Le Grand Chapiteau: Banana Shpeel

While rumors had been circulating the fan-circuit for a number of weeks/months, other media outlets began to pick up on the potential of Cirque du Soleil re-inventing vaudeville, much like the company re-invented the circus years ago. Variety reported that the “new stage production [would] reportedly be written by Laurence O’Keefe (“Legally Blonde”), although Madison Square Garden Entertainment, which owns the Beacon, would only confirm that for one of several shows being developed by Cirque, David Shiner (also helmer of Cirque’s “Kooza”) [was] at work on a new offering about vaudeville, with a cast of 50 to 55. No venues or dates were announced. [The show was rumored to open] at the Chicago Theater in Chicago [from Nov 19 to Dec 31 2010] before it [went] to Gotham for a multiple-month run at the Beacon Theater.”

On September 9, 2009, Cirque du Soleil announced its “Vaudeville” concept to the world as:

"Vaudeville doesn't exist anymore, but, as you know, it was huge," Daniel Lamarre says of the eclectic variety shows that were once the most popular form of entertainment in North America - before film, the Great Depression and television killed them off. "This format has giant potential if a creative team can bring it to today's world."

But who was this mysterious Banana Man and how would Emmett escape the clutches of Shmelky and his henchmen?

La-La's and Ta-Da's? • Under New Management?
The Banana Shplits • Cirque Slips on its Own Shpeel

La-La's and Ta-Da's?

When Banana Shpeel opened for limited preview performances in Chicago on November 19, 2009, the show not only failed to connect with critics, it also failed to connect with audiences – a flop of major proportions! And it didn’t take long for the negative reviews to make the news rounds: Banana Shpeel was a "vastly disappointing, often grating, surprisingly padded ode to vaudeville," one newspaper said. Another: "This, sadly, is a whole lot of wrong." The NWI Times declared Banana Shpeel was "more dumb than fun," calling out the show for "second rate material and mediocre talent." In The Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones wrote that Banana Shpeel was "cold, chaotic, clipped and cacophonous," and in The Chicago Sun-Times, Hedy Weiss wrote that it could give "a bad name" to "all that was delicious about the classic variety show format of days gone by." She would go on to say the show's "shapeless script is limp, lame and tired," and contiued to say there was no rhyme or reason or cleaver lead-in to any major act presented in the show. But perhaps Chicago Beat reviewed the previews best (or at least more colorfully), saying...

The comedy is so silly it seems aimed at children – but then there are ugly, awkward jokes about alcoholism and whores and erectile dysfunction, so then again, maybe it’s not. At either rate, Shiner just drowns his show in this primarily witless shtick. Following an incredibly long, cartoonish introduction, set as auditions for cigar chomping mega producer caricature Marty Schmelky (Jerry Kernion), the clowns keep on cutting it up during Schmelky’s opening spectacle, and again in a beyond tedious restaurant skit that has nothing to do with Schmelky’s show. By this point, the clowns have well overstayed their welcome, and we’re only at the show’s halfway point. They come back for more goofy antics in act two, mugging it up obnoxiously in a “magic” scene with no magic except for a repetitious disappearing/reappearing act played for weak laughs. Then the clowns bring the show to its anticlimactic finale.

And then the changes started rolling in: even before the show ended its engagement in Chicago the Chicago Tribune, Playbill Magazine, Theater Magazine, and New York Theater Guide all reported that Banana Shpeel would be re-written. According to those sources, Broadway leads Michael Longoria (of Jersey Boys) and Annaleigh Ashford (of Wicked), who joined the cast with much fanfare, would be written out of the show due to too many storylines and characters. That happened even though the two triple threats had already been featured front and centre in a "sneak peek" of the show that aired on the season finale of America's Got Talent. Even Theater composer Laurence O’Keefe ("Bat Boy"), who was brought in to write the score, was let go. And with the sour reviews coming in from the Chicago previews, the New York Times reporded Cirque du Soleil decided to postpone the opening at the Beacon Theater in New York city to allow a full month for rehersals. Thus, rather than opening on February 4th as previously announced, the show would open for New York City previews on February 25th. But, for those keeping score, it wouldn’t be the first delay.

