The ‘Tyrannical and Abusive’ Garth Drabinsky, and His Attempted Return to Broadway with ‘Paradise Square’ - Part 2
CW: Abuse (physical, mental, emotional, verbal), derogatory language.
Who is Garth Drabinsky, what is Paradise Square, and why should anyone care?
The latter is being heralded as the first new musical to reopen Broadway. It has been described as “one of the most anticipated stage musicals to make it to Broadway since the pandemic began”, and as “set to rival Hamilton’s Broadway success”. It is hurtling along to open in Chicago in a matter of days on November 2nd, before shifting onto Broadway early next year in February.
The former is the attached producer of this show – a convicted felon from Canada, a lauded ex-producing mogul, and a creator of hostile working environments. He, correspondingly, has been described as a “seductive and relentless psychopath”, or as actress Rebecca Caine put it, “Scott Rudin but maple syrup flavoured”. A criminal lawsuit in 1998 characterized that “Drabinsky’s management style was tyrannical and abusive”. It is furthermore well-established that he has historically created and maintained producing environments where he, as reported by The Globe and Mail, “intimidated staff through profanity, abuse, and derision, either directly or by direction of other senior employees who adopted the same approach”.
In short – Garth Drabinsky’s return is a threat, and a direct contradiction to the progressive forward motion to be found currently as some of the world’s most notable theatrical environments emerge from unprecedented periods of dormancy. Cries like “#bringbackbetter” are elsewhere typifying the dominant mentality being striven for in hoping to create safer and more diverse workplaces for returning inhabitants. And, even further, tangible actions and consequences are in fact materializing in response to other publicly raised inequities.
Actors are leaving rather than returning to shows in outrage at current theatrical climates, like with Karen Olivo. Investigations via Actors’ Equity are being triggered into working conditions, like with Nora Schell and Jagged Little Pill. Corrupt or abusive white men who have conventionally yielded power in destructive ways are being removed from their positions of leadership, like with Ethan McSweeney or Scott Rudin.
Drabinsky’s imminent re-emergence on Broadway thus places him at the center of a culture in which he no longer belongs, and positions him as a direct danger to the safety of his employees if this is allowed to happen.
So far nowhere else has it been fully explored why. Click here for Part 1
Part 2: “Callous, negligent and abuse-enabling”
Rebecca Caine, and Colm Wilkinson and Rebecca Caine, in the Toronto production of The Phantom of the Opera.
Attention from this summer onwards has brought increased light and evidence to matters concerning these angles of Drabinsky’s impact, principally by Rebecca Caine as provided on social media. This comes courtesy of her experiences as Christine Daaé in the previously referenced Toronto production of The Phantom of the Opera.
During her time as the show’s principal female lead between 1989-1992, Caine experienced the use of prolonged, excessive, “brutish conduct” and violence on stage from her co-star Colm Wilkinson. This happened in tandem with the management and Mr. Drabinsky’s callous indifference to these matters that enabled the perpetuation of hostile working environments.
Caine spoke up about these harmful and negligent conditions, and the environment of fear she was forced to work in day after day at the time. The result? Drabinsky’s Livent terminated her contract and refused to pay the remaining portion of her salary.
There’s no shortage of supporting evidence for these details, due to the 150-page arbitration report that was generated in consequence of Caine being required to take on Drabinsky’s multi-million-dollar company. This saga formed a highly contentious and drawn-out legal battle in 1992, that was described for its severity and intensity by Canadian Actor’s Equity as strongly “not traditional”.
According to the arbitration report, Wilkinson “perpetuated the conflict” between them, and was “unnecessarily rough with [Caine] on stage” through the use of “excessive force” over prolonged time periods. She found that “as time went on, Mr. Wilkinson became rougher and rougher”. She contrastingly became more “frightened” and “afraid of Wilkinson’s treatment”, frequently spending large portions of her employment with the production “very upset and distraught”.
