Shows We Don't "Get"

Jared, Jessica, and Christopher get together for this second edition of the Broadway, Etc. podcast to discuss the shows they just don't "get." Those shows that everyone else seems to adore, but they just can't get behind. Prepare for some surprising (controversial?) admissions. Also, the team discusses the future of the ill-fated musical "Rebecca," and if this European import will ever see the light of day on Broadway.

Tony Watch: Assessing the Fall Season Part 1

One lady who should really start shopping for her Tony night gown

It’s never too early to talk about the Tony Awards.  Ever.  Hell, sometimes it can be more fun to discuss them months in advance, when almost any prediction is pure speculation.  And while I won’t go so far as discussing productions and performances that have yet to open, I thought this mid-winter lull was the perfect time to reflect on those shows that have already opened.  So read on for my completely biased, 100% speculative opinion on who is and isn’t a contender for a nomination this year.

Let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start, I’m told), and run through this year’s Broadway shows in chronological order:

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

In a turn of events that positively sickens me, this show is actually in a good position to score some Tony love.  This is not due to any actual merit in the production (it’s terrible, and earned my Worst of 2011 award), but because of Tony politics.  You see, a large number of Tony voters are producers, either for Broadway or touring houses, and they tend to favor shows with wide commercial appeal.  Having awards to brag about helps with advertising, and a Best Musical win has been proven to boast almost any show’s box office.  With an average of $1.5 million in weekly grosses, Spider-Man’s definitely has monetary appeal, and it’s the only new musical still running after this fall’s flops.  Since none of the new musicals this spring are surefire critical or commercial hits, Spider-Man could end up with a Best Musical nod, further signifying that the Mayans were right about the world ending this year.

On the positive side, I can’t imagine it scoring any writing nominations (it is much easier for a short-lived show to get nominated in the Score and Book categories).  And while I found the design aspects of the production disappointing given the amount of money and hype involved with the show, I wouldn’t be offended to see it nominated for Scenic or Costume Design.  And since the Best Supporting Actor in a Musical category is pretty slim pickings thus far, Patrick Page could find himself nominated for being easily the show’s strongest asset.

Master Class

Yes, this show happened.  It even got pretty good reviews.  But it closed so long ago, and there are many more plays opening between now and Tony time.  It may manage to make it onto the Best Play Revival list, and leading lady Tyne Daly could conceivable get a Best Actress nomination.  But with so many plays premiering this season, such recognition seems unlikely.

Follies

Follies will be a major presence at this year’s Tony Awards.  That isn’t mere speculation, it’s fact.  The toast of the fall season and an event musical for the Broadway community, there was such overwhelming love of both the show and this production in particular that I can’t imagine it not getting a bevy of nominations.  It’s a lock for Best Revival, leaving only three slots up for grabs in that category.  It will also end up in one or more design categories (if it only gets one design nod, my money is on the costumes).  For so expertly realizing such a tricky piece, director Eric Schaeffer really deserves a directing nod, and “Who’s That Woman” (the mirror number) should be enough to net Warren Carlyle a Best Choreography nomination on its own.

Oddly enough, the show’s greatest potential of being snubbed comes in the acting categories.  With such a uniformly excellent cast, and many of them competing against one another, someone will surely get overlooked.  Of the four leads, I would say Rob Raines is the weakest, and he was still wonderful.  Although I would never underestimate the Broadway community’s love of Bernadette Peters, her take on Sally has proven oddly divisive and may keep her from being a strong contender in a year when Best Actress in a Musical is likely to be a bloodbath (we’ll see why a bit later).

However, there are two performers who so deserve acting recognition that if either one is omitted, you can expect a lengthy blog entry from me decrying how wrong the Tony voters got it.  Jan Maxwell was utterly sensational as Phyllis, and if her universally praised performance doesn’t warrant one of the five Best Actress slots I don’t know what does.  And Danny Burstein, who was positively revelatory as Buddy Plummer, is not only a shoe-in for a Best Actor nomination, but at this early date is the man to beat.

Man and Boy

Did you remember that this early fall revival even happened?  Probably not, which tells you just about everything you need to know as far as its Tony chances are concerned.  Three-time Tony-winner Frank Langella is so adored by critics that he may end up with a Best Actor nomination, but that is Man and Boy’s only shot at Tony gold.