Director David Shiner defended the Chicago purges: "The show was becoming too story based. We also wanted to include clowning and variety. But the story element was outweighing everything else." The show's producer, Serge Roy, said it was "dragging." Shiner called it "a learning process for everybody."

Cirque du Soleil attempted to placate critics and audiences alike in New York City with an Open House (on February 10, 2010) at the Beacon Theater, which also coincided with the unveiling of the show’s marquee The first 100 guests who arrived with a banana in hand would win two complementary tickets to the show (with the bananas donated to Life Center, a local New York homeless shelter). During the afternoon the Banana Shpeel cast would lead the public into the theater for an exclusive sneak peek at the show’s creative process. Guests would see rehearsals on stage, make-up demonstrations, costume displays, and take photos with costumed performers. Local restaurants and businesses would also provide complimentary snacks.

But it didn’t work.

Michael Riedel of the New York Post (not the most balanced of sources, but still) wrote a scathing "review" of Banana Shpeel on that day and from the way he describes the situation, the show went from bad to worse: "What's set to open Feb. 25 at the Beacon Theatre is no minor accident. It is, according to several people working on the $20 million production, a 'train wreck,' a 'catastrophe,' a 'nightmare' and, not to put too fine a point on it, 'one of the worst shows you’ve ever seen.' Performers and writers have been fired (only, in some cases, to be rehired the next week); rehearsals are chaotic; the director, David Shiner, is described as 'clueless'; and Madison Square Garden Entertainment, which owns the Beacon and has shoveled $10 million into this fiasco, is furious. A couple of scary clowns, played by Daniel Passer and Wayne Wilson, were let go - they looked like John Wayne Gacy, the Chicago serial killer who entertained kids as Pogo the Clown. The two were replaced by a single female clown who doesn’t come across as a psychopath. And another composer, Simon Carpentier, was also dismissed (although he was later rehired)."

Last week, L'Homme de la Lune (Guy Laliberté) beamed himself down to New York to check up on the revised "Banana Shpeel." He didn’t applaud at the end. In fact, sources say, he thought the show was worse. "The show had minimal appeal in Chicago," one person says. "Now it has no appeal." But the two Pogos are back. After last week's run-through, Laliberte rehired the scary clowns. "He thinks they give the show an edge," says a source. What are they smoking up there on the moon?

Uh oh.

It came as no surprise then when Cirque du Soleil announced another delay for the show's debut, this time to March 7th. The reason? "The latest delay is attributed to the fact that creatives, who are busily reworking the production, need more time to integrate new performance elements."

Under New Management?

Banana Shpeel slipped its March 7th premiere date (surprise), however, which only further drove speculation that the show was in imminent danger of collapsing completely – had Cirque du Soleil unleashed a lemon of a banana? With reviews for CRISS ANGEL BELIEVE and VIVA ELVIS in Las Vegas also lack-luster, patrons and fans began to wonder. Then on March 10, 2010, Cirque du Soleil surprised us all by announcing BANANA SHPEEL was "under new management" – it's latest bid to rescue the production.

New York, March 10, 2010 – Marty Schmelky, producer extraordinaire of such box-offices smashes as The Phantom of the Banana; Annie Get Your Banana; Fiddler on the Banana; The Best Little Banana in Texas; Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Banana; and Gentlemen Prefer Bananas, announced today that he has closed the deal with Cirque du Soleil to allow Schmelky Productions to produce the new show Banana Shpeel. Under his management, Banana Shpeel will begin performances at the Beacon Theatre (2124 Broadway) on April 29, 2010, instead of March 17.

"To the good people of New York and the entire tri-state area who have so wonderfully supported my shows for all these decades, my newest creation Banana Shpeel still needs more time to ripen. The truth is, my friends, that the bananas are still a little green," explains cigar-puffing Schmelky. "I am still holding auditions because Banana Shpeel has to be like me: bold, wacky and colorful."

In describing the new show, Schmelky is moving in a new direction from his previous productions. "I'm mixing together different ingredients and we will showcase dance, comedy and circus arts in the fancy-schmancy Beacon Theatre on the Upper West Side."

