There's a star-studded production of Company being staged in New York for a few performances this week. The cast is amazing…though as this piece notes, when you sign up stars like that, you get the problem that they're often unable to rehearse when you'd like them to be rehearsing. I suspect with this kind of production, there's another possible downside, which is that the performance becomes less about the material and whatever the show is about and primarily about Who's Doing It. Folks come to see stars gathered together in historic assemblage, not to see the material.
I'm not saying that's wrong, just that it is. Show business — and we sometimes forget that theater is show business — is a lot about creating events or a package that sounds commercial. I once heard a movie studio exec asked at a seminar, "What makes a script good?" He replied — this was in the late eighties — "A good script is something that Eddie Murphy's willing to sign on to appear in."