The Mountaintop

This show disappointed a lot of people, and will pay for it come Tony time.  After receiving a lot of critical accolades during its London run and securing two genuine movie stars for its US premiere, this new drama underwhelmed most critics.  Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett got good but not great reviews, and the entire enterprise seems to have been damned by faint praise.  If the show had opened in the spring it would be more of a contender, but with the amount of competition this year it may be completely shut out.

There’s plenty more Tony chatter where this came from, but given the short attention spans of internet readers, I’ve probably already lost you.  The rest will have to wait for another day, while I spend the rest of this week trying to figure out what the hell a Superbowl is.

The Worst Show of 2011

Here it is, folks.  The moment you’ve all been waiting for.  There have been some truly odious shows in our countdown, but this last one takes the cake as the single worst piece of theatre I had the misfortune of seeing in 2011.  That show is (drumroll please)….

Spider-Man:  Turn Off the Dark

A scene from Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

Now, some of you might think I am being unnecessarily harsh on a show that spent all of 2011 (and much 2010) as Broadway’s whipping boy.  Does the much-maligned megamusical really need to be further abused in print after all of the malicious things written about it in the past 12 months?

Yes.  Yes it does.  Because, my friends, any of you who actually saw Spider-Man know that it may possibly be even worse than the press has let on.  Let’s forget, for a moment, that the idea of a Spider-Man musical is already a patently terrible idea.  There is already a level of absurd fantasy in the idea of masked men with superpowers beating the snot out of each other.  Having these characters break out into song pushes things way past the point of credibility.  By musicalizing a superhero story, you also force yourself into the very expensive and danger-prone realm of having to physically execute feats of daring-do eight times a week.

But even if we forget that the concept is irrevocably busted from the start, Spider-Man remains such a poorly plotted, underwritten mess that many of the 8-year-olds in the audience have written better Spidey stories while playing with their action figures.  This is even more infuriating given that the writers of Turn Off the Dark (which is an awful, nonsensical subtitle that it pains me to type) have chosen to focus on Spider-Man’s origin story, something that has been done repeatedly in other mediums, and done well.  What should have been a simple matter of copying what has worked before is completely bungled by the inept writers, leaving a show with plot holes so big you could easily drive the show’s massive set pieces through them.

While I am more than familiar with Spider-Man’s comic book history, I am by no means a purist.  I accept that certain details will need to be altered or updated to make the show work for modern audiences.  That is fine.  What isn’t fine is to see a show that completely alters the basic personality traits of a plethora of beloved characters, and then fails to successful execute those changes.  I don’t know what comics Julie Taymor and company have been reading, but Aunt May has never been as sarcastic and mean-spirited as she is in this show.  Mary Jane may come from a broken home, but I barely recognize the sullen emo girl running around the Foxwoods Theatre stage.  It certainly isn’t the self-assured redhead whose famous first words to Peter Parker were, “Face it, Tiger, you just hit the jackpot.”  By altering these traits, the show completely throws the characters’ interpersonal dynamics out of whack, and doesn’t bother to replace them with interesting or believable new ones.

Of course, it doesn’t help that the acting is uniformly terrible.  I’m sure all the behind-the-scenes drama and months of tech work weren’t conducive to the acting process, but dammit, this is Broadway, and I expect a certain standard of work for my $100 ticket.  Many of the actors seem utterly lost onstage, as if they have never before set foot in a theatre.  Save for Patrick Page as the Green Goblin, the leads lack believability, chemistry, and the ability to sing on-pitch, with all of the show’s vocals sounding unbearably flat.

Which brings us to the atrocious pop-rock score by Bono and the Edge.  I am not a U2 fan, but I have to believe that the multiple Grammy-winners are capable of much better than the garbage they’ve written for Spider-Man.  Every song sounded the same (bad), with the “orchestra” (I use quotation marks because I didn’t hear more than 6 instruments the night I saw it) and singers so out of balance that it’s laughable.  There’s also a cast-wide diction problem, but given the quality of the lyrics I could understand I don’t think I’m missing much.  At least the songs are repetitive, giving the audience multiple chances to decipher what is going on.

