The crunching of the numbers…

And although we do not publish box office figures in the West End, the producers of the equally ill-fated Prick Up Your Ears (which lost its original star Matt Lucas the week after its opening) admitted in a press statement, “Despite very good feedback and notices for Con O Neill’s performance, the box office sales have not been sufficient to keep the show going, and so the producers have taken the difficult decision to close the show three weeks prior to its scheduled end date.” It was also announced yesterday that The Shawshank Redemption will close at Wyndham’s on November 29, several months short of its original end date of February 10, 2010.

There are any number of reasons why a show fails, and as Michael Riedel points out in a column in today’s New York Post, “Neil Simon has written 33 plays and musicals — just a few shy of the number of theories floating around Shubert Alley this week as to why one of his best, Brighton Beach Memoirs, closed faster than one of his worst, Jake’s Women.”

Mr Simon, the New York Times reported on Monday, was himself “dumbfounded”, saying, “After all these years, I still don’t get how Broadway works or what to make of our culture.” But Patrick Healy, the Times journalist who wrote the story in which Simon is quoted, goes on to suggest, “What went wrong with Brighton Beach Memoirs is a case study in success and failure on Broadway today. There were no big stars like Jude Law in the current commercial hit Hamlet, there was no marketing campaign that framed the Simon play as a can’t-miss theatrical event, and there was no wow factor that brought the period piece to life, like the breakneck pacing of the popular farce Boeing-Boeing last year. But the failure also reflects America’s evolving sense of humor and taste.”

Simon himself wondered aloud whether the theatre it was housed in didn’t help, the Nederlander, tucked away on West 41st Street away from the main tourist drag. “I never wanted to go into that theatre,” he told the New York Times in a blog posted on Monday. “I fought as hard as I could not to go into the Nederlander.” (The show’s fast demise, however, hasn’t stopped the theatre from lining up another tenant almost immediately: it was announced yesterday that a new musical Million Dollar Quartet, currently also playing in Chicago, will begin performances there in March).

But neither could it specifically be blamed on the reviews. As the New York Times points out, “Broadway shows rarely close a week or less after opening. Those that do — like Glory Days in 2008 or Carrie in 1988 — were usually killed by reviews that were far worse than those for Brighton Beach Memoirs. It actually received good reviews, but the play was shuttered because people, for whatever reason, did not want to see the Simon show about a Depression-era family laughing through the tears.” The New York Times’s own review by Ben Brantley, had praised the spontaneity of the production and “Mr Simon’s snappy, streamlined dialogue”.

And the playwright was himself apparently pleased with the result, too. “People were laughing every night I was there, and I think [director David] Cromer and the cast did themselves proud,” Simon tells the New York Times. “It was certainly good enough to see, but nobody came.”

But why not? It may be a question of changing tastes and sensibilities, suggest some. “American sensibilities about comedy change so rapidly, especially in the cultural centers on the East Coast and West Coast where people are always looking for the next new style of humor, whereas Neil Simon’s brand of humour is pretty unchanging,” suggests Susan Koprince, a professor of English at the University of North Dakota; while Matthew Maguire, director of the theatre programme at Fordham University, says, “It’s clear from the ascendancy of certain types of comedy, like the trend exemplified by Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, Steve Carell, The 40-Year-Old Virgin,Knocked Up, that what audiences are seeking in humor is getting more raw and edgy than Simon’s work.”

The audience that do like his work, though - assuming they’re not dead or worse, as Michael Riedel suggests, in Florida - needed to be told that it was happening. And here Riedel suggests there may be darker forces at work, namely to do with the failing power of the New York Times itself. According to Riedel, “The Times offered the producers of Brighton Beach several weeks worth of splashy ads in the paper and on its Web site at steep discounts, production sources say. In exchange for what one source calls the “fire sale” price, the Times demanded exclusivity. Brighton Beach couldn’t advertise anywhere else until after opening night. No radio spots, no e-mail blasts, no direct-mail campaign — none of the things most shows do to generate advance sales. But the Times ads didn’t work, and the show opened with an advance of less than $500,000, sources say. Some nights, the cast played to 500 people.”

By a piquant irony, the day of the play’s closure, a full page colour quotes ad duly appeared in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. But as Riedel goes on to say, “Once upon a time, a full-page ad in the Times generated strong ticket sales. But that was when the paper, unchallenged by the Internet, had absolute power over Broadway. Those days have gone the way of the bulldog edition. ‘Times ads don’t even pay for themselves anymore,’ one producer says. Many shows don’t even bother advertising in the Times. If they do, it’s to reinforce direct mail, radio spots, word of mouth and so on. The media landscape has changed radically. Producers now believe they have to be everywhere with their shows.”

Of course, the New York Times still attracts plenty of theatrical advertising - according to a weekly e-mail report issued by the New York theatre publicity firm Boneau/Bryan-Brown, there were display ads for some seven more current or forthcoming Broadway shows in the Sunday Arts and Leisure section, though once upon a time every single show would have likely been in there. By contrast, Riedel’s own paper, the New York Post, had no theatrical advertising at all in its Sunday edition.

But if there’s been a significant change in theatrical marketing spend in newspapers, how will the theatrical community respond when the papers cut back, in turn, on their theatrical coverage? Just yesterday I was speaking to a leading West End theatre producer and owner, who wondered aloud whether there would be any critics left in ten years time - but welcomed the fact that there are now many other ways to get the message about their shows out. I said, “You’ll miss us when we are gone”; and when I got a slightly puzzled look back, I rephrased it: “You’ll miss some of us when we are gone”. And the same applies to the newspapers that some of us write in.