You know the sinking feeling. You arrive at the theatre and the star is off: sometimes even more than one, especially if you’re seeing a musical. In America, you open the free Playbill you are given when you are shown to your seat and a shower of little slips of paper falls into your lap. It happens all the time. But the transfer of The Woman in White to Broadway has been more than uncommonly besieged by this since it opened there last November: American co-producer Bob Boyett commented on Friday, “Unfortunately, early in previews, the show experienced a number of medical problems among the cast. Maria Friedman performed admirably through a diagnosis of breast cancer and its treatment and Michael Ball battled a serious viral infection. As a result of these and other health issues among the company, audiences got to see the entire original cast perform just 31 of the 108 performances played to date since the show’s first preview”.
Andrew Lloyd Webber added, “There have been performances when two or more leads have been absent due to illness. I’m not sure even The Phantom of the Opera could have survived the illnesses which have beset this wonderful company”.
Though Maria Friedman battled on through her illness – returning to the show just a week after an operation to remove a lump from her breast – the producers had announced a leave of absence from February 12 so she could receive further treatment, but she has now announced that she will continue to the end of the run. Michael Ball, meanwhile, has also been curiously absent, with no reason stated, for a while now; he was not on when I saw it a couple of weeks ago there, but the understudy came up trumps: as I reported here, he was the best Fosco I have yet seen.
The streak of bad luck it has suffered – which also saw original star Michael Crawford depart the London production early, citing illness – has now been declared terminal as a result: it will close on Broadway on February 19, just three months since officially opening there, at a loss of most of its $8.5million budget. It also closes in the West End a week later, on February 25.
In this critic’s view, The Woman in White is easily the best (and most ambitious) Lloyd Webber musical for some years: not since Song & Dance has he flirted quite so bravely with exploring new forms – in that case, pairing an exquisite solo song cycle followed by a score for a blazing dance drama that long prefigured Susan Stroman and Twyla Tharp’s later Broadway entries in the form (with Contact and the West End bound Movin’ Out respectively). And The Woman in White also boasted an uncompromisingly difficult score that, notwithstanding Lloyd Webber’s trademark melodic uplifts, also went into far darker musical territory. Maybe, as with Aspects of Love that was a teasing chamber musical but was horribly overproduced, it simply needed a more understated staging to reveal its charm. The Woman in White may have gone into the red; but I suspect that its future life has not faded to black just yet.
In other news today, former Really Useful exec Bill Taylor is – according to the Sunday Times – tomorrow being announced as the new chief executive for Stage Entertainment UK, the British division of Joop van den Ende’s massive European theatre and television empire. I recently wrote in a profile of corporate players in the entertainment market in The Stage that van den Ende “is spreading the tentacles of his European-based company into a growing range of new markets, including Britain where Stage Entertainment are currently behind the transfer of the Blue Man Group from off-Broadway to the New London Theatre. They also co-produced Contact in the West End…. In Germany – the world’s third largest market for musicals, after the West End and Broadway – Stage Entertainments run 11 theatres, and have three each in Spain and the Netherlands, plus one in Russia. It can only be a matter of time before they expand into UK theatrical ownership, too.”
The appointment of Taylor, who spearheaded Lloyd Webber’s own incursions into becoming one of the West End’s most powerful theatrical landlords in 2000, can only increase this suspicion. At the time of RUG’s theatrical acquisitions, Taylor commented, “RUG’s commitment to live productions is well known. Our acquisition of Stoll Moss, which is a well-run and prestigious group with a fine track record, ensures a thriving and profitable future for the West End. The scale of the new Group will now make the overall operations more efficient and provide a very strong base for future acquisitions both in the UK and overseas.”
