst of summarizing historians' reactions to Jackson, not as favorable as Jackson might have wished, tells him "you can't shoot history in the neck.". If you have to dump info this is the way to do it! Broadway, so the action is good, Benjamin Walker especially so in the lead role. The set design stretches into and engulfs the audience, though I could have done without the concert style lights directed into the audience that go off way too often and only serve to temporarily blind the audience and keep us from looking at the stage which we have paid even at discount a decent Broadway price to see. Propulsive and energetic rocking songs.
So why didn't this have the decent run of an earlier youth-oriented transfer, the Tony winning Spring Awakening? I think Spring Awakening had heart, while Andrew Jackson is more about history. And Andrew Jackson has rock style music, while Spring Awakening has music that just totally rocks. Kind of like Sondheim, in that you maybe can't sing entire songs, but at least rich songs that stand repeat viewing and I can hum a few bars. Te songs in Andrew Jackson, they're lively and good and fun, the update of Ten Little Indians is a nice one. But I can only hum the concept of the song, and not the song itself, which exits the mind about as quick as it enters. Not totally successful, but I am intrigued by the idea that Alex Timbers (writer) and Michael Friedman (music & lyrics) might do 40 of these to cover all the Presidents. Because I did learn a lot, and was entertained doing it. Doesn't replace a full biography, but as a good entry level survey that raises questions for further study...
A quick word on Enron. What were the British thinking? This was quite the rage in the UK. It had some clever concepts like giant on-stage raptors in honor of Enron's special purpose entities of the same name, and a good visualization of how they were able to nest little ownership stakes inside of little ownership stakes to mask things, but it just wasn't very good. Closed almost immediately upon opening on Broadway.
The other show I saw in London this year was Jersey Boys. That is fantastic. The first act is full of music with enough background along the way to make the slightly more plot heavy second act succeed. The music is great, of course, one classic song after another. I liked the show so much that I was kind of ready to go out, buy tickets, and come back for the next performance. What I need is for some client to come to New York with a desperate urge to see, so I can have an excuse to go again.
But not Wicked, which I saw in Sydney. It was by no means as bad as I feared it could be, I could even admire it professionally as it does a good job of filling in the background of the fantasy world, which is something real fantasy writers need to do when they write their prequels. But it wasn't my cup of tea. At least with this I could kind of figure why some do find it their cup of tea. But Enron? What were the British thinking.
Mojo was an energetic and well-acted production of a play that isn't so hot, you ask me. Some seedy club, some two-bit singer who might be signing with another club, a dead body of one of the club owners. Important unanswered questions hang over the stage. Lime, how will staying in the club overnight and not reporting the body help the current manager to keep the club Why is this two-bit singer important? All ending on a very strange note of drift. Well, it's worlds better than the inert Parlour Song, also written by Jez Butterworth, but still not good. Butterworth also co-wrote with his brother the rather more successful script for the movie Fair Game, and a newer play of his Jerusalem opens on Broadway in 2011 after an acclaimed run in London. By and large, I don't yet see why Butterworth is considered quite the big thing,but maybe Jerusalem will surprise by being good as it is supposed to be instead of being Enron, which I shall talk on below...
But first Andrew Jackson, which got lots of good reviews during it's run at the Public and which I certainly enjoyed, but at the same time very easy to see why it couldn't cut it on Broadway. Essentially, it's a 100 minutes Schoolouse Rock on President Jackson, only the songs aren't as catchy as Conjunction Junction. We learn lots of good things to know about Jackson, with lots of spoonfuls of sugar to make the medicine go down. As an example, a lot of information about Jackson is relayed by a narrator who rolls on stage in one of those scooters used by disabled people. She gets annoying, so Jackson shoots here, but she isn't actually dead and comes back a bit later, then Jackson goes after her again and she returns, and she may actually be dead the final time she comes on stage, and in the midst of summarizing historians' reactions to Jackson, not as favorable as Jackson might have wished, tells him "you can't shoot history in the neck.". If you have to dump info this is the way to do it! Broadway, so the action is good, Benjamin Walker especially so in the lead role. The set design stretches into and engulfs the audience, though I could have done without the concert style lights directed into the audience that go off way too often and only serve to temporarily blind the audience and keep us from looking at the stage which we have paid even at discount a decent Broadway price to see. Propulsive and energetic rocking songs.
So why didn't this have the decent run of an earlier youth-oriented transfer, the Tony winning Spring Awakening? I think Spring Awakening had heart, while Andrew Jackson is more about history. And Andrew Jackson has rock style music, while Spring Awakening has music that just totally rocks. Kind of like Sondheim, in that you maybe can't sing entire songs, but at least rich songs that stand repeat viewing and I can hum a few bars. Te songs in Andrew Jackson, they're lively and good and fun, the update of Ten Little Indians is a nice one. But I can only hum the concept of the song, and not the song itself, which exits the mind about as quick as it enters. Not totally successful, but I am intrigued by the idea that Alex Timbers (writer) and Michael Friedman (music & lyrics) might do 40 of these to cover all the Presidents. Because I did learn a lot, and was entertained doing it. Doesn't replace a full biography, but as a good entry level survey that raises questions for further study...
A quick word on Enron. What were the British thinking? This was quite the rage in the UK. It had some clever concepts like giant on-stage raptors in honor of Enron's special purpose entities of the same name, and a good visualization of how they were able to nest little ownership stakes inside of little ownership stakes to mask things, but it just wasn't very good. Closed almost immediately upon opening on Broadway.
The other show I saw in London this year was Jersey Boys. That is fantastic. The first act is full of music with enough background along the way to make the slightly more plot heavy second act succeed. The music is great, of course, one classic song after another. I liked the show so much that I was kind of ready to go out, buy tickets, and come back for the next performance. What I need is for some client to come to New York with a desperate urge to see, so I can have an excuse to go again.
But not Wicked, which I saw in Sydney. It was by no means as bad as I feared it could be, I could even admire it professionally as it does a good job of filling in the background of the fantasy world, which is something real fantasy writers need to do when they write their prequels. But it wasn't my cup of tea. At least with this I could kind of figure why some do find it their cup of tea. But Enron? What were the British thinking.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)