Talk about doing it wrong. If only they'd named her Marilyn Monroe, and the musical was based on Karen Carpenter.

Good news: while reviews of the show have been embargoed, even though they've circulated DVDs to the New York City elite media, which is, not incidentally, made up of gays and single women who like being catty, any recent boarder of an American Airlines flight has gotten to see the first episode! I caught it Friday night, and boy is it... well it's... "expensive" seems accurate. (If you're not flying, you can even watch it on Netflix.)

Maybe it'll be great? Debra Messing (who actually is given a husband and a family in the show—talk about ways to alienate your single lady demo) and her best gay (presumably; gayness telegraphed by his "chatty hands") are back in the game with a brassy producer (the getting-divorced character played by an extremely taut Anjelica Huston) with a Big Musical! But they must Make Sacrifices to play the Broadway Game as they begin to cast their Marilyn, working with an Evil Scheming Fosse-alike. What Marilyn will win? Will it be the sassy unfamous one with the bosoms? Or will it be the newcomer with the heart of gold, who wears a dress literally adorned with cherries to her call-back?

Tune in for the second episode to find out which over-produced musical song rendition will win! Or don't bother. Because it's not actually campy: "The show slogs through one grave, brow-knitting plotline after another," is how one brave soul put it.

To be fair, I could go for this show, but the way they treat the music is so dreadful. The songs are Broadway-good (not really a compliment in my book but here we are) but they don't let anyone sing; everything is so relentlessly over-studio'd and done up Real Big, what's the point? The current TV audience is used to "American Idol"; we're not afraid to hear people actually sing, but we're being really quite protected here. The music here is more like being trapped in an elevator with Celine Dion's backing tracks blaring at you. That takes away half the fun, and then what are you left with?

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There's the moment in every New Yorker's life (tourists, you get to play this round too!) where they experience the terrible feeling of a leg cramp during a Broadway show. Do you scream? Do you shuffle out of your aisle noisily and try your best not to faceplant? Why are those seats so small in the first place?!

The New York Times investigated the issue in 2004 and came out with some unsurprising stats. Their "nonscientific survey" confirmed what everyone already knows: "some seats in Broadway theaters are really small." The "pitch" (the distance from a point on one seat to the same point on the seat in front of it) in heaters mostly ranged from 30 to 32 inches—a puny amount of space for a full-grown human.

But what the article didn't answer was why these seats were so small in the first place and why they were so scrunched together. We turned to an elite panel of experts for our answer.

We asked Wall Street Journal's drama critic Terry Teachout on what the deal was with the little chairs. His answer:

"It depends—usually—on the age of the theater in question, and whether that theater has been renovated in modern times. Houses built prior to World War II typically have narrower seats, undoubtedly because Americans have grown fatter in recent years. Legroom has also shrunk in most Broadway houses, the same way that it has on airplanes and for the same reason: to cram in more people. That problem, however, has nothing to do with the age of the house. (Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, which opened in 1965, is notoriously difficult for long-legged people.) In addition, the width and 'pitch' of theater seats also varies within a given theater. Generally speaking, though, these two rules apply: (1) The smaller the house, the smaller the seats. (2) The cheaper the seats, the bigger the problem."

New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley, who says that he "flies economy often enough to make Broadway seats feel pretty roomy," didn't have a lot to add on the subject. He did note that he had "heard complaints, though," and forwarded us to Broadway producer Elizabeth McCann.

McCann's production credits are a laundry list of successes. Some of her recent smashes include the revival of Equus with naked Daniel Radcliffe, Waiting for Godot (with Nathan Lane in 2009), and the revival of Hair. She confirmed the cram-in theory. "The Hirschfield theatre has more seats than it originally did, the St. James has more seats than it originally did. They all do. They're constantly trying to put more seats in the house to boost revenue."

But these small seats not only limit legroom, they also limit the creative desires of directors and producers too. McCann says that "If the audience is seeing a 1st act that's over an hour— they're going to get restless." She explains, "It's not only about uncomfortability, it's their ability to understand the plot."

McCann mused about an unfortunate event that did at least make Broadway seating more comfortable: when she had broken her leg and was confined to a wheelchair. "Those seats are the best in the house because your wheelchair is your seat. If everyone went to the theatre in wheelchairs, it would be great." In a less tongue-in-cheek suggestion, McCann said that she would be willing to pay an extra $25 dollars for an extra two inches of leg room. Sounds lucrative for her and roomier for us. Sign us up already, Elizabeth, our knees are killing us.