Matters worsened and tension escalated between the pair throughout 1991 into 1992 up to a few key moments. In particular performances, Wilkinson “lost it”, or was “seething with anger”, or said to have “gone out of control”. He demonstrated physically violent actions so intense that Caine’s “wrist was severely sprained as a result”. At a later date, he “grabbed her…and hurled her off stage with such force” that further injured her wrist and nearly knocked her flat. In response to Caine being made “to cry out” at this, Wilkinson snarled at her, “That is the best f*cking acting you have ever done”.
These actions resulted in short-term grievances, such as causing acute fear and pain due to the immediate physical injuries and by serving as the trigger for precipitating Livent into terminating contracts. But they also had longer-term implications. The protracted physical damage was caused by way of the fact Caine faces compromised motility in her wrist even to this day. Mental health suffered both in enduring the troubling events in real-time over lengthy periods (“I waited a whole summer to hear that I’d won my case… The next morning I woke up having a panic attack so severe I wanted to go to the hospital. I had PTSD,” Caine would say); and also throughout the following three decades in carrying the burden of the trauma these events caused.
Moreover, Caine’s experiences from her few years spent in the show irrevocably altered the entire trajectory of her career, as these encounters subsequently made her withdraw from the musical theatre profession for the next twenty years.
For all this significant damage Caine’s treatment caused her, the arbitrators ultimately found she had essentially done nothing to deserve it. They ruled that “Ms. Caine cannot be held accountable for Mr. Wilkinson’s brutish conduct towards her”, and that the circumstances of Wilkinson’s “excessive roughness…which was abusive in nature…did not justify the premature termination of Ms. Caine’s…contract”. As those involved from positions of managerial power were “either unable or unwilling to deal effectively with Mr. Wilkinson's roughness”, it is clear that the management team, Livent, and Mr. Drabinsky failed Rebecca and grossly endangered her safety.
Caine related that she raised concerns with members of Drabinsky’s management team “repeatedly about Wilkinson’s stage roughness”. Nothing was done. Meanwhile, Drabinsky himself in his status as a veritable “control freak” knew exactly what was going on. “[He] was aware of her grievances, and was meant to air them with Wilkinson.” He did not. Again, nothing was done. What DID he do instead then? He called Rebecca a “c*nt” via her agent, and “told her to get back on stage”.
As the saga began to attract some attention in 1992 after being published in the Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, Drabinsky refused to make any comment on the published report. “It’s not particularly germane to the running of this corporation,” he obfuscated.
In short, Drabinsky’s callous, negligent and abuse-enabling behaviors become self-evident.
Others involved and under Livent’s employment also allowed the mistreatment to continue, and contributed to a wide range of behaviors that fostered hostile working environments. These included tactics like sexist dismissal – calling Caine “difficult” and “contrary”, and saying that she was “overreacting”. Her requests to change small blocking details in the show to protect her safety were overruled, given that “Mr. Wilkinson did not like changes, he was valuable to the show, and they did not want him to be disturbed”, as well as the fact he had director Hal Prince’s approval.
Also, intimidation practices were present, like threats of previous contract terminations being used to enforce continued performances in unsafe conditions. Or alternatively, with Anne Allan (the show’s resident director) saying, “if it came to a choice, Ms. Caine would be the first to go since it was easier to find Christine’s than to find another Phantom”. Clear signs of victim-blaming are evident here too like with Livent taking the position it was “Ms. Caine’s failure to follow a note that provoked Wilkinson”.
Colm Wilkinson being congratulated by Hal Prince and Garth Drabinsky at the opening night premiere of The Phantom of the Opera at The Pantages Theatre, Toronto, in 1989 (Photo: Mike Slaughter/Toronto Star via Getty Images)
Along with Allan, key players who propagated some of these behaviors included Edgar Dobie in his position as the Senior Vice-President of Livent. Dobie’s association with Drabinsky ends here. He was coerced into testifying against Caine in the first place, not long after he was “escorted to the door by security guards” upon leaving Livent and seemingly only on the grounds of Drabinsky threatening to otherwise withhold his settlement pay. The same severance of association cannot be indicated for Anne Allan. Caine would characterize how Allan at the time was “basically [Drabinsky’s] assassin”. This relationship is crucial to remember, as she is once again right back at Drabinsky’s side in her position as the Associate Producer / Resident Director on Paradise Square itself. If one is looking for evidence of change, distance, or accountability from the errors of the creative teams of the past, one will not find them here.
