No foolproof formula for success
“THE LION KING.” Has become the most financially successful multimedia production ever mounted.
Showbiz circles are agog over the “breaking” news that “The Lion King” has become the most financially successful multimedia production ever mounted, with a total gross of more than $6.2 billion (and still counting)!
Other producers get an empathetic surge from these record figures, so they’re looking for other exceptionally popular and “empathetic” stories and scripts to also delight different generations of viewers.
Another popular musical, “Miss Saigon,” is currently being revived in London, with Filipino musical-theater standouts like Eva Noblezada and Jonjon Briones reprising the success, 35 years ago, of the likes of Lea Salonga and Monique Wilson.
The fact that the latest incarnation of producer Cameron Mackintosh’s iconic show is still a hit proves that it can appeal to sequential generations of viewers, like “The Lion King.”
However, the most noteworthy and cautionary aspect of the “Miss Saigon” phenomenon is that, after he produced it to great acclaim and profit, Mackintosh hasn’t come up with another blockbuster hit for many years now. He’s an expert at mounting hits like “Miss Saigon” and “Les Miserables,” and yet he’s failed to match those amazing accomplishments, despite his very best efforts.
In our view, this is the key “teaching point” about mounting new shows—that each one of them is a big risk until viewers embrace it, and there’s no absolutely foolproof formula for success in creating and financing shows!
So, even if many producers are hell-bent on coming up with another top-grossing, record-breaking hit like “The Lion King,” it’s still basically a crapshoot, all the time.
Passion
You improve your chances if you give your new show everything you’ve got in terms of talent, budget, time, judgment and passion, but failure is still just around the corner, if your new show doesn’t “connect” with your audience’s deep need for unique entertainment—and inspiration.
This “inspirational” aspect to success in production should correspondingly inspire prospective producers to look way beyond the financial incentive to motivate their best efforts to entertain and excite viewers.
All too often, producers just want to make a big profit, so their products are empty, shallow and ickily utilitarian. Some of them do become hits, but many others are rejected by viewers, who hate being exploited—and taken for granted!
More unsolicited advice
Now that he’s being built up as a tween performer, former child actor Zaijian Jaranilla should work harder to clear and clean up his diction, which is sometimes not as succinct as it should be, since he tends to gloss over the ending syllables of some of the words he speaks. The problem wasn’t such a big deal when he was a child performer, but now that he’s moving into his tween years, he should be less verbally imprecise.
For his part, Zaijian’s costar on “Hawak-Kamay,” Piolo Pascual, should really light a brighter and hotter fire under his thespic performances, which are consistently too “underplayed” to be profoundly moving.
Last month, for instance, Piolo’s character was given a really challenging and emotional “moment,” alone in a hospital room with the woman he secretly loved (Iza Calzado), who was unconscious after surviving a potentially lethal accident.
His character was supposed to intensely break down in fear, love and remorse—and yet the actor failed to fully “deliver,” taking the emotional moment up only a few notches, and not really conveying his character’s powerfully conflicted feelings.
Piolo has been doing this “underacting” portrayal for a long time now—but, as he moves into maturity, it’s really time for him to bite the bullet, “commit” fully to the thespic assignment at hand, and go beyond being merely “serviceable” as an actor!