You think you know it all about how to get by in New York, but admit it, there's something that you have a nagging uncertainty about. Ask us! Maybe we can help!

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On Saturday, in downtown Los Angeles, Julie Taymor sat down with Roger Copeland for the much-anticipated closing keynote presentation of the Theater Communications Group's annual conference, before an audience of a thousand or so colleagues. Copeland is a big, charming, rambunctious man with about the biggest, bobbingest head you ever saw, wearing very thick glasses and, I think, no socks. He's a professor of theater and dance at Oberlin College, Taymor's alma mater, who has written extensively and admiringly of her work.

If you're involved in the sort of Theater with a capital T that is "avant-garde" or "serious," TCG is the place to go in search of fellowships, grants and jobs. Taymor made her bones in this insular, rarefied environment, but later went out and took the greater world by storm; she is the first woman to win a Tony Award for directing, for the blockbuster stage version of The Lion King, and she's directed several Hollywood movies. But Taymor has lost none of her cred with this group, because her approach has remained resolutely avant-garde, highbrow and scholarly. Eager to welcome her back into the fold, Saturday's crowd of BFFs could barely contain their standing ovations. "We are her family," said board member Philip Himberg in his introduction.

Taymor's poise and delicacy of movement were thrown into sharp contrast by Copeland's massive presence across from her onstage. She wore indigo jeans, a rather piratical white shirt and a slightly shrunken, overstitched dark buff jacket of complicated design. Never in a million years would you guess that this slim, elegant woman is near sixty. But for all her grace and ever-perfect hair and aura of general expensiveness, there's a certain tension in Taymor, a wariness that was visible throughout the three days of the conference. And no wonder, given the fracas of her dismissal in March from the Broadway musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, that opened last week to tepid reviews after nine years in production.

So, did the trusty Copeland ask Taymor about Spider-Man? He did, though he danced around the subject like crazy, using phrases like "I hope you don't hate me for starting with this," and "the $64,000 question," and "... an ordeal that played out in public, so that even Anthony Weiner must have been saying, 'at least I didn't have to go through THAT'." Indeed, Copeland's actual question was ultimately lost to me in all the bobbing and weaving.

But did Taymor finally provide her version of events to a curious and sympathetic public? Not even. There's a good reason why not, I suspect; one to do not so much with the talented director's famed self-consequence as with the questions of cold, hard cash that so often lie behind the plying of the arts trades at their highest reaches, where incomprehensibly large sums are burned through in search of a mass audience.

Too Big To Not Fail
The first, and worst, catastrophe to befall Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark came in October of 2005. Several very prominent artists had been assembled by the producers, including Bono and The Edge of U2 as well as Taymor, so contracts had already taken years to negotiate, what with the principals' conflicting work schedules and various internal difficulties at Marvel Entertainment; the delineation of responsibilities, royalties, limits of control and all the rights issues had involved rafts of lawyers in the thorniest and most protracted wrangles, but all had at last been set right, and Taymor and Bono had signed. Then the producers went along to The Edge's Tribeca apartment with the contract. And just as The Edge was about to set pen to paper, right then and there, producer Tony Adams collapsed with a stroke. He died two days later. Only 52 years old, Adams was the veteran of many, many successes including Blake Edwards's Pink Panther films, 10, and both the filmed and stage versions of Victor/Victoria.

It was Adams, along with his partner, show-biz lawyer David Garfinkle, who had first secured the stage rights to "Spider-Man" from Marvel and brought U2 on board for the music. Garfinkle had none of Adams's direct experience as a producer, but seems by all informed accounts to be a smart and good guy, a talented negotiator and a lifelong theater freak who had raised a lot of money in his hometown of Chicago for the show; his father was reported to have been the first investor. (Far and away the best précis of the genesis of Spider-Man's troubles on Broadway is to be found in this profile of Garfinkle by David Bernstein for Chicago Magazine.)