The production – now "a riot of ha-ha's, la-la's and ta-da's" rather than "a new twist on vaudeville", would begin performances on April 29th with a gala premiere on May 21st. If all was successful, Banana Shpeel would run through August 29th.

But all would not be successful.

Reviews came in - The Globe and Mail said: "Cirque du Soleil ambitiously set out to reinvent vaudeville the way they once did circus. What they've ended up with, however, feels like a reinvention of The Muppet Show with clowns in the place of Kermit and his cohorts." - and although they were more positive than those in Chicago (even a number of fans deemed the show "fun"), BANANA SHPEEL still could not connect with either critics or audiences alike. And thus on June 14, 2010, producers of the show announced that BANANA SHPEEL would give its final New York performance on Sunday, June 27th – a full two months early – with a hefty discount on tickets ($39/$49 versus $35 to $89 for previews and $45 to $110 for regular shows).

The Banana Shplits!

Leaving New York City was not the end to BANANA SHPEEL’s legacy, however. Cirque du Soleil in cooperation with Mirvish Productions brought the show to Toronto for a limited engagement (September 14th through October 10th) at the Canon Theater. Furthermore, according to Broadway Mania and San Francisco Broadway World, Cirque would also present a special engagement of BANANA SHPEEL at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theater from Saturday, October 16th through Sunday, November 14th. As a “fair bit of tweaking” had been rumored to have taken place after the curtain fell in New York, Toronto was Cirque du Soleil’s last hope for the show as it began its tour.

Alas, audiences didn’t like BANANA SHPEEL in Toronto any more than they had in New York City or Chicago before it – reviews were awful:

From the Toronto Sun:

[The clowns] are charged with carrying the full weight of a second-rate narrative that Shiner has imposed as seeming justification for forsaking the big top for the theatrical big-time. And frankly, that's where things start to fall apart; for in attempting to hitch a ride on vaudeville's rather shabby coattails, the folks at Cirque seem to have overlooked the audience on whose collective imaginations Cirque's success has been built.

Over the years, Guy Laliberte and Gilles Ste-Croix have consistently refused to simply tell a story, instead setting scenes that force every member of their audience to impose his or her own narrative - a brilliant way to draw an audience into a show... Now, with a narrative served up on a platter - Shiner takes the whole premise of the Ed Sullivan Show and almost succeeds in converting it into the Dead Sullivan Show as a Schmelky Spectacular, overseen by impresario Marty Schmelky, played by [Danny] Rutigliano - it all just seems a little tedious, as he tries to pass an amuse-bouche off as a main course...

But ultimately, though no one is killed in this collision between Cirque and vaudeville, no one really walks away uninjured either.

From Eye Weekly:

If a show makes clowns the most important element, they should at least be funny ... but Shiner has given none of them interesting material unless you think "shut up" is a witty comeback line...

The three clowns who join them really lower the tone. One is a horrid caricature of a senior with palsy and Alzheimer's and we're supposed to laugh when his walker is kicked away and he falls down. The second is a horrid caricature of a sleazy Latino whose specialty act makes fun of deaf people. The third is a would-be flasher in red briefs, who is funny as in "creepy," not "ha-ha."

But the final three acts, though amazing in themselves, suffer from being too similar - hand-to-hand followed by hand balancing followed by contortion and balancing. Cirque du Soleil is famous for its costumes, but Dominique Lemieux's are downright ugly here. The period shifts unaccountably from the 1920s in Act 1 to the 1960s in Act 2 - a bit odd since vaudeville was dead by the '60s. To remain creative, a company needs to experiment; this experiment just doesn't work out. It would be better for Cirque du Soleil to withdraw Banana Shpeel than flog it on tour and endanger its reputation.

From The Globe and Mail:

Since Banana Shpeel's New York run, only minor changes have taken place. The show still seems like, if I can quote myself, "a reinvention of The Muppet Show with clowns in the place of Kermit and his cohorts" that works in its own idiosyncratic way, but never feels entirely worth the effort...

The scripted jokes fall pretty flat much of the time. Perhaps, in retrospect, it was unwise for Cirque to hire a mime (David Shiner) to write and direct their first show with proper dialogue...

