If you walk past the Imperial Theatre on West 45th street, the front-of-house signage is already up for Billy Elliot that arrives there in October; and meanwhile, their “virtual” front-of-house in the shape of the show’s website is literally counting down the days till then (3 months, 28 days, as of today).
It is also already offering a primer to guide American audiences around things they may be less familiar with, like a timelines of the Miners’ strike and a multiple choice quiz on Geordie slang! I tried the latter, and I won’t tell you my score - but the result came back that “you’ve got a bit of Brit in you. Although some words might leave you gormless, you’ve a knack for the twang of the slang. Divant worry, you’d fit right into Billy’s town in County Durham”.
But back in the real world, I walked past the Imperial’s rear entrance on West 44th street yesterday and the stage loading doors were open; work is already being done to ready the theatre for it.
This is when a show starts to become a physical reality beyond the PR announcements of it happening, and it put a little spring in my step.
But if Billy Elliot should prove to be one of the sensations of the next season here, one show that won’t be heading here anytime soon is Gone with the Wind. As part of the closing notice that was issued late last Friday evening for the West End production, producer Aldo Scrofani stated what must surely be the obvious - that “plans for a New York production are currently on hold” - but, he added, “in the meantime we are pursuing various options that have been presented to us from interested parties worldwide.”
When The Observer rang me on Saturday for a reaction to the closing notice for a story that ran on Sunday, its reporter David Smith said to me, “So you’ve got blood on your hands”. I reminded him of something that Frank Rich once said when asked about the power of the New York Times to summarily close shows: “critics don’t close shows, producers do”.
But though this is a sad outcome, it has also been an inevitable one. The fixes, which included shaving another 15 minutes off the running time after it opened, were too little, too late. We need, of course, to remember that no one - with the exception of Bialystock and Bloom in The Producers — deliberately sets out to create a flop, but no one who works in the theatre is immune to failure, either, and even Trevor Nunn - who had previously directed two of the most successful musicals of all time in Cats and Les Miserables in the 80s — ended that decade by directing two consecutive flops on either side of the Atlantic. After entirely reconceiving the successful West End staging he had done of Chess for Broadway, it ran there (at Billy Elliot’s future Broadway home, the Imperial, as it happens) for just 68 performances in 1988, and the next year he brought a flop American musical called The Baker’s Wife (that had closed out-of-town on its way to Broadway when it was first premiered in a different production in 1976) and turned it into a West End flop all of its own, running at the Phoenix for barely six weeks.
Now Gone with the Wind joins their notorious ranks as shows that Nunn, for all his dazzling abilities as showman and classicist, couldn’t rescue. And, in a curious footnote, amongst the producers who are now looking certain to lose their entire investment is Patty Hearst, the one-time kidnappee turned guerrilla terrorist, subsequently granted a full presidential pardon by Bill Clinton on the last day of his Presidency. But who will pardon her ill-judged theatrical investment this time?
Fine article, however, isn't the Imperial's rear entrace on W 46th?
Was this perchance a revival of the musical version of GWTW that my wife and I saw in London in 1972? It was also supposed to migrate to NYC and - happily, as it was a mess (although the burning of Atlanta was an impressive stage effect) - didn't. We still share a laugh or two remembering particular moments, especially the chorus which responded to someone singing "Where has it gone? It's gone with the wind" with a heartfelt "Woooooooh! Wooooooh!".
If you were the only one who had criticized GWTW and forced it to close then the "blood on your hands" line would be correct. However, it got bad notices across the board as well as not pleasing its audience. The people with "blood on their hands" are those that perpetrated this misguided amaturish attempt at a musical. It really can all be laid at the arrogant feet of Trevor Nunn who thought his directorial genius could overcome a crap score, even crappier lyrics and a libretto that told its story rather than dramatized it. The producers/promoters etc were all aware that it was crap but all kept coming back to the words: but the title sells. They were wrong. Sometimes the public and the critics can sniff out a stinker and this is one of those times.