Undaunted, clearly, by the current failure of the West End to Broadway transfer of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (see blog entry for Friday November 4), another British-born stage adaptation of a popular family film, Mary Poppins, is chancing the transatlantic crossing, heading for a Broadway opening at the New Amsterdam next November 16 (following previews from October 14), displacing current tenant The Lion King that transfers to the Minskoff (just as Beauty and the Beast transferred from the Palace to the Lunt-Fontanne to make way for Aida in 2000).
But while co-producer Disney have yet to go belly-up on Broadway, the stakes this time are even higher for their British partner Cameron Mackintosh, who hasn’t had a fully-fledged Broadway hit since the opening of Miss Saigon in 1991 that then ran for a decade. In the years inbetween, he’s opened Five Guys Named Moe (for a run of just over a year from April 1992), seen the NT’s revivals of Carousel and Oklahoma! transfer to Broadway for runs of just 9 and 11 months respectively in 1994 and 2002, and the Sondheim revue Putting It Together run for just 3 months in 1999. He also produced the four month Broadway run of Adventures in Motion Pictures’ Swan Lake in 1998. But Mackintosh has also closed Cats (in 2000) and Les Mis (in 2003) since; and now only has The Phantom of the Opera on the Broadway boards.
So it’s not just a lot of money, but reputations, too, that will be riding on this one.