It was never going to be anything but a bumpy ride. From the beginning, the producers had envisioned a gigantic show with a gigantic budget, and they had enormous, glacially slow-moving forces to contend with from the first minute: the media conglomerates, Sony and Marvel; the stars of U2, who were out on tour when most composers would have been glued to the theater; a huge gang of rich investors, who by the end had ponied up a reported $70 million, each with his own worries and demands. And finally, there was the notoriously uncompromising Taymor, well known to be willing to sacrifice any amount of money to realizing her vision. In one of many articles sounding the same note, Michael Riedel reported on Spider-Man's troubles in the Post in August 2009: "'You've got to be on top of her all the time,' says a person who worked with her on 'The Lion King.' 'She'll spend days and days on one minute of stage time. It will be a brilliant minute, but it's expensive.'"

After Adams's death the production continued to inch forward, but the difficulties snowballed. Permits for rebuilding the Foxwoods Theatre were complicated by its landmark status; Evan Rachel Wood and Alan Cumming had to leave for other projects; people got hurt in rehearsal, some of them quite seriously; the economy crashed and burned.

Money Makes the World Go Around
But the real mess began when Spider-Man finally went into previews, and it emerged that though the sets and costumes were gorgeous, and all the stagecraft spectacular, the show utterly lacked a story. The incoherently repurposed mythological/comic-book character of Arachne came in for the worst drubbing, particularly a song (since dropped) called "Deeply Furious", that was something to do with giant spider-girls having a shoe fetish. Frantic attempts were made to retool the production, and tempers frayed as the result of the bad notices; Taymor was asked to leave her role as director in March.

Whatever happened, Taymor still has an ownership stake in the production—an amount yet to be determined or litigated, perhaps—an an unknown sum that might or might not come to be very large. And so Taymor, the show's producers, Bono and The Edge have all been cagey in their public comments about the trainwreck of Spider-Man.

That is to say, if Spider-Man turns out to be a hit after all, there will be lots and lots more money to squabble over than just the $200,000 to $300,000 in unpaid wages that Taymor's union filed suit for on her behalf last week.

Though the press has been quiet on this aspect of the matter, the Daily Mail managed a few conjectures from "a source":

As [Taymor is] the musical's creator, director, mask designer and one of its two script-writers, negotiations over 'who owns what material, and how the royalties and future development of the show in productions around the world will be worked out,' are very delicate [...] Apparently, both sides are keen to prevent having to fire her outright, which would almost certainly result in a lengthy and embarrassing court battle.

To give an idea of the potential of a super-smash-hit musical, The Lion King, which catapulted Taymor to superduperstardom, has grossed over $4.5 billion so far. Even the tiniest of royalties, at that rate of exchange, is going to add up to a boffo amount of coin.

The only comment Taymor made regarding her stake in the future of Spider-Man during last week's conference was a wry, throwaway one near the end: "I'm lucky because I've had one hit... maybe two, we'll see," which got a huge laugh from the audience.

If not, then the show's producers and investors, Taymor, Bono and Edge, or The Edge, whatever (his name is David Evans!—and Bono's name is Paul Hewson, and I can't believe we have to call two grown men these ridiculous names) will perhaps remain just gigantically rich, instead of gigantically-plus-some-huge-amount rich.

The two U2 frontmen have long been known to be all about the money. Both musicians have come under increasing fire in their native Ireland for moving their music publishing business out of that country in 2006, in an effort to evade the already insanely favorable income tax for artists (who get their first $650,000 or so of income tax-free every year). The Edge's memorable comment at that time was, "Of course we're trying to be tax-efficient." Author Marina Hyde's equally memorable response was to observe that Bono, who has a house in Ireland, seems perfectly happy to be "driving around on roads paid for by teachers, and nurses and plumbers—the very people he'd appeal to for donations when an African village needed a well. Or indeed, a road."

Bono admitted to Patrick Healy in the Times last week that he did not put any of his own money into Spider-Man, though The Tax-Efficient Edge did contribute an undisclosed amount (to "underscore his commitment," apparently).

Taymor turned up for the Spider-Man premiere last week and distributed uncomfortable-looking hugs and smiles for the camera. Now that Cui Bono has released a few remarks about how much he "misses Julie" and so on, it looks quite a lot like there are legal and contractual disputes still unresolved. Money disputes. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that at these altitudes of the art world, the money part is way more important than the art.

The Superhero Part
Taymor's most successful works, such as The Lion King, are based on simple, literal stories already fully fleshed out, like a readymade armature that can be adapted and clothed to suit her purposes. As a visualist, she is every bit the genius and visionary one has so often heard praised over the years; everyone seems to agree on that. Her works are crafted with such a teeming, multivalent sensuality and in such meticulous detail that they practically induce synesthesia; sights so beautiful you can nearly taste them.