The foulness of the language and the sexual jokes are a poor fit with this colourful show. Sure, they would hardly raise an eyebrow in a teen comedy, but in the context of Cirque's otherwise uplifting aesthetic, the crassness (a character calling another "retarded", an "elderly" clown shaking like he has Parkinson's) seems tasteless - even, perhaps, sacrilegious...

Dominique Lemieux's shiny, spangly costumes are the definition of gaudy. Particularly appalling are the neon and glow-in-the-dark flapper outfits - they look like the early Nineties doing the Twenties...

Simon Carpentier's songs are a mish-mash poorly matched with the dance sequences. Jared Grimes's tap numbers are all about clatter, speed and athleticism, but leave subtlety in the wings. They're the equivalent of watching Bulkin do 1,000 push-ups: impressive, but what's the point?

With the reviews not-so-favorable in Toronto, BANANA SHPEEL’s San Francisco engagement (as well as one in Orange County, California, which was to follow its stop in San Francisco), were abruptly canceled. The show’s future beyond Toronto was never announced and the concept quietly died away, with its last performance in Toronto on Sunday, Nobember 14, 2010.

Slips on its Own Shpeel

Today Cirque du Soleil does little to acknowledge the show. But we have to ask: what went wrong? Patrick Healy of the New York Times asked Cirque du Soleil that very question and put together a fantastic overview of the entire situation – “How Cirque Slipped on its ‘Shpeel’” – which you can also read in its entirety below:

Less than six weeks after opening in New York, “Banana Shpeel” — the latest high-budget, high-profile show from Cirque du Soleil — is scheduled to close on Sunday. For Cirque, the show was supposed to be another milestone: a production that could compete artistically and commercially with Broadway, blending signature Cirque acrobatics and clowns with elements of vaudeville, dance and musical theater. Instead “Banana Shpeel” will go down as one of the most frustrating failures in Cirque’s history.

With an original budget of $20 million, the production not only had the Cirque touch but also a team led by David Shiner, the renowned clown and co-creator of the hit 1993 Broadway show “Fool Moon,” as writer and director. And the show was booked for the Beacon Theater in Manhattan, which had reopened in 2009 after a $16 million restoration.

Now the closing notice stands as the first time that Cirque has quickly shuttered a major show, said Daniel Lamarre, the company’s president and chief executive. And the experience has clearly had an effect: Mr. Lemarre said it was too early to say if Cirque would try a theatrically driven entertainment like “Banana Shpeel” again.

“We tried something very new and very different for Cirque, which is what we love doing — tackling new creative challenges — but obviously this was a difficult and somewhat surprising process for us,” Mr. Lamarre said in a telephone interview from the company’s headquarters in Montreal. “I think it will take some time to understand what happened with ‘Banana Shpeel’ in New York.”

According to interviews with nine executives and artists who worked on “Banana Shpeel,” the production appeared to suffer from competing creative impulses. Cirque is known for using a highly improvisational, free-form process to create shows, preferring to experiment with clown or circus acts rather than to work with a script. In the case of “Banana Shpeel,” however, the plan was to use a conventional plot, with music and dancing, as well as actual characters, like an overbearing, off-color theater impresario named Marty Schmelky, and an array of clowns and actors who spar with him.

Yet for long stretches of development in 2009, Mr. Shiner and his team were still not working with a scripted story; instead, artists involved with the production said, Cirque emphasized the importance of working with a blank canvas and creating vaudeville numbers with bits of story interspersed. (Several attempts through intermediaries to reach Mr. Shiner, who lives in Germany, were unsuccessful over the last week.)

“There was such a struggle getting everyone, people in the rehearsal room, senior Cirque executives, on the same page about what the show was supposed to be,” said Annaleigh Ashford, a Broadway actress (“Hair,” “Legally Blonde”) who was hired in late 2008 to play the main female role in the show. “But I got the clear sense that Cirque, while wanting a different sort of show, also didn’t want a show that looked too much like Broadway.”

Mr. Lamarre said Cirque wanted to avoid putting labels like “Broadway” and “musical theater” on “Banana Shpeel,” so as not to predetermine the shape of the show or the expectations of audience members. Still, he added, “When you’re working on a show that you’re hoping will be different from other productions out there, you can run into problems as people try to determine what the show is.”