This is evident too in the fact unfavorable working environments have also been described in relation to Paradise Square in the present, putting actors again in unsafe or adverse conditions. One example that documents this is an interview on Irish radio station Ceol na nGael in June of 2021 that described how the choreographer “Bill T. Jones is a monster” with “what he was getting the people to do and pushing them”.
The above patterns of behaviors demonstrated by individuals employed by Drabinsky are concordant with patterns as revealed by Barry Avrich in his 2016 book “Moguls, Monsters and Madmen: An Uncensored Life in Show Business” – and also link to the initial indication of self-perpetuating cycles and cultures of abusive behavior.
“There is not a day in my life that I don’t resent what Garth did to me”
Through his multiple decades of first-hand experience of working with and for Mr. Drabinsky, Avrich here uses his unique position to document some of the practices he observed, including experiences of being “forced to deal with Garth’s people”. These employees he describes as “all…suffering from Stockholm Syndrome” as the consequence of being made to regularly endure the behavior of their tyrannical master as a “control freak with a savage temper”. Avrich would say, “Having been beaten and pissed on by Garth, they were eager to beat and piss on everyone else beneath them”.
These establish multiple reportings by separate individuals that substantiate Drabinsky’s conduct as overt and well-recognized patterns of behavior. It thus becomes unambiguous that they are far beyond anomalies to be dismissed as just one woman’s unfortunate experiences.
Garth was known abjectly to not treat his employees well. For instance, in frequent, long, and arduous meetings, “if someone made a mistake, or failed to answer a question, Garth took that person down ruthlessly, not just for that one error, but for every stumble and misdeed in his victim’s employment history”.
Amongst others who faced Drabinsky’s treatment as a “certified bastard and betrayer”, Avrich would affirm “some people left Garth’s employ damaged for life”.
Jon Wilner was one of many who could testify to this. And he did. Once Drabinsky’s respected advertising man, Wilner would report that when Livent went bust, his company was forced to declare bankruptcy too. “My career was cut in half... I had to fire 35 people and shut down a business I worked at for 28 years,” Wilner would say. “And all because of his maniacal ego.”
“There is not a day in my life that I don’t resent what Garth did to me”, he conveyed in 2008.
Near the conclusion of Avrich’s discussion on Drabinsky, he makes mention of “Garth’s toughest critic” – “theatre columnist Michael Riedel of the New York Post, who said of Garth, ‘He was a tyrant, cruel and unpleasant and nasty and brutal”.
Riedel himself has his own moral flaws, but in his journalism he has indeed written on Drabinsky with seemingly a higher frequency than anyone else. He would jocularly refer to him as “that real-life Max Bialystock” – referencing The Producers to invoke connotations of an “aging, fraudulent, corruptible, and greedy Broadway” mogul.
Riedel dedicates considerable space in his 2020 book, ‘Singular Sensation’, to further accounts of Drabinsky’s abusive, violent and alarming behaviors over prolonged periods of time. These involve personal accounts like Drabinsky “pounding [Riedel’s] desk recorder so hard that [his] tape recorder fell off it” during an interview. Or alternatively, via retrospectively collected reports from those who worked with or under him. This included his “bullying” of his accounting department and putting them, “for several years, under intense pressure” while forcedly concocting his fraudulent books.
Drabinsky was one of Livent’s top three executives, and it was these “top executives [who] relied on coercion and intimidation to browbeat their accountants”. If Drabinsky didn’t like something during meetings, he would yell enraged expletives like “This is shit!”, and often target someone, usually a low-level employee, for humiliation. One specific example details how a “[young, female] underling in the marketing department…broke down in tears” when he “lit into” her just “because she didn’t have the answer to one of his questions”.
