Congratulations, Ross, Vallejo, Sally, Megan, Amanda and all at Spiegelworld. Their New York season finished tonight, and I finally saw Absinthe last night — it was sensational. The entire Spiegel experience – restaurant, night club, bar and shows – were a huge leap forward from last year. It’s a huge triumph that they’ve made it a New York summer fixture in only it’s second year.
To quote Kevin McCollum, "theatre is research and development…your goal is to enter the marketplace with the least amount of cost and test the market to see if anyone likes what you’ve created". We closed "The J.A.P. Show" tonight because the punters didn’t like what we created – well, actually, the ones who came seemed to really like it, but they didn’t like it enough to drag their friends back.
It’s not surprising when a new show closes. In any field, the research process is going to throw up more honorable failures than successes. And it’s a pretty random process: rarely are either the hits or misses predictable.
Big success depends on that rare, but hugely rewarding, random win. The problem is, each entry in the lottery is hard. If you followed the advice of The Black Swan, my oft cited favorite book de jour, you might make small gambles on supposedly impossible events in the financial markets – say, the Euro going to $2 or Google stocks crashing – and only lose your investment when it doesn’t pay off, which is most of the time. But producing a show – and esp. a low budget show – requires huge personal effort and energy and emotion. Even a small show like this one, capitalized at under $200,000, takes a big personal investment, so its hard for everyone when they close.
Crikey! Duran Duran will play Broadway for two weeks in November. They’ll be playing the Barrymore, which would have housed Kiki and Herb if the Helen Hayes hadn’t come through at the last minute.
Frankly I think this is a brilliant idea. A two week run allows them to amortize the high load in cost – the premium that gets you on to Broadway – and Duran Duran’s audience is probably the same as the Broadway audience in general.
I was invited to see "Million Dollar Quartet", the true story / recreation of a 1956 night when Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis jammed, impromptu and all night long, at Sun Studios. Just saw this very stong Talkin Broadway review , which confirms that I need to see this show, which is playing at the Village Theatre in Seattle.
I recently mentioned Time Out leaking word of our Kiki and Herb Xmas show. And it was a genuine leak – only today did we have our first full marketing meeting.
It’s an interesting marketing challenge. Our last KIki and Herb Carnegie show sold out two weeks in advance. But that show was billed as their LAST ever show, generating huge interest. (Of course, rumors of their death turned out to be exaggerated, and we went on to produce their Broadway show…and get robbed at the Tonys…nuf said).
We can’t call this a "final" show, but we still have some marketing hooks: K&H Xmas shows are an institution in their own right; the Broadway show broadened their appeal; and the last Carnegie show was incredible. But we’re going on sale before the Xmas
spirit kicks in; and once it does, right after Thanksgiving, we’ll only have two and a half weeks till the Dec 12 show.
We’re pushing for a sell out. Let’s see how we go.
I hear that "Celia The Musical", the Spanish language musical about to open at New World Stages, is doing great business. In other words, Off Broadway works when you produce something people want to see.
The conventional wisdom says Off Broadway is dead. But perhaps that’s what happens when you produce shows people don’t want to see. Of course, it’s easier for producers to blame Off Broadway than accept that their shows aren’t working. To reference Black Swan yet again (my new fave book), this is the narrative fallacy at work – we have to find a story to explain randomness.
As reported moments ago in Playbill, Love Gone Wrong has cancelled its November run. Time to call the Shuberts! We’ve been hitting a traffic jam, unable to get Snowshow on Broadway for a holiday run. Perhaps this will be our opportunity…
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!
