Wasn't there a Forbidden Broadway tune about the horrors of working on Lion King? To the tune of "Can You Feel the Love Tonight":
I hate Julie Taymor. She doesn't have a clue.
My neck is breaking wearing her designs, and subluxating too!
The puppetry is stunning, but now I must confide:
although it looks great from the audience, it's torture here inside!
I think I understand what Matthew's driving at, though. (A show this size can keep hundreds of people employed, after all. We all want that, yes?)
What really bothers me is that number: $65m. Producers have a hard enough time keeping things together when the budget is much lower and the egos involved are much smaller. At $65m, not only do you have all sorts of parties trying to set terms in order to protect their investments and involvement in the production (backers have
all sorts of fantastic ideas that they want incorporated into the production, directors want to defend their artistic visions, writers want fundamental control, actors have egos...), but
inevitably a budget gets overextended and has to be cut, or a timetable needs to be rolled forward, or a vital person leaves the show, or an effect simply isn't coming together, and the whole things needs to be recalibrated. And recalibrated. And recalibrated. If your producer isn't extremely, extremely good, the whole thing can get killed by committee: the backers panic and start making more and more demands, the director has less and less time to fix more and more problems, DC Comics doesn't approve of the latest changes and demands a rollback, the production back-end increasingly becomes a Frankenstein's Monster of assembled bits and pieces that hardly resemble the original plan, more rounds of budget reductions as things slip further and further behind schedule, things slip through the cracks, someone gets seriously injured, bad buzz spreads, the backers start to panic a little louder...
It's a vicious cycle and I like to think that, rather than this all being down to a malevolent director or uncaring/incompetent people in general, this is a problem of the sheer size of the production, the sheer number of people involved, and a back-office team who simply can't keep on top of it all.