Evidence of this “brutish working environment at Livent” is further substantiated elsewhere, as in testimony via the company’s then-executive vice president, Robert Webster, in 1999 from an affidavit produced as part of Livent’s lawsuit. Webster details a culture where “bullying and abuse were standard fare”, which “included executives who screamed and swore at staff and employees who were reduced to tears”. He even more damningly reports how this “mistreatment started with the company’s founder” in saying “I had never before experienced anyone with Drabinsky’s abusive and profane management style”.
“Those who did not adhere to these demands were admonished”, Webster said. This left some employees who “felt nauseated by the tension”, some who were “shaking like a leaf” after giving Drabinsky memos, some who were told consistently their “work was of no use to him”, or even one who Drabinsky threatened he “would have to take action” against if his work was deemed lacking or – florally in Drabinsky’s words – if he “wanted to sit in a corner and jerk off instead of servicing [Drabinsky’s] needs”.
Drabinsky would also yell at and harass individuals who were meant to be his equals on creative or authority-based footings. Nancy Coyne, an advertising industry pioneer whom he was approaching to work on Kiss Of The Spiderwoman, recounted how from their very first meeting “he started to yell at and humiliate me”. Lynn Ahrens, as one of the composers of Ragtime, would recall events of him “shouting” at her with belligerent orders like “You will do what I tell you!”. And this was after he had already threatened her: “If you don’t do an amazing job, I’m going to fire you”.
Drabinsky actively heckled prominent associate, Marty Bell, soon after Livent began to come crumbling down on the street and demanded that he quit his job. This was irrespective of the fact Drabinsky was the one who had made Bell move to Canada for the role not long before in the first place, as well as forcing his wife to quit her job, and having all their family with their young son give up their previous home in a different country.
He did indeed cause additional terminations of employment as well as just threatening with them. Before Webster, a previous executive vice president at Livent was Lynda Friendly. She “complained about the theatre impresario’s abusive and destructive behavior” towards her. Drabinsky fired her. Like Rebecca Caine, this presents another case of intense escalations including contract dismissal in the face of reported abuse. Friendly documents taking the matter to the Superior Court in 1997 where she gave evidence of Drabinsky “swearing at her in front of senior staff”. Some of the things Drabinsky yelled included tirades like, “Who the f--- do you think you are to tell me how to address you in my office? I'll do what I want. I run this company”.
But even beyond verbal abuse, Drabinsky wasn’t above physical violence either. Michael Riedel conveyed when one employee made an error regarding a hotel room, “he was so annoyed with his assistant he turned around and slapped him in the face”.
Riedel’s book or these additional testimonies should’ve, or at least could’ve, been to Garth Drabinsky what the piece in The Hollywood Reporter was to Scott Rudin. Instead, even after reporting all of these abusive and violent behaviors, the world just moved on or Riedel in his acknowledgments section recalls Drabinsky and their interactions fondly, in an even obsequiously nostalgic manner. Riedel was “grateful” for being granted a new interview in 2020 for his book, saying it was “good to see him after all these years”, and ultimately, that Drabinsky was a man whom one could “admire”.
And plenty did. One reason also that these published revelations weren’t quite as impactful as they could’ve been and why Drabinsky has so far faced such minimal effective resistance against his proposed comeback, is that though “Drabinsky is a liar and a bully…, he’s still got plenty of friends in the theater world”.
There are more than enough people willing to look the other way regarding his previous indiscretions and embark on or approve of new projects irrespective. And Drabinsky himself is more than eager to do the same. Asked in 2017 or 2019 if he would comment on his richly problematic history, he replied “I choose not to...because it's the past” and it “is behind me”.
“I’m looking at my future”, he would say. Or rather – the events and injustices of the past are immaterial to him, and he just wants to get back to his positions of power in the theatre, since “he thinks his contribution to the arts overrides his crimes”.
