While Mel Brooks’ The Producers in 2001 may have ushered in a new age for the Broadway musical – even if it was a throwback sort of self-referential metamusical that took as its primary subject Broadway itself – his second musical, Young Frankenstein, seems to have put it back on the slab, literally. Mel Brooks has created his own monster, but unlike Dr Frankenstein (pronounced Fronkensteen, of course), even a creative team that is once again headed by Susan Stroman and a stellar cast cannot bring this one to life. I finally saw this corpse of a musical last night, and the best bit came at the curtain call: not just that it had ended at last, but that star Roger Bart stepped forward and announced that the strike, too, had ended, too, at last — to the loudest and most prolonged cheers of the evening.
That’s great news for Broadway — though not necessarily, ironically, for Young Frankenstein, which can only have benefited from being one of the few big musicals in town (the only other two playing in theatres unaffected by the strike were Mary Poppins, across the street at the New Amsterdam, and Xanadu at the Helen Hayes, the smallest of all Broadway houses).
It was a nail-biting run to the finishing line of the negotiations to end the strike (the pickets were still up at what should have been the curtain up time of 8pm for most of Broadway) and an appropriately theatrical way to discover that it was over. In fact, it ended only minutes before Bart made his stage announcement: according to the New York Times today, the news was only announced at 10.30pm last night, and Charlotte St Martin, executive director of the League of American Theaters and Producers, left around 10.45pm – almost exactly the same time as Bart was telling us that it was over, too. (A late night report on NY1, the local news TV channel, referred to the announcement that Young Frankenstein had made, and suggested that the show may have been suffering from what it called “survivors’ guilt” at having been one of the few to have avoided the strike).
Bart was also doing the now-traditional curtain call speech for the annual fundraising drive for Broadway Cares/Equity Fight Aids, which as I previously reported here has been particularly hit hard by the lack of opportunities to collect money in this way. Bart assured us, in what was probably the evening’s funniest line, that 98 cents in every dollar collected would go to Mel Brooks. (At least Brooks can see the funny side of his own greed, even if audiences who have paid up to $450 a ticket might have a problem seeing a funny side at all to what they’ve paid for).
But if BC/EFA may have been losing an estimated $350,000 a week in donations thanks to the strike, everyone has been counting the cost of it, too. The New York Times today reports that Broadway posted tickets sales of just $7.2million for the two weeks that ended last Sunday, whereas the comparable period last year saw it grossing $42, so that’s a deficit of $35million on box office receipts up to last Sunday, and not including the losses of half of this week, too. And while estimates vary about the losses being incurred by restaurants, shops, hotels and other businesses that depend on Broadway, the city’s comptroller office put the price at $2million a day, meaning around $40m in lost revenue over the 19 days that the strike has gone on for.
And though most shows may be trying to get back to re-open tonight, it’ll be a slow build before Broadway returns to any semblance of normality. Already last night Chicago announced a $26.50 ticket offer on any and all remaining tickets to get people into the show tonight, and advance sales will have literally frozen during the period around town: not just that the box offices were all shut for walk-up business, but that even phone sales must have slowed to a trickle, as who would buy tickets for a show that may not happen? There’s now also a gridlock of productions that should have opened in the last two and a half weeks that will now be juggling schedules to get their shows in front of the critics and reviewed. The Farnsworth Invention and The Seafarer lost their opening nights in the first week of the strike; August: Osage County was due to have followed last week; and Is He Dead? was originally due to open tonight. The bad news about the shows all opening simultaneously now, however, will be to put immense strain on editorial space (not to mention critical patience, where – unlike in London where we routinely deal with three or four major openings a week – they’ll be unused to having to work so hard!).
