Short Shorts 20

It has also been announced that the hit comedy The Ladykillers will close on April 14 at the end of the contracts of its original cast, instead of re-casting; producer Edward Snape told The Stage, “We have the most fantastic cast and they have been performing eight shows a week and it feels right to take a break, I think the summer period is a bit of an unknown quantity with the Olympics and everything, but more importantly it just feels that we would be very happy to come back when everyone is feeling ready to have another go.”

Also closing on April 14 will be The Pitmen Painters at the Duchess Theatre. These won’t, I’m sure, be the only shows not to play into the summer; but will anything replace them? It would be a brave producer who opens a brand-new production in April or May, just as we head towards the double whammy of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, then the Olympics. I expect to see lots of dark theatres around town by June.

Having failed to catch fire in London, Manderley House isn’t going to burn on Broadway, at least not yet: the new musical version of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which was once being planned for a London bow at the Shaftesbury but was cancelled when plans to excavate below the stage hit water, in every sense, has now suddenly cancelled its Broadway premiere, due for April.

It was fully cast, the set was being built, and even the front-of-house marquee had gone up outside the Broadhurst Theatre; rehearsals were booked to begin the week after next. But earlier this week, producer Ben Sprecher admitted a black hole in his financing pot, and commented, “Raising money for Broadway has become even more difficult and laborious than it has historically been. We are very close to meeting our financial goal, but we just ran short of time to complete capitalization with rehearsals slated to begin in two weeks.”



Some would say that’s sailing a little close to the wind anyway; and a whole lot of actors and creative personnel are going to find a big black hole in their schedules now, too. It’s not, however, the first big Broadway show of the year to suddenly cancel after an earlier announcement of casting, theatre and dates: a revival of Funny Girl, slated to star Lauren Ambrose and open at the Imperial in April, was pulled, too. But at least Bob Boyett, it’s lead producer, didn’t wait till the last minute: he made the decision back in November.

He, too, was forced to make the decision when his expected investors failed to step up to the plate (or even the begging bowl): as he told the New York Times, “I just kept hearing from other producers, and then from my investors, that the timing was wrong and that the economic landscape wasn’t right to try to do a top-level revival of Funny Girl.”



The New York Times pointed out at the time, “Pulling the plug on a previously announced Broadway production is rare, especially when (as in this case) theaters have been booked and actors cast. Since the economic downturn began in 2008, only one major commercial production of a musical revival — Hair — had difficulty raising money at the 11th hour; in that instance, new producers were brought in and Hair ultimately opened in March 2009 at a cost of $5.8 million. The show went on to win the Tony for best musical revival and turn a profit in five months.” Clearly, however, the economic uncertainty affecting the rest of the world is finally hitting the theatre.

When The Wizard of Oz first opened at the London Palladium in March 2011, one critic wrote, “Every time one enters a theatre - as with the National Lottery - one clings on to the hope that, against all the odds, one will strike gold. Indubitably, however, one will find it at the end of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rainbow. Technically, dramatically and emotionally, The Wizard of Oz glistens. I would go so far as to say it re-defines what a great West End show is. I am limited to giving it five stars today, but I would say it is off the scale - this is a 10-star production if ever there was one.”

But last weekend, reviewing Travelling Light, a new play about the early days of cinema at the National, a reviewer complained, “It has been so long now since I saw a stage production without some kind of film back-drop that theatres and cinemas are starting to become indistinguishable to me. With its computer-generated special effects, The Wizard of Oz, for instance, might just as well have been put on celluloid in its entirety, and there’s no question that its most striking moments came out of a can of film rather than the mouth of any member of its cast.”



It is a recurring theme of this blog that critics often don’t agree with each other, so perhaps it should be no surprise that critics can hold such divergent opinions on the merits of the same show, in this case The Wizard of Oz. Except that both those quotes come from the pen of the same critic: the Sunday Telegraph’s esteemed Tim Walker.