The short film Fool's Fire is a perfect decoction of Taymor's talents. She adapted the script herself from a wicked little story of Edgar Allen Poe's called "Hop-Frog" for an American Playhouse production that appeared on PBS in 1992. It's a revenge tale along the lines of "The Cask of Amontillado," but it's much simpler, like a fairytale really. Here she cast the staggeringly wonderful Michael Anderson as a court jester who socks it to the evil king and his hideous rubber-masked cronies. This story has no moving parts; justice is served up in a fiery ball, that is pretty much it. But it's beyond gorgeous, and there are some wonderful set pieces, notably a magnificently horrible Trimalchian feast, in the course of which one of the bloated aristocrats explains the preparation of Roast à l'Imperatrice:

Take the pit out of an olive and replace it with an anchovy. Put the olive into a lark, the lark into a quail, into a partridge, the partridge into a pheasant. The pheasant in its turn disappears inside a turkey, and the turkey is stuffed into a suckling pig. Roasted, this will present the quintessence of the culinary art, the masterpiece of gastronomy. But don't make the mistake of serving it whole, just like that. The gourmand eats only the olive and the anchovy.

The thing is, the world-class ironist Alexandre Dumas was kidding, there, when he wrote this recipe in his Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, and yet Taymor thought to use it to lampoon a bunch of greedy aristocrats, so it sounds kind of wrong; a joke to stand in for the-thing-joked-about. This is a failure of humor, a misunderstanding of the nature of self-mockery or the generality—the complicity, really—of human failings.

But who cares, because "Fool's Fire" is so, so lovely. Bowls of soup dashed onto a stone floor take on a freakishly moving, magnificent urgency and scariness. The dwarf princess Trippetta and her beautifully fanning, feathered fingers; the richly mysterious, flickering shadows, the beautiful, tormented face of Hop-Frog as he flees his pursuers, or his shirtless form laboring over the construction of a wooden throne; the cunning, clever lisp with which he pronounces the doom of his enemies. It is 100% enchanting.

She Has Radioactive Blood
There's a temptation to take Taymor's famously lofty, self-consciously learned pronouncements as a kind of contempt for "the little people," or as plain arrogance, but after studying her work and following her around this conference, I came away with a different impression. She seems to me to be the sort of person who, even as an adult, remains a kind of gifted kid, a teacher's pet, almost—crazy focused on and serious about her work; a person who has spent her whole life working like a maniac on just the one thing that she is very, very good at without a moment's doubt or pause. She's almost absurdly secure in her own skin for this reason, and while this has to be an asset in her business, it can also be a fault. A blind spot. You might say that what she's got is a sort of overconfidence in her own superpowers.

After Spider-Man began previews, it wasn't long before Taymor took the fall for the bad notices. She turned up at the TED conference last March and gave a talk, the video of which is mysteriously absent from the TED site; requests for an explanation of its removal went unanswered (naturally, it's super easy to find online anyway). The Q&A after the TED talk marked the first time Taymor had been asked in public about her troubles with Spider-Man; her ouster was, in the event, just days away. In response to questions about the future of the show, she went into an extremely wacky riff that did not go over at all well with many, including the A.V. Club's Sean O'Neal, who'd been covering the story throughout. His brief account is called, "Julie Taymor acknowledges Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark problems in typically pretentious way":

At the TED conference, Taymor humbly said she was "in the crucible and the fire of transformation," adding that "anyone who creates knows—when it’s not quite there. Where it hasn’t quite become the phoenix or the burnt char. And I am right there." Piling on the metaphors, she related the production of the musical [...] to this one time she went to Indonesia, where she and a friend climbed up between a dead and a live volcano, and her friend disappeared in the smoke and left her there alone:

"It’s very easy to climb up, is it not?" she said. "I am on the precipice looking down into a dead volcano on my left, on the right it is sheer shale. I am in thongs and sarong and no hiking boots. I realize I can’t go back the way I have come. I can’t. So I throw away my camera. I throw away my thongs and I looked at the line straight in front of me. And I got down on all fours like a cat. And I held with my knees to either side of this line in front of me—30 yards or 30 feet, I don’t know. The wind was massively blowing, and the only way I could get to the other side was to look at the line straight in front of me.”"

