Broadway producers have always kept a firm eye on what’s happening in the West End (just as West End producers routinely look across the water to what’s happening over there), since a ready-made success is always safer to produce than beginning a show from scratch. Broadway is duly about to see transfers for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Woman in White and John Doyle’s reduced actor-musician production of Sweeney Todd (that began its life at the tiny Watermill Theatre in Newbury) this month, while the National’s production of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys has just confirmed a Broadway opening at the Broadhurst Theatre next April, produced by Boyett/Ostar Productions who have invested in the National precisely in order to secure them a first option deal in taking things from there to a further life.
But the West End is also, increasingly, a first port-of-call for Broadway producers looking to actively invest not just in such future possibilities but also in their current ones on their home territory. So it is that three consecutive openings this week, of Heroes (at Wyndham’s on Tuesday), Duckstastic! (at the Albery yesterday afternoon) and the transfer of the Donmar’s Mary Stuart (to the Apollo last night) have American producers above their titles: the all-powerful Shubert Organisation in the first case, influential film and theatre producer Scott Rudin in the second, and Arielle Tepper in the third. My money, however, is only on the third show actually going across the Atlantic.
