Tonight is the final performance of Rufus Wainwright’s (already legendary) Judy concert. We’ve produced the show at Carnegie Hall, the London Palladium and Paris Olympia.12,000+ people at the Hollywood Bowl is a cool way to say good-bye to a truly amazing show.
Why does the term "commercial theatre" exist?
The publishing business – more high minded than theatre – doesn’t separate out a division with the derogratory word; they just have books, and they range across all genres and audiences. The movie business has a division between studio and independant, but the line was blurred when the studios purchased the most successful indies, so "studio" doesn’t mean "B", low brow or artistically not credible.
Superficially, commercial may indicate that a theatrical production has the intention of making a profit, but it’s really a derogratory put-down that implies a deeper greed, and that profit is more important that the show / audience / art. This is riducolous; not only do most people invest for both financial AND artistic reason, when has their been a show that did not take itself seriously on artistic or entertainent grounds.
Example: in his overview of the Toronto fall season, Richard Ouzounian mentioned many privately funded productions (ie big musicals and plays, whether from Broadway or produced in Toronto), but labelled only Jewtopia as "the commercial production". Surely "commercial" was a put-down, especially when the similarly "commerical" productions of Pillowman, We Will Rock You and Drowsy Chaperone avoided the label.
I say, rename the Commercial Theatre Institute and avoid the word!
"shameless, rude, vaudeville entertainment that fuses Moulin Rouge spectacle with lap dancing and performance art. You will have seen nothing quite like it and it is well worth seeing. C’est delicious, c’est delightful, c’est divine. C’est tres magnifique!" – THE GUARDIAN
"Picture a lap dancing joint, crossed with a cabaret lounge, then up the kitsch and campness a few gears, add some genuine artistic innovation and you’ll get some idea of Duckie’s latest extravaganza. Enormously enjoyable concept cabaret…Impossible to resist…C’est Duckie. C’est Formidable!’" – TIME OUT LONDON
PS122 and Foster Entertainment present C’est Duckie, the Olivier Award winning Christmas show that’s had smash hit sell out seasons in London, Sydney, Berlin, and Tokyo – an all singing, all dancing shameless Christmas crowd pleaser serving tailor-made table-top shows from a top class talent troupe of soubrettes, hoofers and starlets from the London performance scene.
Pitching popular commercial entertainment against contemporary performance provocation – Duckie prove that Performance Art is the new table dancing. Order specials from a show menu that includes a variety of theatrical fare – vaudeville, ventriloquism, balloon modeling, broken down burlesque – with over 30 kunst-cabaret turns from the suggestive to the transgressive to the downright offensive.
Time Out’s Adam Feldman scooped us! He announced Kiki and Herb’s December 12 Carnegie Hall show weeks before our official announcement was due, saying it’s "sure to be one of the concert events of the year".
A CHORUS LINE…………………………………………………..$426,490
AVENUE Q …………………………………………………………$295,263
CHICAGO …………………………………………………………..$417,238
CURTAINS……………………………………………………………$686,394
GREASE …………………………………………………………….$756,849
HAIRSPRAY ………………………………………………………..$630,581
JERSEY BOYS ………………………………………………….$1,208,017
LEGALLY BLONDE ……………………………………………….$573,963
LES MISÉRABLES ………………………………………………..$341,454
MAMMA MIA! ………………………………………………………..$832,533
MARY POPPINS ……………………………………………………$825,587
MAURITIUS …………………………………………………………..$113,423
RENT …………………………………………………………………..$262,053
SPAMALOT …………………………………………………………..$560,395
SPRING AWAKENING …………………………………………….$612,591
THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE….$174,847
THE COLOR PURPLE ……………………………………………..$773,771
THE DROWSY CHAPERONE ……………………………………$487,005
THE LION KING ……………………………………………………..$987,013
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA ……………………………….$578,800
THE RITZ ……………………………………………………………….$93,124
WICKED ……………………………………………………………$1,353,236
XANADU ………………………………………………………………$240,692
Interesting to see that the Bridge and Tunnel tour has cancelled, as reported in Playbill.
Bridge and Tunnel was a big hit in New York, but, as Ross always says, "if you make it here, you can make it nowhere". New York is its own unique theatrical marketplace, and being a hit doesn’t equate to success anywhere else. That’s especially true of a show like Bridge and Tunnel.
We had the same experience with Kiki and Herb. We hoped the Broadway reviews would equal more touring. The smart move, which our partner Jonny Reinis drove, was to work with prestigous not for profits, so the show played Boston’s Huntington, San Francisco’s A.C.T. and, next year, DC’s Arena.
The J.A.P. show will close September 30.Jared and I met with a possible general management client yesterday, a producer bringing in a show that was a hit on the West Coast.
The show was initially budgeted at $1.5m with a weekly running cost over $100G; the producer came to us to rethink that strategy. This raises a couple of questions:
* What is a realistic Off Broadway budget?
We got their budget down to about $60G, and the production budget down to a million. Is that low enough? That’s still a lot of tickets to sell, especially without a star, Broadway’s marketing machine, or some other hook.
* What size venue is right?
We’ve tried to persuade the producer to go in to a smaller venue, and avoid the 499 seat trap. As the cliche says, better to sell-out a 200 seater, than sell 300 seats in a 400 seater. Scenario 1 = hit; scenario 2 = you’re doing okay.
* What’s the right attitude?
The bureaucracy and formality of New York theatre drives up the budget and general managers run the shows without anything at stake beyond their own fees.
Surely the only way they can work is to cut every possible cost. Scott Morfee succeeds at Barrow Street, but who else actually makes a profit Off Broadway.
Ross and I were arguing today about what made "Spring Awakening" a hit. Rumor has it that "the internet saved the show" – and I think that’s absurd.
Okay, I’m still on my "Black Swan" kick, and that book laughs at stock market reports that find a simple reason for daily moves – "today the market dropped 100 points over fears about the renewed insurgency in Iraq". Taleb calls it the "narrative fallacy" – the human need to explain things via an unrealistic simple story.
Predicting shows is like predicting the weather or the stock market – there are too many factors to explain it simply. So, the internet may have been a factor, perhaps seriously important, but how can we know that it was the thing that "saved" the show. We know the show worked and we know it had an aggressive web campaign. But there’s no positive evidence of what single factor made it happen.
Falling for the narrative fallacy fools us. If we forget how random show success is, we fall for the producers’ disease and delude ourselves about our projects.