There was talk, subsequently aborted, of Cats returning to London last year, just three years after it had closed at the New London Theatre after a record-breaking run of 21 years. But now that Les Miserables is on track to break the Cats record in London, it was announced on Friday that Les Mis will be returning to Broadway from October 21 (prior to a November 9 opening), just three years after it closed there after a 16-year run that put it in third place of the longest-ever Broadway runs, after The Phantom of the Opera and Cats.
Such a fast return isn’t completely unprecedented on Broadway – the original production of Dreamgirls shuttered in August 1985 but was back on the boards less than two years later in June 1987 – but on that occasion there was a sentimental reason: director/choreographer Michael Bennett was dying, and indeed did so just four days after its return.
But Broadway, which has spent the last decade finding its feet as the originator of new musicals once again rather than importer of ones from Britain, has also run out of shows to revive: a revivals frenzy has meant that shows as comparatively recent as 42nd Street, Into the Woods and Big River have all found their way back to Broadway in the last four years, so now its time to think again of shows that are even more recent.
And London seems to be catching the disease. The are rumours that Whistle Down the Wind, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1998 musical that ran for three years at the Aldwych to January 2001, may be returning to the West End just five years later. Can it be long before Norma Desmond from Lloyd Webber’s previous Sunset Boulevard is ready for her close-up… again?
