Spinning the grosses… and spinning the gossip

Unlike in New York, where the weekly box office grosses for Broadway shows are collated by the League of American Theatres and Producers and published in Variety and online, we have a cult of secrecy in London where no such data is officially available, but one has to rely instead purely on anecdotal evidence, whether gathered from direct experience or more usually, gossip, about relative business.

Of course, such talk usually surrounds how badly things are doing, rather than how well; but the result is that when the shows that are doing well try to advertise the fact, there’s no point of comparison for their claims, or possible means of validation of them, either. Dirty Dancing, for instance, boldly trumpeted about a £12million advance – the highest ever, they said, for a West End opening – and now Wicked has followed, claiming that last week’s gross of £761,125 was higher than any other West End show currently running and the highest weekly 8-performance gross in West End theatre history. But since we don’t know what the rest of the grosses are, this can only be an assumption, however well informed. The producers also claim that since previews began, the show has been averaging over 95% attendances; and for the month of October, grossed nearly £2.5million.

I suppose the gauntlet is being thrown down to rival producers to contradict the claims; and if they don’t, the record stands. But is it ever authenticated?

Meanwhile, talking of rebuttals: Sunday Telegraph theatre critic Tim Walker, who does double duty on the paper as its Mandrake gossip columnist, earlier this month reported that Kevin Spacey was giving Tony Blair coaching tips prior to his party conference speech. According to the column, a close friend of Spacey’s was reported as saying, “Mr Blair has long been regarded as a highly effective orator, but he seemed understandably anxious about this particular speech. He had what I suppose in this business we’d call stage fright. Kevin started out by giving him some very general advice but they were soon talking about specifics. He got Blair to pause a lot more than he does usually and did some work on his posture. He also wanted Blair to use his eyes to much greater effect.”

Sounds pretty specific, doesn’t it? But yesterday Spacey told Sue McGregor on Radio 4’s Start the Week that the story was “complete bollocks”, and said, “The only thing that surprised me is that it appeared in the [Sunday] Telegraph and we know the editor there and we know the people there. What does it take for someone to pick up the phone and ask whether a story they’ve heard is true?”

Spacey has had a rough ride from many theatre critics during his tenure at the Old Vic, but what we do is a subjective art, based on our own prejudices and preferences so – however passively aggressive or even openly aggressive they are — it is difficult for Spacey to challenge (and I can’t see him rising to the bait thrown down by the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts, who wrote, “Thanks partly to us newspapers, so much is now known about Mr Spacey that it is hard to believe in him fully as a heterosexual charmer. Not even his technical brilliance can overcome that”). But a theatre critic who does double duty as a purveyor of apparently unreliable gossip seems to be fair dues. Especially, in this case, since Walker’s was one of the few unfavourable notices. And, as it happens, quite a personal one: “One can’t blame Spacey, either, for something rather odd that seems to be happening to him. A lot of the time, even in the play’s supposedly-most heartrending moments, I found that the actor both looked and sounded like Mr Magoo. Again, he can’t blamed for this, but it is, to say the least, unfortunate.” So, it seems, is the disadvantage Walker seems to have been watching it at: “It’s as well that, towards the end, Spacey has a lot of shouting to do, which had the happy effect of rousing a rather large woman, sitting on my left, who had, for the play’s final 42 minutes, used my shoulder as a pillow.”