Treasure Island, the show that almost didn’t go on at Derby Playhouse when the theatre went into liquidation on the day of its original press performance but that the cast performed that night anyway before it was prematurely shut down, today receives a five-star review from Alfred Hickling in The Guardian. As he tells it in his review, the offstage story about getting the show back on the road seems even more of a story than the show itself: “After a week of darkness in which candlelit vigils were held in support, a skeleton staff – many working unpaid – have banded together to reinstate the run of the Christmas show. It’s an extraordinary achievement, which required the rights to be renegotiated, the cast to be re-contracted and the swords recalled from the armoury.”
But though Christmas shows often provide regional theatres with the financial stability that allows them to programme the rest of the year, the stakes are even higher this time: At the end of the show, the Playhouse’s chief executive (and this production’s adaptor) Karen Louise Hebden “steps out on stage to make an emotional speech indicating that the Playhouse’s situation remains critical. It now has to satisfy the administrators that it is a viable business by encouraging them to book for this show,” reports Hickling. His review will hopefully serve the same purpose.
And also bouncing back healthily from adversity has been Broadway, which as I extensively reported here was mostly shut down for 19 days by a strike of its stagehands. In his column in today’s New York Post, Michael Riedel cheekily asks, “Did the stagehands really have to go back to work at Grease?, but notes that elsewhere the surfeit of new plays that were set to dominate Broadway this autumn and winter and were in danger thanks to the strike are, with one exception, now holding their own.
Tracy Lett’s August: Osage County, buoyed up by rave reviews, is taking close to $200,000 a day – and according to a recent Baz Bamigboye column in the Daily Mail, could be heading to London next. Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll is also “humming along…proving that Stoppard is a genuine marquee name.” Producer Sonia Friedman, whom I saw at the opening of her co-production of Tintin at the Playhouse earlier this week, told me they are doing fine now, though on Broadway there’s only ever traditionally been room for one, or at the most two, serious plays at a time, she pointed out. Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer, imported from the National Theatre, was embraced by the local critics and according to Riedel, “the buzz surrounding the play’s magnificent cast has given ticket sales a kick.” The stars of Cyrano de Bergerac, Kevin Kline and Jennifer Garner, the first of whom was originally insistent that he would only do a ten-week run, have made good on the lost weeks by extending their run by an additional two weeks, but even so the strike has wiped out any possibility of turning a profit. Mark Twain’s Is He Dead? is also performing well now that the reviews are out and were encouraging.
Which leaves only Aaron Sorkin’s The Farnsworth Invention, based on the real life story of the man who invented television and another who stole his idea, trailing in the deficit row. But given how much competition there unusually is at the moment, something’s got to give. As it is, one producer Jeffrey Richards, who is behind three plays this winter, had innovatively bundled them together to offer a Broadway “subscription” — tickets for August: Osage County, David Mamet’s new play November and a revival of Pinter’s The Homecoming can be bought for an inclusive price of $199. As Variety reports, “Subscription reps a bid to drum up biz in an unusually competitive fall season packed with a dozen straight-play openings… Compared with the aud for musicals, playgoers make up a relatively small but loyal segment of Broadway ticket buyers whom the subscription hopes to attract with a reduced pricetag. Individually, each production sells a full-price seat for about $99; the $199 offer of three prime ducats (in the orchestra and front mezzanine) essentially adds up to a three-for-two deal.”
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