No sooner did I name-check the Broadway musical version of High Fidelity here yesterday than later in the day the producers announced they were pulling the plug on it already: it will close this Sunday, after an official run of just over a week. It will have played a run of just 18 previews (comparatively few for a major Broadway musical, but it did have an out-of-town try-out in Boston beforehand) and only 14 performances.
Fast flops of this order, which were once de rigeur in the cut and thrust of Broadway’s ruthless economics, have become a comparative rarity of late: nowadays, producers rarely throw in the towel this easily. They build in fighting funds and contingency plans to keep their shows running, whatever the critics say; and there’s always hope that a turnaround can be achieved, or at least not having the ignominy of being run out of town quite so quickly. But this autumn has seen two shows come and quickly go: Twyla Tharp’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ staggered on to 28 performances (after 35 previews) and now High Fidelity.
I managed to collect both – and while Tharp’s Dylan show, even without comparison to the ecstasies she achieved with Movin’ Out, was a clumsy, incompetent vehicle that one was surprised to see on Broadway at all, I’m a little more perplexed by the sudden failure of High Fidelity. No, it’s not a great show – but it’s the sort of thing that in a Broadway which wasn’t quite as ruthless as it is now might have trundled on for a season or so, and even found an audience. Original pop musicals like Brooklyn managed to run for 284 performances as recently as 2004, and another film-to-stage adaptation of The Wedding Singer will, by the time it closes on December 31, have (by a curious coincidence!) have played exactly the same number of performances as Brooklyn did.
But there’s no room for the middling hit anymore – or even a middling flop. Partly, there’s a pressure of real estate: theatrical vultures are circling over head, looking for prime theatres like the Imperial where High Fidelity was playing, to pounce on. There’s also a failure of will. Producers need to believe in their shows – or they wouldn’t do them at all. But the producers of High Fidelity clearly didn’t believe in it enough. Sometimes, you feel like a producer is beating a dead horse – as Joe Brooks did with his vanity (or insanity) project, In My Life, throwing good money after bad to keep it running at the Music Box for 61 performances from October to December 2005.
But High Fidelity didn’t strike me in that league. It wasn’t a musical for musical snobs, to be sure, but for a slacker generation who might be nostalgic for the days of vinyl that they grew up in, this might have been just the ticket. Except that they probably don’t go to the theatre anymore. Maybe that was the problem….
