The crisis of good producers….

The biggest threat to the future of the West End isn’t the rising ticket prices or the crumbling theatres – though both could wipe out both the audiences and the places for them to go, in time – but the absence of enough producers putting on shows to charge those prices and hire those venues at all. It has long been a dinosaur industry – not, in fact, unlike my own – that is still dominated by the same players who have been doing it for the last twenty-five years or more.

When, last summer, there were something like two dozen musicals and only a handful of plays on in the West End (and most of those long-runners), the absence of straight drama was largely caused by Bill Kenwright’s temporary absence from the plays market while he was concentrating on putting Cabaret on.

Of course, the occasional newcomer dips a toe into these treacherous waters, only to withdraw it hastily afterwards as they get burnt or they burn others. Beyond the new corporate model of producing – the old Clear Channel, now Live Nation, or Stage Entertainments and the like – the solo producer looks like he is a vanishing species. Of course, there have been a few “stayers”, though, and they’re interestingly mainly women: I’m thinking Sonia Friedman, Caro Newling, Kim Poster and hopefully Carole Winter, as well as Clare Lawrence and Anna Waterhouse of Out of the Blue, though they’ve gone quiet of late. And of the male “newcomers”, we have of course the invaluable Matthew Byam-Shaw (currently riding high with his first Broadway transfer, for Frost/Nixon), but what happened to Phil Cameron (producer of the original London production of Journey’s End that also happens to be on Broadway at the moment, but whose name isn’t on the Broadway producing slate of the show)?

But producing is not for wimps: it’s a Big Boys (and Big Girls) game. The stakes are high, and failure is more guaranteed than success. It takes nerve and guts and instinct to do it; it also requires scrupulous honesty and integrity. It was therefore distressing to see The Stage’s story this week that Paul Coxwell – a 22-year-old wunderkind of a producer – has been arrested for alleged VAT fraud. Of course, he is innocent until proven guilty, but an awful lot of mud is already sticking to him, following the collapse of a tour of a musical called Personals just as it was about to hit the road, and then his failure to meet his obligations to his co-producers of Underneath the Lintel that was his first West End venture and led them to cut him out of the show. Now many are left owing for his projected revival of Some Like It Hot, too.

It’s a familiar story: young producer overstretches themselves and ends up out of their depth. Young Coxwell isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, to have an ambition that exceeded his reach. But it doesn’t have to always end badly. Kenny Wax is a young(ish) producer who got burnt several years ago when he brought a musical called Maddie to the West End — and then got burnt again when he revived Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things. But he produced them responsibly, and though investors were out-of-pocket, that’s the risk they take. At least those who worked on the shows had their debts met. And so Kenny has continued to work, and has now built up a thriving touring business. It’s a salutary lesson.