Though Ken Livingstone seems to offer the West End promotional subsidy from time to time in the publicity campaigns he mounts on behalf of them, and a South Seas island, whose economy is driven by the proceeds of bird droppings, infamously funded the ill-fated West End run of the musical Leonardo in the early 90s, government usually wisely keeps out of commercial productions. But in what is now evidently a first, the Canadian province of Ontario has agreed to contribute some $2.5million of the $23million budget for next year’s Toronto world premiere production of a stage musical version of The Lord of the Rings, as reported yesterday in the New York Times.
According to Sandra McInnes the president and chief exec of the Ontario Tourism Marketing Partnership Corporation, “We’ve never done anything like this. But this is one of the largest productions ever to come to Toronto, and we have a vested interest in seeing it’s successful.” There’ll be a knock-on effect to Toronto’s commercial infrastructure, because of course a successful show isn’t only about the money it brings back in ticket revenues, but in other associated industries: “Our estimation is that a 36-week run could bring in close to $40 million Canadian”, said president and chief exec Bruce MacMillan of Tourism Toronto’s president and chief exec, a private convention and tourism group financed mainly by the city’s hoteliers, who has also contributed a further $2.5million to market the show abroad. “Everything is a risk,” he went on, “but we did our due diligence.”
There’s clearly a lot riding on the success of this production, not least for the status of Toronto as a theatre centre: in the late 80s and early 90s, it became a major try-out centre for big musicals thanks to the now-disgraced impresario Garth Drabinsky (whose accounting irregularities brought down his LIvent empire), who started off productions like Show Boat and Ragtime that made their way to Broadway from there. The deputy minister for tourism in Ontario Bill Allen is quoted as saying, “We’d like to be second behind New York. Frankly, we lost a lot of our place in the theatre scene, and we see Lord of the Rings as a way to bring that back.”
Like all theatre investment, the money could come back assuming the show is successful – but would be lost if not. “While 8 of every 10 Broadway shows fail to earn back their money”, notes Bill Allen, “Toronto tourism officials argued that the cost of not investing might be higher. We realised in the last couple of years that if you don’t have new and exciting things to do, people go somewhere else. They want an experience they can’t find anywhere else.”
And to ensure that they can’t get it elsewhere, the deal struck by the Toronto investors with producer Kevin Wallace – formerly of London’s Really Useful Theatre Company – is that the city gets an exclusive run of the show in North America from its opening next March until the summer of 2007.
Even Cameron Mackintosh – who early on in his career did the unthinkable and persuaded the Arts Council to invest in his commercial tours of Oklahoma! and My Fair Lady in the late 70s – has never pulled off a government partnership of this scale. Jerry Springer — the Opera recently tried and failed to persuade ACE to invest in its forthcoming tour; but things seem to be much different in Canada.