Of course, it is arguably possible for people to change. Perhaps Drabinsky has repented and is actually now contrite for his sins. Perhaps he is a changed man.
This is certainly at least the impression he is keen to put forward himself.
But there is a conflict between Drabinsky’s words as well as the ideas he would like to put to the media, against the words of others and the implications of his own actions.
Garth Drabinsky Speaking At Beth Shalom Synagogue in 2013 (Photo: Richard Lautens. Toronto Star via Getty Images)
Firstly, it must be remembered that he pleaded “not guilty” to his original crimes. He couldn’t even then admit to responsibility for his own culpability in breaking the law, instead declaring, “I have complete confidence that we will be vindicated” instead of being sent to jail.
Following his release from prison on parole years later, he gave an in-person talk in Canada in 2013 where he said, “I made serious omissions, mistakes and failings,” and “I am genuinely remorseful for the devastation” caused.
And yet. In his book, Barry Avrich would describe how he’d visited Drabinsky in jail and subsequently would question, “Did he have any remorse or would he express any culpability for what he had done? None that I could see. It was classic Garth. His defense mechanisms were in full operation—poor me, trapped in this bad situation that isn’t my fault”.
Or alternatively, Michael Riedel reported in 2015 after his release that “sources who keep tabs on Drabinsky say he’s unbowed and unashamed”. “He has no guilt,” Riedel recorded an “old confederate” saying, and that still, “he thinks he didn’t do anything wrong, and if the world thinks he did, well, he’s done his time, and now he wants to get back to producing Broadway shows.”
At Drabinsky’s 2013 talk, his behavior also appears concordant with Avrich’s previous characterization of him as being emotionally manipulative and historically wont to covet sympathy. He described the horrors of his time in prison, as with the “murderers, pedophiles, drug dealers, addicts” and how his “life has been shattered”. But he neglects to mention that much of his sentence was in fact spent at the minimum security and quaintly named Beaver Creek establishment in Ontario – “not far from the summer camps he had attended as a boy”. Or alternatively, that he was mostly free on day parole and out of prisons entirely in halfway houses; or that “during weekends, he [spent] time with family at their home and at a cottage”.
Additionally, he talks of how from the point his sentence began, “the guillotine blade had fallen, severing me from my entire world”. This conflicts with those who knew him presenting that even in prison, “he calls his old Broadway pals every week to talk about new ideas for shows”. He emerged from prison straight into being “employed with a substantial annual salary” with a company that would enable him to get back to producing, and with works already lined up waiting to go.
Readings of not just one but two different shows with their own rights, books, scores, and casts were set for mounting in 2016. This is a tribute to a long thread of Drabinsky’s previous ministrations from inside prison and even in spite of the fact just two years previously he was still under parole.
A company called Teatro Proscenium allowed him this capacity. This was a partnership founded in 2013 by his friends and past associates “when they realized Drabinsky wanted to get back on Broadway” to help him indulge his still insatiable producing appetite. Here Drabinsky operated largely in charge of the company’s ventures, but under a variety of names as “anything from the ‘creative consultant’ to the ‘artistic producer’”. This was due to the need to have him ostensibly associated “at arm’s length”, on the basis of him being banned from owning or having stocks in any company under Canadian law.
Despite these technicalities and caveats, it was said “it is clear that [a Teatro Proscenium] project is Drabinsky’s baby through and through,”. The company was founded specifically for “raising funds for…Drabinsky projects” and any resulting show would involve “Drabinsky’s name above the title” without question. No legal loophole was too large to stand in the way of Drabinsky’s onward quest for control and power.
It is strongly doubtful that his words are trustworthy, the same can be said of his behaviors. Drabinsky is still exhibiting the same infamous anger and demonstrating the same highly dubious or even fraudulent accounting practices as before he was sent to prison.