If you think O'Neal was rough on Taymor, have a look at the pasting she took in the comments on his piece, wherein readers poured out a fusillade of droll commentary (a lot of which focused on who or what was "massively blowing"):

It's a little painful to see this talented, well-meaning artist raked over the coals in such a way. But Julie Taymor, you cannot be forever explaining how you went to Indonesia to study shadow puppetry, or how you came to be lying hidden under a banyan tree in Bali, nursing a leg wounded by a rock spit from a volcano, because people are going to think it is The Onion. No, not even if it's all true and you are so super earnest because you care so much and take it all so seriously.

The Sorcerer On Her Island
Taymor's complicated relationship to the audience became apparent again at the TCG conference screening of The Tempest.

In her introductory remarks, the movie's producer Lynn Hendee said, "This audience will be the only one we've had that understood that The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare." (Lord, what yahoos these mortals be!) Later, Taymor made a similar observation, sounding pretty danged sniffy: "People don’t know how to review a Shakespeare film well. They criticize the plot."

During the Q&A I asked how those assembled had approached the idea of translating Shakespeare for a popular audience. The movie's star, Helen Mirren (who'd been kind enough to attend the Q&A despite having been delayed for three hours at the airport), talked at some length about how much work it took to make "Prospera's" speeches immediate and comprehensible. To contain the sense, more or less. She credited Taymor with understanding this, and with having the same goal. And it is true that Mirren has that amazing Royal Shakespeare Co. skill of making you understand Shakespeare's language so effortlessly that you could nearly believe that these dense Elizabethan speeches were all blogged yesterday.

But Taymor rather scoffed at the idea of making particular alterations for a popular audience and said, straight up, "You don't do Shakespeare to make a lot of money." We did this "for the canon," she said; she expressed the hope that the film will be taught in schools.

Seemed like a ballsy thing to be saying in front of the producer of the movie, I thought. Surely at least you should want to make back the $20 million that it cost to make? Because to date, according to Box Office Mojo, this movie has seen only around $350,000 in receipts.

And isn't it all connected? Because there is no percentage in making stuff for an audience toward whom you feel, if not outright contempt, an absolute, unshakable certainty that you always know better. And then, is there a legitimate distinction to be made between those who attend a filmed version of Shakespeare and those who spend a kajillion dollars to take in a show on Broadway? If you need a mass audience to make the work a success, does this really necessitate "dumbing-down"?

Plus, this production of The Tempest, beautiful as it is, is lacking a great deal from the highbrow or pointy-headed angle. Casting a woman as Prospero in order to show a mother's protection of a daughter rather than a father's was reckoned an interesting move by many, and there's no question that Helen Mirren makes a wonderfully doughty sorcerer. But from a feminist point of view, this decision could not be more disastrous. If Miranda seemed like a MacGuffin or trading card in the original story, she is trebly so here. It's one thing for Prospero to give Miranda to her next lord and master at the end of the story, and quite another for Prospera to do so; basically she ends by giving her kid back over to the patriarchy that abused and banished them both. And then, it's really irritating that Prospero never teaches Miranda to do magic—he just puts her to sleep when she starts to bug him. But if I were a sorcerer you can bet your sweet bippy that my daughter would be conjuring up earthquakes and comets by the time she hit 12. Daughters need every particle of whatever weaponry their moms can give them.

They Pull You Back In
The 90-minute conversation between Copeland and Taymor last Saturday was punctuated with clips from her work, including Oedipus Rex, The Lion King, Juan Darién and The Tempest. It became clear after the first clip, from Spider-Man, that the director was in a defensive frame of mind.

Taymor began the few remarks she made about Spider-Man by expressing her aversion to test audiences and the like. "I don't believe in focus groups at all," she said. "There's always something people don't like. It’s very scary if people are going more towards that [...] The audience can't tell you how to make a show." She's none too keen on the Internet, either, as people on the Internet can influence public opinion all over the place from wherever they are. "Twitter and Facebook and blogging just trump you... it’s incredibly difficult to be under a shot glass and a microscope like that [...] Shakespeare would have been appalled." (Although for all Taymor or anybody else knows Shakespeare would be calling all his fans out onto Twitter himself.)

What she really, really didn't want to talk about was her recent difficulties.

"I'm jumping off of Spider-Man," she said flatly, to wild applause.

