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Is there anything more painful than passing on a show that becomes a hit? What about knowing you have a hit, and watching it slip between your fingers?

Today’s Variety has a story about Off Broadway’s non-verbal shows (Fuerza Bruta, Jump etc), and says Stomp "found its first major success in Australia". I lived in Melbourne then – about 1993, I guess -  and my boss was one of the Stomp tour producers. The tour was sensation, so he set off for New York, trying to find partners to produce it Off Broadway. It didn’t work out for him — but 12 years later, the producers who made it happen still have a monster hit.

We have brand new artwork for Kiki and Herb’s Carnegie Hall Christmas show. It looks fantastic. Great work by Jared!

Our Jerry Springer sales have slowed since the strike hit. That’s partly because our first advertising wave has passed, and we’ll wait till after Thanksgiving to really push hard again. But I suspect the strike is the real culprit – the sales have slowed further than they should. After all, the on-sale was strong; we know the interest is there.

Buying a ticket is neither a simple choice, nor an intellecutal one — the ticket buying urge is driven by intangible unconscious factors. And people are irrational animals: the wraps drop when daylight savings switch on and off; they take the elevator to the gym, to get on the Stairmaster*; and, oh, they’re flocking to Wintuk at Madison Square Garden.

I’ve heard that Off Broadway had a bump on the weekend, with theatregoers strapped for choices, but now sales have slowed. The strike is sucking the life out of theatre, regardless of where the show is. And, being an irrational choice, no-one is considering that Springer is in January and in a non-strike afflicted venue – they just don’t think of buying a ticket.

* thanks to Nicholas Tassim and "The Black Swan"

No offense to David Denby, but the second i get the New Yorker each week, I flip to the contents, hoping this week it’s an Anthony Lane movie review. #1 fan!

In dismissing "Lions for Lambs", the Robert Redford / Tom Cruise pic, as dull and didactic, Lane says it "is most charitably described as Ibsen with helicopters". In the movie world, "Ibsen" is an insult. How sad that in theatre it’s still a compliment. It reminds me of Walter Kerr’s book "How Not to Write a Play", which impacted me as theatre-geek teenager. Kerr blamed Ibsen and Chekhov, and imitation of them, for killing the theatre. 

Phew. Cancelling Snowshow’s Christmas Broadway run was absolutely the right choice. Our first New York Times ad would have run last Sunday, the day after the strike started. Imagine how we’d be feeling now, on  Strike Day 4, with no negotiations taking place. Doesn’t bear thinking about…

I opined, when the strike first looked likely, that the producers would cave. (When "The Producers" first opened, one of its producers told me they’d concede in any negotiations – how could they threaten a once-in-a-lifetime smash hit.) How wrong I was. The producers and theatres, thank God, appear unified and strong. Onwards and upwards with the arts!!

The first producer I worked for switched shows in his subscription season. A thrifty chap, he dispatched me to a dark corner of the Sydney Opera House box office, to cross out the old show, and write "What the Butler Saw" on 18,000 tickets. Computers may have changed things, but one thing didn’t change – tickets will always be too expensive.

Pricing issues are getting an unusual amount of media attention this week. Firstly, it was reported that the Federal Reserve had weighed in on Hannah Montanna ticket prices. God knows how a Fed economist got involved, but parents were in a flap about the scalpers. The economist said it was simply supply and demand. The cheap tickets (aimed at families) merely exacerbated things, and the scalpers matched supply to demand.

Of course, the secondary ticket market is just getting bigger and more legitimate. This week Stub Hub, already a huge online ticket reseller, opened a storefront in Times Square. Ticketmaster is getting in to the resale business too. (Coincidentally, TM is such a money machine that Barry Diller is now spinning it off, to be a separately listed stock.)

The Fed economist was right about supply and demand, but the media loves to scream about Broadway prices. (The furor about Young Frankenstein seems to re-ignite each week.) This is not gouging. As the cliché says, producers aren’t mass producing their shows; unlike a film, the event is created live each night and costs pretty much the same in the third year as it did in the first year.

Gordon Cox gets the story right in Weekly Variety’s headline theatre story. Although leading with news that Broadway plays have crossed the $100 barrier (up from around $65 in 2000), he shows that the average prices are actually down slightly. The internet makes a vast array of discounts possible – theatres don’t have the variable pricing software of airlines and hotels, but these services do a good job of matching supply (discounts for slower shows) and demand (expensive last minute tickets for sold out shows).  

You won’t find me in the singalong at Marie’s Crisis, but I just finished – and loved – Emma Brockes’ "What Would Barbra Do? : How Musicals Changed My Life".

It reminded me of the passionate audiences who flocked to "Singalong Sound of Music", the first show I produced in New York. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, smart and fun and sarcastic. Brockes’ captures a tone – simultaneously biting, irreverent and adoring – that Time Out only dreams of.

And it’s no fluffy love letter to musicals; it may be her presonal project but Brockes is a serious journalist.(Her Wikipedia entry is about a Noam Chomsky controversy her work ignited, not her analysis of Yentl.)

So why did the US publisher deliver a Barbara Cartland-on-steroids book cover? Were they trying to turn off buyers? Did they figure that Broadway fans are a legion of Mr Humphries from "Are You Being Served", 50 year old gay men mincing to their window dressing day jobs.

I nearly didn’t buy the book when I stumbled on it at Borders. And I took the dust jacked off so I could read it on the subway. Meanwhile, there’s a second cover on Amazon – presumably the UK edition. It’s fun and irreverent and captures a book in which Babs plays only a small role.

New York mag’s article about the (so-called) Web 2.0 bubble quotes Netscape founder Marc Andreesen: "The technology industry gets funded – by venture capitalists, angel investors and Wall St – on the baseball model. Out of ten swings at the bat, get maybe seven strikeouts, two base hits, and, if you are lucky, one home run. The base hits and home runs pay for all the strike outs. If you’re going to call it a bubble, you have to conclude that the industry is in a perpetual bubble, and has been for 40 years."

The implication that the technology industry invented this strategy cracks me up — it’s funded the entertainment business since at least Shakespeare, and as technology morphed entertainment into cinemas and television. (And suggests that entertainment is in a centuries-long bubble…)

Peter Guber, when I saw him talk at the Aspen Comedy Festival, reminisced about running Sony Studios. After using the same analogy to describe a slate of movies, his bosses in Tokyo said "but Guber-san, just don’t produce the flops".

We’ve pulled the plug on Snowshow’s Broadway Christmas engagement. How depressing…

Everything was in place – the Belasco Theatre, the investment and the show.

But the strike threat’s killed it. The stagehands announced that they’d work till December 1 – then strike if they didn’t have a new contract. Right when we’d be loading in…

Yesterday was the on sale for Jerry Springer – The Opera. It was a strong day at the box office, especially considering we’ve held back most of the ads.

 On sale days = anxiety. Although I don’t get it as bad as I used to, I still feel anxious for days before. Some people check the wraps constantly but I prefer to wait till the end of the day when the number is as big as possible.