The ‘Tyrannical and Abusive’ Garth Drabinsky, and His Attempted Return to Broadway with ‘Paradise Square’ - Part 3
Garth Drabinsky arrives for his sentencing hearing in Toronto in 2009.Credit...Mark Blinch/Reuters
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.
Click here for Part 1. Click here for Part 2.
Part 3: ‘Sousatzka’
As discussion on Paradise Square begins anew this year, it should come with an awareness that what audiences are getting now is simply a lukewarm reheating of an idea that had already been discarded and rejected five years ago.
Paradise Square, still in its previous guise as Hard Times, was one of the two early workshops that he staged in 2016. The other was a musical called Sousatzka, based on the 1988 film with Shirley MacLaine. This piece endeavored to address traumatic events like the Holocaust and Apartheid, via the lives of an older Polish piano teacher and a young South African pianist.
In considering these projects head-to-head, Drabinsky discarded the former and placed all of his hopes in the latter as he selected Sousatzka as the more promising of the pair. He then turned this workshop version into full production in Toronto in 2017, with a starry cast and creative team. There was a “lot riding on this show”, given that “it was supposed to mark Drabinsky’s triumphant return to the top” in the glorious phoenix-style rebirth that he was so covetously in search of.
It didn’t.
Sousatzka was ultimately deemed critically and commercially a failure, and it died unceremoniously in Toronto, not even then managing to make it to Broadway as had been originally planned. Realistically, Paradise Square is principally only seeing the light of day now because Drabinsky’s first and previous comeback attempt failed, and he remains ravenous in his quest for success. It should be noted, however, that there is more than an insignificant chance of it facing this same fate of pre-Broadway vanishment as its predecessor.
Victoria Clark and Jordan Barrow in Sousatzka, Toronto 2017 (Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)
Some of Sousatzka’s patterns are relevant to examine in relation to Paradise Square, especially given that it is the only other piece of musical theatre that Drabinsky has been involved with producing in this modern and now very different climate in the last two decades.
The shows share a number of similarities. Like Paradise Square, Sousatzka has a basis on attempting to “grapple with big themes and big issues”, including race, segregation, historical trauma, and marginalized oppression. There is also a common, heavily cloying foundation of “a theme of redemption in both musicals”. Drabinsky developed Sousatzka literally while still in prison, and it featured the attached tagline of being about “genius, sacrifice and the redemption of the human spirit” and included lines like, “They can’t bear to see you soar. They will destroy you”. As Paradise Square tries to forge a new dawn in “a new society”, and with its big, lead song being called ‘Welcome Home’, it is easy to see how both shows could be likened to obviously paralleling Drabinsky’s own desired redemptive arc.
Seldom is it completely about the show, and seldom is it not about Drabinsky himself – whose “ego always gets in the way”. Even just in considering the photos on the website for Sousatzka, Drabinsky’s own image was four times larger than those of any of the actual or critically acclaimed actors involved.
Further corollaries indicate that in reviews so far to date, each show has exhibited signs of being underwhelming as technically good pieces of theatre, and as having recognizably flawed handlings and presentations of race.
Sousatzka’s “punishing reviews” included a summary of it being “an overproduced, overcomplicated mess”, or “disjointed, indecisive and just plain confused”. Appraisal of its lyrics specifically were as “distant and obscure about race”, via J. Kelly Nestruck’s comprehensive piece in The Globe and Mail in 2017.
In elaboration it was written, “Perhaps part of the problem is the creative team assembled by Drabinsky doesn't live up to [its ideals] – if the show is so much about the identity of a black South African in exile playing Eurocentric music, it really could use a writer who can tackle that subject matter with confidence in a contemporary way.”
Grievously, it was said to be the “depiction of its South African characters that is unignorably flawed”, with many that have “unclear aims and desires”. Its treatment of women seemingly didn’t fare much better either, with a “hilariously underwritten and oversexualized girlfriend” and a flashback rape scene that “feels particularly gratuitous”.
Sousatzka was noted by one viewer as “a perfect example of overproduction, with producers having more control than the director”. The unilateral control Drabinsky had here, as a white man attempting to put together a show dealing with delicate and controversial issues while being in sole charge of selecting his creative team, was clearly far from optimal in producing the best results.
“Doesn’t he know what I've done for blacks?”
Drabinsky is in this same position of having total creative control again on Paradise Square. This does not bode well in theory, nor has it been received well so far in practice. This can be observed in considering elements of reviews from the 2019 staging of the show at Berkeley – “the costliest musical that the nonprofit Berkeley Repertory Theater has ever mounted” to the value of $5.7M – which occurred as the most recent precursor form of the musical before it will be seen imminently in Chicago.