After the clip from Juan Darién, Copeland ventured gingerly to note that one influential critic had not cared for that show: "... if I can name names??—I think his initials are Ben Brantley," he quipped nervously, and went on to observe that while he is not "a hater" of the Times's theater critic, he'd found the review lacking: "I thought well, if you didn't like Juan Darién... whoever doesn't like this simply doesn't understand a certain kind of theater. Nor did he care for the Unnamed Musical ..."

"MOVING ON," declared a visibly exasperated Taymor, to huge applause.

I already knew that Brantley hadn't cared for the new version of Spider-Man any more than he had for the old one, but what had he said about Juan Darién? Among other things, this: "Ms. Taymor's skills as a storyteller don't match her abilities as a weaver of phantasmagorias, and the work has its longueurs. But she knows how to catch her audience off guard with inspired shifts of scale and perspective, and there are times when you may feel exhilaratingly like Alice falling down Wonderland's rabbit hole."

This struck me as such an astute and exact criticism of Taymor's work that I wished I could phone Brantley and ask him all sorts of stuff, such as for investment advice, and what he thinks about Huntsman's chances.

What We Can't Rise Above
As the Spider-Man debacle unfolded, I found it easy to believe the reports of story problems, because Taymor, while a superb visualist, really is an indifferent writer with a tendency to become mired in the folkloric and mythological. Her public remarks, though, suggest a deeper reason why the story was hard for her to find.

"Peter Parker is the one who shows us how to soar above our petty selves," Taymor has said. That is a catastrophically bad reading of Spider-Man, at least in this longtime fan's view. Peter Parker's flawed, earthbound part is the crux of the story. His owning of his defects, and yet his refusal to give up on the better part of himself, create a sort of third, transcendent Parker: not the scared, nerdy kid who feels unending grief and shame over his responsibility for his beloved uncle's death, nor yet the superhero who has left a painful past behind, but an adult who can encompass and own the whole truth about himself. This wisdom protects him from superhero hubris, and is rooted in the certain knowledge and acceptance of his own failings. The twin burdens of greatness and smallness are always with Parker, and with Spider-Man. In fact, the key message of Spider-Man is to remember and respect our limitations rather than to try to "soar above" them.

But this isn't a message that people who believe themselves to be artists who are superior to the common run of mankind are able, maybe, to access very easily. The tacit acceptance of universally human failings seems essential, too, to the use and understanding of irony. And maybe it takes an ironist to do a comic-book story properly.

Comic books are the time-honored property of teenagers, who are generally neck-deep in the worst morass of self-consciousness that most will experience in their whole lives. Classic comic books like Spider-Man are stories purpose-built for just this kind of self-doubt and insecurity, providing a world of in-jokes about the inner workings of the outcasts and nerds who are meanwhile and unbeknownst to all possessed of embarrassing but heroic and exhilarating superpowers. These stories are therefore full of knowing, winking asides about such subjects as acceptance or "coolness," social power, sex appeal and "being misunderstood." On the one hand, if you're a superhero, these subjects are ridiculous; you have a city to save. On the other, who could care about saving a city if you're in love? In this way, comic books are fables of gentle, absurdist self-mockery.

We are all of us here to be humbled. The message of the original Spider-Man story is that if we don't acquire humility, patience and self-knowledge through our own will, events will keep overtaking us to make sure we learn and relearn these things the hard way. There's a Spanish phrase for that, one I learned many years ago in a Venezuelan coconut grove during a hurricane (kidding! but it is a good phrase): "aprender a palos," "to learn by blows." Will Julie Taymor rise to the wisdom of Peter Parker?

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like A Gentleman, Think Like A Woman.

Photo of Taymor by ellasportfolio.

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They don't waste their time with "pared down" productions where the orchestra is reduced to two actors playing recorders and a keyboardist plinking out orchestrations designed for at least 24 real musicians . No, these folks always put mad cash behind their productions-and they still turn a profit.

The surprisingly excellent Mary Poppins is a great example of this. Based on a classic movie that was basically a Broadway musical without ever being one, this show has a strong book, believable characters in conflict, fabulous sets that move up and down and all around, soaring music (much of it new), and a hot bitch with an accent who fucking flies and does magic and is not painted green. It's also surprisingly dark for a show aimed, primarily, at the elementary school set.

