And finally the NY Times (that's enough for one night, I should think. someone else can post the rest
![Stick Out Tongue :p :p](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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Tarzan Arrives on Broadway, Airborne
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: May 11, 2006
The tree-surfing title character is not the only creature sailing through the air in "Tarzan," the giant, writhing green blob with music that opened last night at the Richard Rodgers Theater. Apes, flowers, moths, a snake, a leopard, a hut-size spider, two shipwrecked Victorians, an English botanist in her underwear: no sooner do such figures make their entrances in this restless adaptation of the 1999 Disney animated film than they find themselves pulled into some kind of airborne aerobics.
Almost everybody and everything swings in "Tarzan." Which is odd, since the show itself, to borrow from Duke Ellington's famous credo, definitely ain't got that swing.
"Tarzan" is the latest, and most insistently kinetic, offering from Disney Theatrical Productions, the Goliath that conquered little old Broadway by turning cartoon movies from its mother company into stage shows, including "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King." Directed (and largely designed) by Bob Crowley, with songs by Phil Collins and a book by David Henry Hwang, "Tarzan" feels as fidgety and attention-deficient as the toddlers who kept straying from their seats during the performance I saw.
Though much money (a reported $12 million to $15 million) and international research (with special emphasis on what a character in the show calls pendulation) has been lavished on "Tarzan," it somehow never acquired the art of focus. Momentous events — from fatal fights with evil animals to Freudian struggles between parents and children of two species — occur regularly in the course of this retelling of Edgar Rice Burroughs's evergreen adventure novel. But any tension or excitement is routinely sabotaged by overkill and diffuseness.
No moment seems to carry more dramatic weight than any other. All instances of swinging (and they are countless) have been created equal. And Mr. Collins's soda-pop songs (expanded from those he wrote for the film) surface and evaporate more or less at random, like bubbles on a pond. The whole experience starts to feel like a super-deluxe day care center, equipped with lots of bungee cords and karaoke synthesizers, where kids can swing when they get tired of singing and vice versa.
The Disney film on which this "Tarzan" is based remains a charmer, notable for its vivid dimensional perspective and the chameleon virtuosity of its hero (given voice by Tony Goldwyn), who never met an animal he couldn't imitate. As several members of the movie's creative team observed in commentary that comes with the DVD version, it required animation to create the physically protean Tarzan of Burroughs's imagination. A live actor, it was suggested, could never begin to capture the ape-man's animal artistry.
Which goes to prove, employees of Disney, that you should be very careful what you say when a camera is running, even when the camera comes from the head office. For we now have conclusive evidence that the Disneyfied Tarzan does indeed flatten perversely when translated from two dimensions into three.
A few somersaults and cartwheels, plus hovering in a suspended harness, just don't convince you that this show's grown-up Tarzan (played by Josh Strickland, an "American Idol" contestant) can float like a butterfly, sting like a serpent, swing like an ape and love like a man.
Clearly at some point the show's creators decided that if they could just get the swinging part right, then everything else would fall into place. So they recruited Pichón Baldinu, the Argentine theater artist responsible for the Off Broadway hit "De La Guarda," an antic revue performed mostly in midair.
Mr. Baldinu may be the king of his area of specialization, but his skills have been drawn upon too generously. The opening scene, which portrays the shipwreck that brings baby Tarzan and his English parents to the African coast, finds mom, dad and child floating behind a watery scrim. Shortly thereafter, a host of vine-riding, hooting apes flies over the audience.
After that, I hate to say, the thrill is gone. And the moments when flying should take on wondrous emotional significance — like when the child Tarzan (alternately portrayed by Daniel Manche and Alex Rutherford) first learns to ride the wild vines — pass by almost unnoticed.
Like the Disney movie, the stage "Tarzan" emphasizes family-therapy dynamics and uplifting messages about misfits finding their places in the world. Tarzan has Oedipal issues with his grouchy adoptive ape father, Kerchak (Shuler Hensley, of the mighty baritone, a Tony winner for his Jud in "Oklahoma"), and adoring mother, Kala (Merle Dandridge).
Jane Porter (Jenn Gambatese), the plucky English botanist, must also declare her independence from her father, a doting and dithery Darwinian professor (Tim Jerome), while shedding her maidenly Victorian inhibitions. (Actually, Ms. Gambatese's Jane seems ready to strip down to her underwear and party from the moment she sets foot in the jungle, and she openly drools over Mr. Strickland's naked torso in the manner of Miss Hathaway ogling the muscular Jethro in "The Beverly Hillbillies.")
There are also an assortment of vignettes — featuring Kerchak, Kala and Tarzan's best friend, Terk (Chester Gregory II, the show's liveliest presence) — that could collectively be described as "Apes: They're Just Like Us!" This means that Kerchak and Kala have a syrupy reconciliation song that might have been lifted from "I Do! I Do!"
In contrast to the treacle of Mr. Collins's music and lyrics is the abrasively wiseguy tone of the script by Mr. Hwang ("M. Butterfly," the book for the Disney musical "Aida"). "Do you know how many apes are lost to underripe bananas?" asks Terk, trying to steal Tarzan's snack. "It's a silent epidemic." And the Latin-quoting Jane, upon realizing she is trapped in that spider's web, says, "O excrementum!"
Better, perhaps, to shift your attention from plot and dialogue to song and dance, except that it's often impossible to tell who's singing. (Even solos are coated with layers of disembodied offstage voices.) And Meryl Tankard's choreography is just a grounded version of Mr. Baldinu's aerial acrobatics.
So that leaves you with the visuals, and since Mr. Crowley is known to be a brilliant stage designer (his work includes the Lincoln Center "Carousel" and the Broadway-bound "Mary Poppins"), there should be plenty to divert the eye. Well, the apes — who suggest a cross between heavy-metal band refugees and Daryl Hannah in "The Clan of the Cave Bear" — are certainly novel looking. And those floating, singing flowers have a kind of "Fantasia" appeal.
But only Natasha Katz's lighting, especially the impressionist dots that suggest flocks of butterflies, summons a magical spirit. Otherwise all those layers and layers of green — walls of shredded cloth and scrims and floor coverings — start to induce claustrophobia after a while. No wonder the cast members spend so much time in the air. Even with a personal spotlight, no one has much of a chance of standing out in this oppressive jungle.