Hey, we haven’t checked in on this rolling disaster in a while, how’s it been doing? The incompetent, allegedly insane director they fired is suing them for some reason? Yep, that makes sense.
Yes, folks, Julie Taymor is back and she wants to get paid. We really wish this lawsuit was some sort of gibbering insanity, but really what it is is Taymor is unhappy about being fired. She made a claim for $500,000 in compensation which went into arbitration, so she’s taking a different tack and suing for royalties because the show makes use of her “creative” “contributions”. Or, roughly translated, she’s ticked the producers brought in different people who completely redid her show and made it into an actual hit instead of an embarrassing disaster.
This is actually a controversial topic in the theater industry, as theatrical directors are massive ego cases who think they’re entitled to a share of a play’s copyright if they worked on the first staging. The law is a bit more nuanced than that, of course, but Taymor’s case could settle the debate once and for all. Or it could end with a judge saying “They totally revamped your work, STFU.”