Here's where the theater cognoscenti start saying "But did you SEE Little Mermaid? It was a clusterfuck of Lisa Frank imagery and chorus boys scooting around on wheelies." (Technically they were called "merblades.") Fact of the matter is actually that none of these complainers did see it. I did, though, and it was fun. It was certainly more entertaining than In the Heights, with its faux hip-hop "take" on the life of colorful ethnic types who dream of dancing and being friends in what is basically a drawn-out version of "Sesame Street."

Another thing Disney has going for it is that they hire truly great theatre artists to create their shows. I spoke via email with Thomas Schumacher, producer and president of Disney Theatrical Group. Here's what he said about his habit of hiring avant-garde artists: "I like to say that I only had one great idea on The Lion King -hiring Julie Taymor. When creating that show, and all of our shows, we want the strongest, most original creative minds in the room because we want the theatrical experience to work completely on its own terms. It makes sense, then, for us to go after giant, iconoclastic talents like Julie, Doug Wright, Bob Crowley, David Henry Hwang, Richard Eyre and Matthew Bourne, among many others. We're lucky to have had the chance to work with some of the very best."

Who the heck had heard of Julie Taymor when she got hired to go all puppet crazy for Lion King? Not me, that's for sure. But now that crazy lady is directing closing night films for the Venice Film Festival (The Tempest) and is working maniacally to bring U2's Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark to the Great White Way (which I, for one, cannot wait to see no matter what it turns out like.)

However, I mostly respect Disney for hiring playwrights like Doug Wright (who won the Pulitzer for I Am My Own Wife), David Henry Hwang (who penned M. Butterfly which alone is important for introducing the world to BD Wong), and even screenwriter Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) to write the books for The Little Mermaid, Tarzan, and Mary Poppins respectively. As one who has written a play, and one that was even mildly successful, I made about 24 cents on both the New York and London productions combined. The fees that the above three make for every performance of these Disney shows no doubt fund their other, perhaps more high-brow, attempts at theater-making. These are not the actions of an outfit that cares only about bringing in bucks on the backs of tourists with kids.

Also, the kiddies! I mean, will some one please think of the children?! Who among us that loves musicals doesn't remember the first time we saw a real live Broadway show (even if, like me, it was a touring production in LA). For me it was Phantom. And 6th grade me fucking loved it. Just think how many future theater goers (and future ticket buyers) are falling in love with musical theater when they thrill to the opening number of Lion King or the swinging monkeys of Tarzan or the merblading sea creatures of Little Mermaid. Let us also not forget that every kid (and parent for that matter) who sees Lion King is sitting through a 3-hour avant-garde puppet show! This is not Sound of Music puppetry, but rather really bizarre, at times even disconcerting, puppetry. It's sort of like introducing people to Pop Art and then slyly replacing it with Abstract Expressionism or contemporary video art.

Sure, not every Disney production has been Tony worthy. (Though what these days is? Uh, hello: Memphis?? Ugh. And let's not even get into the horror that was Catherine Zeta-Jones in Little Night Music. Wasn't it hard for her to sing with the massive amounts of scenery she's chewing?!) Ben Brantley of the Times called Tarzan a "giant, writhing green blob with music." And, well, he wasn't entirely off base. There are rumors that a revamped version plays amazingly well in Hamburg, Germany but I haven't trusted the Germans since the Hapsburgs ruled Austria. But so what? Even Sondheim wrote Bounce or Road Show or whatever that junk is being called now.

This raising a burning question: what exactly is Disney really good at it besides making money? Some might say its stealing great talent and using it for their own nefarious purposes. I think that's a particularly negative way of viewing things. Pastiche is often used in regards to Madonna, Lady Gaga or even Karl Lagerfeld when he channels Coco Chanel in his latest resort-wear collection. Homage is used by schmancy filmmakers ripping off other, more talented, directors. I think what Disney does is just recognize great talent and say to themselves "Hey, we're gonna be making Hunchback of Notre Dame anyway because the Lord commanded it so why not hire some sexy show queens and their brethren and let them go at it?" And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, but kudos to the execs in their glass offices for actually giving artists creative freedom to try something new. It's not like the Roundabout allows for much of that anymore, if Promises, Promises is any indication.

As for what's upcoming, Mr. Schumacher told me, "We are working with the New York Theatre Workshop on a show we created with Rick Elice, Roger Rees and Alex Timbers at the La Jolla Playhouse last year called Peter and the Starcatchers. It is a smaller-scaled ensemble piece based on the great series of books by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. On the larger scale, it has been reported that we are messing around with an interesting take on Dumbo with Stephen Daldry."

