The ‘Tyrannical and Abusive’ Garth Drabinsky, and His Attempted Return to Broadway with 'Paradise Square' - Part 1
Garth Drabinsky Poses Inside The Elgin Theatre in Toronto in 2016. (Photo: Bernard Weil/Toronto Star)
Who is Garth Drabinsky, what is Paradise Square, and why should anyone care?
The latter is being heralded as the first new musical to reopen Broadway. It has been described as “one of the most anticipated stage musicals to make it to Broadway since the pandemic began”, and as “set to rival Hamilton’s Broadway success”. It is hurtling along to open in Chicago in a matter of days on November 2nd, before shifting onto Broadway early next year in February.
The former is the attached producer of this show – a convicted felon from Canada, a lauded ex-producing mogul, and a creator of hostile working environments. He, correspondingly, has been described as a “seductive and relentless psychopath”, or as actress Rebecca Caine put it, “Scott Rudin but maple syrup flavoured”. A criminal lawsuit in 1998 characterized that “Drabinsky’s management style was tyrannical and abusive”. It is furthermore well-established that he has historically created and maintained producing environments where he, as reported by The Globe and Mail, “intimidated staff through profanity, abuse, and derision, either directly or by direction of other senior employees who adopted the same approach”.
In short – Garth Drabinsky’s return is a threat, and a direct contradiction to the progressive forward motion to be found currently as some of the world’s most notable theatrical environments emerge from unprecedented periods of dormancy. Cries like “#bringbackbetter” are elsewhere typifying the dominant mentality being striven for in hoping to create safer and more diverse workplaces for returning inhabitants. And, even further, tangible actions and consequences are in fact materializing in response to other publicly raised inequities.
Actors are leaving rather than returning to shows in outrage at current theatrical climates, like with Karen Olivo. Investigations via Actors’ Equity are being triggered into working conditions, like with Nora Schell and Jagged Little Pill. Corrupt or abusive white men who have conventionally yielded power in destructive ways are being removed from their positions of leadership, like with Ethan McSweeney or Scott Rudin.
Drabinsky’s imminent re-emergence on Broadway thus places him at the center of a culture in which he no longer belongs, and positions him as a direct danger to the safety of his employees if this is allowed to happen.
So far nowhere else has it been fully explored why.
Part One: ”Drabinsky’s reign as the King of Broadway was finite and his fall from grace inevitable”
Drabinsky began making a name for himself in Toronto in the 1980s, when he “styled himself a modern-day Florenz Ziegfeld [and] built up the movie chain Cineplex-Odeon” – until he was forced to resign over financial irregularities in 1989. He then moved on to restoring the grand Pantages Theatre, and remodeling the Canadian theatre scene entirely in establishing Toronto as “the third-largest market in the world for live theatrical productions”. Notably, he and his production company, Livent, struck gold in mounting the landmark $450M-grossing and decade-long-running Toronto production of The Phantom of the Opera. Drabinsky & Co. were subsequently responsible for shaping a significant portion of the face of Broadway in the ‘90s – rivaled seriously in dominance only by the Disney-influx. Involvements included a range of other theatre refurbishments, and a run of successes that garnered a total of more than twenty Tony Awards like Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Parade, Ragtime, and Fosse.
But Drabinsky’s reign as the King of Broadway was finite and his fall from grace inevitable. His company filed for bankruptcy in 1998 when his longstanding spiderweb of defenses broke, leading to revelations that he had stolen an estimated $500 million from investors. He was subsequently convicted of several counts of fraud and forgery and was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2009 for his corrupt, “multi-faceted and pervasive” schemes.
After his release, Drabinsky was also disbarred from practicing law, stripped of his order of Canada, and banned from working in a number of Canadian positions, like running any publicly trading companies.
The man has not produced or been linked to a show on Broadway since 1999.
Paradise Square marks his attempted efforts towards a comeback of glory. (Or technically, his second attempt. He has already had a failed first attempt with ‘Sousatszka’ in 2016.)
And on paper, Paradise Square seems in part a flawless vehicle for this aim – and close to everything to be sought after in a new musical in this current climate. It involves work from Tony Award or Pulitzer Prize-winning or nominated creators and actors, and sets out to feature a diverse cast to tell the stories of marginalized communities. This it will purportedly do by illuminating the “shared experience of Irish and African immigrants [or slaves] in New York City” around the draft riots in 1863. Tackling important themes like “race, politics, [and] polarization” through a historical lens, it has been said the show might “soon rival Hamilton in terms of its financial and cultural impact” and that it has “all the makings of a huge hit”.