The show was assessed here to be lacking in many key areas – including again both technically, and in its consideration of race. Tellingly, it was said the show “felt more committed to intellectual showboating than satisfying storytelling”. The results of reinterpreting Stephen Foster’s already problematic songs were not viewed as the most successful or even that well-done, instead, seeming like they were tacked on “like a barnacle…lingering from a long-gone Foster-centric” early iteration of the show.
“The music has no particular fealty to the period”, it was written. Moreover, some of Foster’s songs have been awkwardly reimagined” – like with one now being loftily burdened as “an anthemic fight song”. For another, it was also remarked the creative team achieved “the extraordinary feats of making songs like “Oh, Susanna” less catchy”. Though this may not necessarily be a bad thing here upon closer examination. This is the song, after all, that Foster originally wrote for a “thick dialect [of his] own invention, [with a] second verse, which is never sung today, [that] contains the unforgettable line:
I jump’d aboard the Telegraph and trabbeled down de ribber
De lectrie fluid magnified and kill’d five hundred N***er.”
The piece might have bold storylines lines, such as “a labor strike sowing divisions between Irish and blacks; a deadly draft riot; a pregnancy; a debate over whether Stephen Foster has the right to tell slaves’ and blacks’ stories”. However. “Each of these storylines more declares itself than emerges organically”, and the “characters and situations still feel like cogs in a wheel not sure of its destination”.
In essence, it feels forced and confused. There were conclusions of it being “in need of more soul and fewer concepts”. The piece’s “heartbeat is often difficult to hear through the buzzy crosshatched brainwaves of a creative team that shows signs of internal discord”, resulting in it feeling “less like a genuine collaboration than an oft-passed baton, covered with everyone’s…fingerprints”. Thus it appears not a bold, new progressive endeavor founded on artistic integrity, but rather a belabored, arduous attempt trying to salvage matter out of already racially precarious or antiquated foundations, while its leader with his interests “undoubtedly invested heavily” tangentially chases his comeback.
Drabinsky has said the show has undergone significant changes before it will open in Chicago since its last outing in Berkeley. Here they allegedly “learnt a lot” and “know the show now”, such that it is now “a marvelous piece of work”, so “[we] don’t think we’ll be doing too many adjustments after Chicago”.
However, Drabinsky’s words on their own have already been proven to be untrustworthy. There seems little reason to accept these statements at face value on the sole basis of Drabinsky attempting to paint positive pictures for the press. Or alternatively, that the increased number of revisions it has received as non-white writers were “tapped to help with major rewrites this past year” will indeed equal a better product, amidst the convolution within the large creative team.
On paper, the show has two black dramaturgs as well as “Black and Latinx” writers, yes. But it also has Drabinsky, a “monster”, an “assassin”, and a whole host of white creatives. Where does one draw the line on paper to decide if the balance is sufficiently weighed in favor of the optics of progressiveness, equity, and diversity?
Drabinsky is not new to being linked to “musicals that deal with racism in American history”. After all, he does have successful entities like Parade and Ragtime as well as a revival of Show Boat to his name.
But Drabinsky is not the culturally and racially sensitive poster child he would like to have the world believe from linkage to the above shows. One glaring warning concerns that for the opening line of his 2013 talk to herald his release, he had the audacity to appropriate his time in prison as being comparable to the Holocaust, in “[quoting] from Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel on how the duty of those who have survived a great test is to tell the story”.
Another warning example concerns Norm Lewis when he declined Drabinsky’s ardent pursuits for him to feature in the national tour of Ragtime – as Eddie Shapiro recounted in his 2021 book “A Wonderful Guy”. Drabinsky then raged, “Who the f*ck does Norm Lewis think he is? Doesn’t he know that I'm the most significant producer on Broadway?... Doesn’t he know what I've done for blacks?”.
Moreover, these earlier shows often started with Drabinsky as the main financial producer. Given the current restrictions on his status of owning or running companies and his demonstrably untrustworthy position with money, he is restricted to acting on these shows less so in financial, and more so in creative capacities. Which produces substantial problems.
Thus there is a warning before current readers get beguiled by ambitious lines in new articles on Paradise Square promising notions of great success, advocacy, and diversity. It must first be considered more carefully as to Drabinsky’s own fundamentally exposing beliefs, words, and actions, and the way in which these same elements have been handled in his two (and only) previous creative attempts in the last two decades.