Come on, aren't you just DYING to find out what "messing around with Dumbo" means? I know I am! And if Disney is looking for a playwright to pen the book, well, they have my email.

David Ozanich writes the occasional play, teen novel, and travel guide among other things. His favorite musical is all of them.

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At some point, someone will pipe up and announce that she, too, has starred in a musical production. She's put on a wig and stage makeup and a battery-pack microphone and neglected her science homework for weeks on end to learn a dance routine. She has won the hearts of parents and teachers alike with her charm, her clear-as-a-bell high notes, her ability to emote for the seats in the back.

And then, Little Orphan Annie gets laughed at.

Annies are a sisterhood united in red wigs, misbehaving dogs and a devastating lack of respect from cooler, more adult stage characters. Some of this, to be sure, is because "Annie" happens largely in elementary schools, years away from the stolen cigarettes and kisses that make up so many high school musical theater memories. Annie, you see, is literally child's play, by and for a group of people not old enough to see "Cabaret" without a parent or legal guardian-and for that Annies are punished.

You know what? We're sick of it.

"Annie" is a musical that doesn't quite fit into any established category. It's not a comedy, no one dies, and the center of the story isn't unrequited love but poverty, both of wealth and affection. In addition to these grim qualities, it is terrifying.

Annie and her friends, as you may remember, live in an orphanage, and yes, they sing songs and dance up and down the stairs, but the songs are about hard labor and the dances are elaborately choreographed escapes from Miss Hannigan, the drunk warden who abuses the kids and does a very peculiar and highly sexualized song and dance routine with her brother.

Annie longs to reunite with her birth parents, but unlike the wealthy orphans of The Little Prince or The Secret Garden, cared for by elderly grandmothers and their butlers, Annie is stuck in a tenement house in the New York City of the 1930s, which communicates to everyone but her that her parents are dead, destitute or both.

Also, everyone Annie meets-besides Daddy Warbucks, Miss Farrell and FDR-is a hobo!

It's dark stuff, and yet! Reviews good and bad always seem to judge the show based on its appeal to families and children. A 1996 production starring Kathie Lee Gifford as Miss Hannigan (and here you thought no orphanage head was more likely to eat her charges than Carol Burnett in the 1983 film version) was praised by the New York Times as "an elating piece of family theater that deserves to become the mass-entertainment holiday staple it aspires to be." A year later, though, a new Broadway cast was called charmless and antithetical to the show's "perky, crowd-pleasing roots."

It is apparently impossible that a show starring children, some of whom, yes, are indefatigably optimistic, can also be scary and real and a reflection of how precarious life for the Other Half is in times of economic hardship and national malaise.

There's also the problem of "Tomorrow," the song most associated with the show and the Pollyanna qualities that have shunted it into the "musicals for children" category. Yes, it can grate, and yes, there isn't a whole lot of subtext (okay, there is no subtext) happening, but it's also really powerful! An abandoned child who, until recently, had never gone to bed without hunger pangs is singing, on the radio, for the sole purpose of brightening the nights of people who are jobless, who are poor, who are hopeless-people who are, in fact, no different from the same people that were forced by the same circumstances to put her in the orphanage in the first place. It is not sexy, and it is not mournful, but it is pure-not an expression of feeling from singer to audience, but a chance for audience to express feelings of their own.

When it was announced that "Annie" would be returning to Broadway in 2012, something shifted. I have yet to read anything mocking the show's reappearance, and perhaps more encouraging, critics and fans alike seem to realize how exceptional the timing is. The Great Depression feels closer now than it did in 1996. We as theatergoers might be ready to see the show not as a glorified pageant for children, but as something closely resembling our own realities, if enhanced by tap dancing. And, in what is a true vindication for Annies everywhere, the original Annie, Andrea McArdle, is taking over the role of Miss Hannigan, inspiring a slew of "day after 'Tomorrow'" headline puns–and not one joke about red wigs.

Angela Serratore is a writer/historian in Los Angeles, and has played Annie-twice!

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"Over the last 25 years, all the costs have spiraled with no constraints," Azenberg told me. The physical production, he said, "cost $100,000 then; it will cost $500,000 now."

"The director's fee was $25,000 then," he continued. "It will be $100,000 now. An ad in the Times was $20,000 then; it's $110,000 now. With payments to the pension fund and health plans, the cost of union labor today is $100 an hour."

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