Within Cirque, meanwhile, the problem of determining what “Banana Shpeel” would be came to a head last fall, when Mr. Shiner and his cast and team held a closed-door performance of their work for senior Cirque executives, including Guy Laliberté, who created Cirque in 1984 and built it into a global brand with total revenues of more than $700 million a year.

By all accounts, the performance was poorly received. The show struck executives as a little of everything (vaudeville, theater, clowning, acrobatics) but neither entrancing nor memorable by the standards of Cirque — whose popular shows include “Ka” (a gravity-defying production, inspired by martial arts performers) and “O” (a water show). It was also a nerve-racking performance, according to several people involved, since a pre-New York run of “Banana Shpeel” was soon to open in Chicago.

Shortly afterward Ms. Ashford and another actor hired for his theater experience, Michael Longoria (“Jersey Boys”), were let go from the production. (The show’s composer, Laurence O’Keefe, who was a co-writer of the music and lyrics for “Legally Blonde,” had already quit the show last June because of concerns about the competing, conflicting visions for the production, he said.)

Mr. Shiner and his team quickly and heavily reworked the show, focusing on Schmelky, his troupe of clowns and the vaudeville acts rather than the more traditional musical numbers. But it was all to disappointing ends: In December “Banana Shpeel” opened in Chicago to disastrous reviews, and Cirque executives declared that the show was not even close to ready for New York.

“A lot of people have told me that a normal producer would have given up after Chicago, but we’re not a normal producer,” Mr. Lamarre said. “That said, we don’t think we’re invincible, we weren’t arrogant about it. We weren’t pleased after Chicago. But the spirit of Cirque, working day and night to make the show work, is a point of pride for us, and we wanted to give our team a chance to fix the show.”

The Beacon in Manhattan, meanwhile, passed up bookings for three months awaiting “Banana Shpeel” preview performances, which ended up being delayed three times, from early February to, ultimately, April 29. With continued reworking of the show, the production budget ballooned to at least $25 million from $20 million, Mr. Lamarre said.

More people began weighing in with proposed changes, including executives at MSG Entertainment, which owns the Beacon Theater and is a partner in “Banana Shpeel” and other Cirque productions. (The Cirque show “Wintuk” has become a Christmastime staple at The Theater at Madison Square Garden.) The Cirque team had sole artistic control over “Banana Shpeel,” but the MSG Entertainment team had a financial stake in the show, as well as in the decision to turn over the Beacon Theater to Cirque, which meant ousting its popular March residency by the Allman Brothers.

Once “Banana Shpeel” finally began its run in New York, opening on May 19 and accompanied by heavy television advertising, weekly ticket sales were only a fraction of Cirque’s projections. And almost four weeks after opening, Cirque officials announced they would close the show.

Paul Binder, the founding artistic director of Big Apple Circus, with which Cirque has been competing in New York City in recent years, was invited to a dress rehearsal of “Banana Shpeel” and also attended opening night. While he said he admired much of the talent in the show, he added that he sensed right away that Cirque might have a problem building an audience.

“The reality is, people have very specific expectations with Cirque shows, and ‘Banana Shpeel’ turned out to be neither fish nor fowl — neither circus act nor theatrical vaudeville entertainment,” Mr. Binder said. “So I think it was probably difficult to get a large audience excited about a show when many didn’t really understand what it was.”

The final decision to close was Cirque’s, Mr. Lamarre said, adding that the company never came under pressure from MSG Entertainment to leave the Beacon so it could book more profitable acts. For his part, Jay Marciano, president of MSG Entertainment, said in a statement that regardless of the “Banana Shpeel” debacle, his company would continue its “long-standing relationship” with Cirque, including on a major Cirque production scheduled for Radio City Music Hall in 2011.

While Mr. Lamarre said Cirque was “very excited” about the Radio City show (which became ZARKANA), he added that executives were not casually moving on from “Banana Shpeel.” The show is expected eventually to have a run in Toronto, where, Mr. Lamarre said, Cirque was hopeful that the show would finally find an audience.

Perhaps it's for the best...