But there’s an issue.
As long as Garth Drabinsky is at its helm, the show will never be able to escape the fact it is rooted to an insidiously contaminated and corrupt core. Contrary to what most popular headlines would have readers believe, and while it is being announced as a new show, the origins of Paradise Square actually date back to 2012. And while it appears only recently to have caught slight public attention at the fact it is linked to Mr. Drabinsky, this Canadian criminal, “madman”, and “breathtakingly ambitious…perfectionist [with] a darker side” has actually been attached to the project for over six years. Paradise Square is not a newly birthed entity, rising brightly out of the troubled waters of pandemia. Instead, it’s the 9-year-old puppet being dragged along in its master’s destructive never-ending quest for a comeback. And moreover, one that was plotted long before anticipation of being able to conveniently attach its storylines of black lives to the topical media bingo headlines of ‘BlackLivesMatter’, or being “particularly resonant now”, or “filled with the hot-button topics”.
From Hard Times to Paradise Square
Paradise Square first appeared in tangible form Off-Broadway in 2012 under the guise of a show called ‘Hard Times’. By 2015, Drabinsky had acquired its rights after discussions with one of the show’s original book writers, Larry Kirwan. He quickly set upon pursuing a creative team – one that was made up entirely at his discretion and was relatively very large. These multiple book, score, and lyric writers had the complex task of attempting to build new material upon the original premise of “reimagining…the songs of Stephen Foster”, in the surrounding quagmire of such racially charged and heavy themes. Foster was a noted composer, famed for his “Depression-era hits”, and is also characterized himself in the musical. He spent the final years of his life in the Five Points district in Manhattan, which the musical takes its title from and was known for becoming a region of vivid cultural integration. The musical is not technically a jukebox show, but it does stem from and include some of Foster’s pre-existing songs, like ‘Oh Susanna’. As such, the necessity for this large, new creative team to provide a “kind of re-processing through contemporary lenses” becomes apparent, given that Foster was known for “the now problematic minstrel show” and it is now well recognized that some of his material is filled with inherent “unabashed racism”.
When it was decreed an acceptable number of revisions had occurred, the material was then presented at a workshop in Toronto in 2016. Intentions were already stated here that it was to be Broadway-bound. The piece then premiered in 2019 under its new guise at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California, with a Broadway transfer allegedly scheduled for the following year.
There’s a deep absurdity to be found in examining some of these timings. Kirwan was invited up to Toronto to meet Drabinsky by a friend “[who’d seen] the show in New York” after 2012. This was no great feat of hospitality, mind. Rather it was a matter of necessity: at this point in time, Drabinsky was not even legally allowed to physically enter America. He was still then a fugitive, hiding in Canada, “under indictment in the United States for fraud”. “If he sets one foot over the borderline, he’ll be clapped in irons,” the New York Post said in 2016.
This status of impending possible further conviction continued until the summer of 2018 when the last remaining criminal charges against him in America were finally dropped – a long two decades after they’d initially begun. This means that for around five years of his association with and work on Paradise Square, Mr. Drabinsky was literally still on the cusp of potentially being sent back to prison for his outstanding crimes.
What’s also interesting to note, is that when US legal proceedings did finally end against him in 2018, it was not on any grounds that he was actually innocent. Instead, a New York judge decreed Drabinsky would be saved from a second period of incarceration in America, chiefly on the basis of the theatrically canny performances of his lawyers. They presented via “countless scenes and soliloquies” that, as The Globe and Mail reported, “the offenses took place so long ago that Drabinsky no longer needs further punishment”. He may not have been good at being innocent, but he was good at knowing what he wanted and knowing how best to manipulate people to try and get it.
Drabinsky’s criminal endeavors have been both assiduously and publicly detailed. Remembrances of some of his key indiscretions are often even featured in regular “This Day in History” sections in Canadian periodicals. More enduringly, a documentary charting his downfall was made in 2012, entitled “Show Stopper: The Theatrical Life of Garth Drabinsky”, by a former colleague and close associate of 15 years, Barry Avrich.
But less publicly documented or discussed is the depth of his tyrannical and violent nature in his personal, behavioral conduct.
Thankfully, there are those who are speaking out about that.