And what did that reported $75 million budget get spent on, exactly?  The show I saw didn’t look any more impressive than something like Wicked, which while still expensive cost only a fraction of the amount spent on this disaster.  I didn’t find the much-ballyhooed stunts to be overly impressive, despite the producers repeated promises that it would be unlike anything I’d ever seen.  The various wires and flying apparatuses are blatantly apparent, and everything moves at such a slow pace that it saps any excitement from the aerial battles.  I should point out that I am all for the actors’ safety; I just feel that for that amount of money, they should have been able to come up with something that looked more impressive while still remaining safe.

The most disheartening thing about Spider-Man is that so far, it has been a financial success, proving that a large portion of the theatergoing public doesn’t give a rat’s ass about quality.  I can only urge all of you to avoid this show like the plague.  If you think it’s going to be a fun, Showgirls-like debacle, you are wrong.  While certainly a train wreck, it isn’t the least bit of fun, and is easily the Worst Show of 2011.

Note:  These observations are based on Julie Taymor’s original version, not the revised show currently playing the Foxwoods.  While the new version is reportedly better, the show I saw was so far gone that I cannot imagine they made enough improvements during the three week hiatus to salvage the endeavor.  For one thing, they were stuck working around Taymor’s costumes, sets, and aerial stunts, since all of these elements were far too expensive to simply throw out.  And given that Taymor’s version ran for five months, longer than several of the shows on my Best and Worst lists, I feel absolutely no qualms about naming it the Worst Show of 2011.

Will It Recoup?

Fair warning:  I'm about to get pretty "industry insider" on you guys right now.  Not so much in that I'm going to be using a bunch of pretentious terms you don't know, but because the topic I'm going to discuss doesn't really come up outside of industry newspapers and websites like Playbill.com.

That subject, boys and girls, is when a major Broadway musical manages to recoup its investment costs and therefore start turning a profit.  The reason this topic fascinates me is because it is not a straightforward result of popularity or the length of the run (although those things obviously come into play).  Some shows manage to recoup their investment within the space of a year, and others run for years without making back their initial costs.

For example, The Addams Family, that veritable punching bag of the 2009-2010 Broadway season, will be closing this Christmas.  By the time it's gone, the show will have run for nearly two years.  Furthermore, for the first six months of that run, it did nearly sell-out business and made over $1 million a week.  And yet, the show still won't have turned a profit by the time it closes, due to its high initial capitalization and what must amount to high weekly running costs (something tells me Nathan Lane and Bebe Nueworth did not come cheap).  Meanwhile, there are shows like the 2009 Hair revival that manage to make back their money in as little as 5 months.

I would argue that moreso than the initial cost, the thing that really makes or breaks a show financially is the weekly running cost.  It costs money to pay the actors, musicians, and stagehands, not to mention maintain the props, costumes, and sets while also paying rent on the theatre and the monthly power bill.  And since even the biggest theatres can only cram in about 10,000 people during a typical 8 show week, that means a very finite amount of earning potential for even sell-out shows (and this is assuming everyone pays full price for their tickets, which pretty much never happens).  If the weekly costs aren't kept in check, your show is going to have a tough time turning a profit even if it runs for years, since they amount to additional money being spent on top of the initial capitalization.  It's basically like trying to pay off a credit card while continuing to make charges on it; the more you "charge" in weekly running costs, the longer it will take to pay the balance down to zero.

So in the spirit of this fascinating (to me, anyway) subtopic of the theatrical business, I wanted to play a little guessing game about which of this season's musicals will actually turn a profit and prove financially successful.  I'm going to focus on the musicals because they:  a) cost more; b) are more likely to be commercial runs instead of not-for-profit productions that aren't actually concerned with making money.  So let's take a look at the first 5 musicals opening on Broadway this season, starting with Broadway's other favorite punching bag, Spider-Man.

(Note:  This may or may not be an attempt to salvage an article written for a certain nameless website who decided not to run it at the behest of their marketing department, after I had put in a lot of time and energy to write it.  Just sayin'.)

Spider-Man:  Turn Off the Dark

Yes, it’s been running for almost a year, but Spider-Man is technically part of the current Broadway season due to its mid-June opening.  This famously troubled musical is the most expensive in Broadway history, with a whopping $75 million in initial production costs (for comparison, Wicked cost “only” $14 million).  That hefty price tag, combined with the critical lashing the show received, led many to predict the show’s early demise.  But ticket sales have remained strong throughout the fall, and the show regularly grosses over $1 million a week.