In 2017, “he lashed out at Jonathan Tunick, the orchestrator” he’d chosen for his show Sousatzka, when he “wheeled on him during a rehearsal and screamed” or “bellowed” at “full-tilt” – “Why am I paying you all this money?”. Graciela Daniele as Sousatzka’s choreographer would bring up his “fiery temper” as well in 2016, and list amongst some redeeming qualities, that “he has his explosions” still.
Even more acutely in relation to Paradise Square here, he is seemingly not trying to change his ways at all, by virtue of hiring people who have been described as “monsters” or “assassins” in their treatment of cast members. The alacrity to reinstate people at his right hand with whom he has historic relations back to his fraudulent and documented abuse-enabling days of the ‘90s in Anne Allan, conveys how far from turning over a new leaf Paradise Square actually is.
Additionally, Drabinsky frequently exhibits an evasiveness and unwillingness to talk about his behaviors regarding financial matters with any clarity.
He cuts any discussion concerning money off with phrases like “I’m just not going to answer any of these questions, or “it’s not relevant”, as exemplified in his TV interview on The Agenda with Steve Paikin in 2016 in relation to Sousatzka.
Is it really not relevant to ask where the money is coming from for a project being helmed by a man who bankrupted a company, stole $500 million, additionally took $4.6 million’s worth in personal kickbacks, and hasn’t really worked since the turn of the century?
It wasn’t even just mega-rich investors he was defrauding at the time either when he stole this money and “left a human wake of wreckage in [his company’s] collapse”. In a hugely exploitative and iniquitous case, it was evidenced in 1999 that “hundreds of school children have been caught in the financial mess surrounding Livent Inc”. The young kids themselves and their families “even had to dig into their own pockets to help cover the company's debts”, in reference to their programs run to stage productions for school children. Some schools were left with unpaid debts of tens of thousands of dollars.
And these debts did not magically disappear. Both Drabinsky’s debts and his disreputable accounting practices continue right up to the present.
The reported feat of him having his casts come in to do Q&A sessions both “early” and “unpaid” before each of these special school performances as above, isn’t the only instance of those under his employment lacking payment. Actors or creatives or “angry people claiming to still be owed money by Drabinsky” “on Twitter” are still visible to this day, and were notable enough to be referenced in a profile in The Globe and Mail in 2017 that shone a more candid than usual light on Drabinsky’s capacity for a “comeback”.
Some principal leads from his shows awaited reimbursement for their work at length. As an example, Patti Cohenour headed Drabinsky’s Canadian touring cast of The Phantom of The Opera and was linked to other Livent-run productions, like Show Boat, through the ‘90s. Cohenour had been owed enough money from Drabinsky for her work when Livent went bankrupt and was dissatisfied enough with her experiences with him that even two decades later, she refused to come back to the 20th-anniversary Canadian reunion event for the show in 2009.
As he emerged from jail, it was documented in 2014 that Drabinsky had “received $7 million in outstanding loans from prominent friends “over several years to help cover his legal fees”.
One lawyer, who was owed “more than $61,000 for legal work” done in 2014, started an investigation into Drabinsky’s finances, in escalation of already fruitlessly “pursuing Drabinsky for payment for years”. Only in 2020 were the findings of these inquiries eventually concluded, whereupon it becomes apparent Drabinsky is still trying to exempt himself from standard, legal financial responsibilities. Rather than paying back those he owed, Drabinsky attempted moves like trying to eliminate evidence of a $2.63 million house of his, in transferring its ownership to his wife to put the “property out of reach of his creditors”. However, “the judge declared the ownership transfer void” given that “Mr. Drabinsky offers no other explanation that makes sense”, and the transaction “bore many badges of fraud”.
Illuminating how Drabinsky is still “deeply indebted” and concurrently intertwined with fraudulent practices is just one of the ways of observing how Drabinsky’s ‘changed ways’ and ‘remorseful behaviors’ appear hollow and highly questionable. What alternatively does not appear questionable, is Drabinsky’s clear angling for money and a return to notoriety and Broadway with as much control and power as he can conceivably acquire.