Will It Recoup?  No.  Despite steady box office returns, there’s almost no chance of Spider-Man turning a profit.  In addition to its astronomically high initial capitalization, the technologically advanced show spends almost $1 million a week paying salaries, power bills, and maintaining sets and costumes.  Spider-Man would need to continue its current earning patterns for five to seven years before it begins making money, something that seems incredibly unlikely.  Only 15 musicals in history have run for that long, with recent megahits like The Producers and Hairspray only managing six year runs.

Follies

One of the many attractions of the critically lauded revival of Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking 1971 musical Follies is the fact that the show is a fully staged production.  The large-cast, costume-heavy musical is usually performed in scaled down concert versions due to its prohibitively expensive production costs (the original production was at the time the most expensive Broadway show in history, with an $800,000 capitalization).  In this era of bare bones revivals and smaller scale new musicals, the show’s 41-person cast and 27-piece orchestra seems particularly extravagant.

Will It Recoup?  Probably not.  The weekly running costs (including actor and musician salaries) are just too high.  Box office returns have been strong enough to prompt a three week extension of the show’s limited run, but Follies is also one of the few new productions currently open.  The glut of show openings in late October and November will surely steal some of Follies’ box office thunder, but if strong word of mouth continues to drive business there’s a possibility of a second extension which would increase its chances of recouping.

Godspell

This staple of high school and community theatre is prepping for its first Broadway revival, and its financial prospects are particularly up in the air.  The show does have a pre-established brand that’s familiar to the tourists who drive a large percentage of Broadway ticket sales, and being from the same composer as Wicked certainly won’t hurt.  In fact, the revival’s location next door to the Witches of Oz may make it an ideal alternative to those unable to score tickets to the perpetually sold-out hit.

Will It Recoup?  The chances are 50/50 on this one.  Popular regional shows do not necessarily set New York box offices on fire, and people may wonder why they should spend $135 to see something they could view for significantly less back home.  But with a 10-person cast and a small venue like the Circle in the Square Theatre helping to keep running costs down, the show shouldn’t need to sell-out every night to remain financially viable.  With some good reviews and positive word of mouth, it could easily run for a year or more, which is likely all it would need to turn a profit.

Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway

Although not a musical in the traditional sense, this solo concert featuring one of Hollywood’s A-list stars qualifies as one for our purposes.  Headliner Hugh Jackman has been on Broadway exactly twice, and both times his presence has translated into box office gold.  In fact, Jackman was such a strong draw that both productions couldn’t continue without him, and The Boy from Oz even elected to temporarily shutter for a week during Jackman’s scheduled vacation rather than try to sell tickets without him.

Will It Recoup?  Yes.  Jackman’s Broadway concert already has a reported $6 million in advance ticket sales, cementing the Tony-winner’s status as a proven box office draw.  Even with Jackman’s star salary – which could easily be $100,000 a week or more – and an 18-piece orchestra to pay, running costs for a concert like this are comparatively low, making this one of the surest financial bets of the season.

Bonnie and Clyde

Frank Wildhorn must be a glutton for punishment.  Just six months after the critical and financial disaster that was Wonderland, Wildhorn is back with a new musical based on two of the most notorious outlaws in American history.  Helping this show’s financial viability is an intriguing subject matter that seems ripe for musicalization, and the large number of diehard fans of Wildhorn’s previous works.  Of course, the same could have been said about Wonderland, and that barely lasted a month.

Will It Recoup?  No.  There are just too many factors working against it.  Despite two well-reviewed out-of-town tryouts and two well liked up-and-comers in the lead roles (Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan, respectively), chances are Bonnie and Clyde will be ripped to shreds by New York critics, who have historically lambasted Wildhorn’s shows.  And even the composer’s biggest hit, Jekyll & Hyde, failed to turn a profit despite nearly four years on Broadway.  Given the current economic climate, Bonnie and Clyde can hardly count on a run that long, making the show’s financial prospects grim.

That's all for now.  I hope to make this a recurring article, so look for another installment as we get closer to more show opennings.  :-)