After weeks of negotiations, the Goodspeed Opera House production of
”The Most Happy Fella” is set for Broadway.
The critically acclaimed revival, directed by Gerard Gutierrez and co-starring Sophie Hayden and Spiro Malas, will open at the Booth Theater in February.
The co-producers will be Goodspeed, Center Theater Group/Ahmanson at the Doolittle in Los Angeles, Lincoln Center Theater and the Shubert Organization. The musical will cost $1 million to produce. The arrangement echoes last season`s ”Piano Lesson,” which was a joint effort among eight theaters to share expenses.
The plan with ”Fella,” about a mail-order bride, is to open at the Doolittle in October and run through December.
Center Theater Group will pay $200,000 for building the sets and costumes, and is expected to make that investment back during the show`s run there.
The producers then hope to arrange another out-of-town booking to avoid opening in New York in the dead of January, though plans are not yet firm.
Lincoln Center will pick up half the remaining $800,000 in costs, offering the show to its subscribers as part of its season, and the Shuberts will pick up the remainder.
The musical, with its cast of 30, will be expensive to run. The Booth seats only 785, which gives the show the intimate atmosphere it needs, but limits the potential weekly gross to $275,000.
Running costs are expected to be $200,000 to $210,000 a week, says Philip J. Smith, executive vice president of the Shubert Organization. If it sells out at every performance, it will pay back its investment in 25 weeks, he says.
This production will follow one to be mounted by the New York City Opera in September, which will be done with a full orchestra on a much larger scale, and should be quite different from Goodspeed`s chamber production.
Andre Bishop, who will become the artistic director at Lincoln Center Theater in January, says the trend of institutional producing not only helps defray costs, but also marks a turning point away from competition among theaters and toward collaboration.
”Five years ago, this would have been unheard of,” he says. ”But it is likely that we will see more of this over the next 10 years.”
– Here`s one for the books. For the first time in its history, Variety, the show business trade publication, has altered its reporting of a Broadway show`s weekly gross receipts at a producer`s request.
For the week of June 24 to 30, ”The Will Rogers Follies” at the Palace Theater said it sold 101.1 percent of its seats. (Standing room tickets customarily boost the figure over 100 percent for shows that sell out.) These figures were based on a seating capacity of 1,420.
The only problem is that there are 1,721 seats in the Palace. The theater`s second balcony, 301 seats of mostly obstructed views, is difficult to sell, and Sam Crothers, a co-producer, says it remains empty during the week and sells minimally on weekends. But those seats are on sale for $15 apiece, and some do get bought.
If they are not selling well, isn`t it just wishful thinking to pretend they don`t exist? Couldn`t every producer do the same with tough-to-sell balcony and obstructed-view seats and claim his show is selling out?
”The producers felt they looked bad in Variety, because when they don`t sell those tickets it automatically lowers the percentage of seats filled,”
says a company member who insisted on anonymity. ”They are selling out except for those seats. But I don`t think they`re fooling anybody.”
Crothers says that ”we sell those second balcony seats for $15, which is even less than the standing-room tickets, which go for $20. Everyone wanted to close the second balcony and I said no, because you can sell tickets at $15 to people who don`t mind stretching their necks a little bit.”
Although he says the number of people with flexible necks has been small, the producers plan to book the second balcony with school groups in the fall. If they do, will they tell Variety to start counting these 301 seats again?
”We haven`t discussed it,” he says.
Other producers and theater owners say they find this new math laughable. Paul Libin, the producing director at Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns five Broadway theaters and is a co-producer of ”The Secret Garden,” says: ”If we used the same principles of accounting, `The Secret Garden` would have done 114 percent of its capacity that week. So we win.”
Greg Evans, who compiles the grosses for Variety, says, ”They said that because those seats were sitting empty they didn`t consider them part of the seating capacity.”
”The answer is, we probably shouldn`t have done it,” says Peter Bart, the editor of Variety.
– Kyle Renick, artistic director of the WPA Theater, home of ”Little Shop of Horrors” and ”Steel Magnolias,” has announced his next season. Alan Menken, who composed the score for ”Little Shop” with Howard Ashman, will return with a new romantic science-fiction musical called ”Weird Romance.”
Another WPA alum, Pamela Berlin, who directed ”Steel Magnolias,” will return to stage ”Peacetime,” a new play by Elaine Berman, about a Jewish soldier`s struggle to resume a normal life after fighting in World War I.
The WPA has also commissioned performance artist Jeffrey Essman to write
”Bella, Belle of Byelorussia,” a satiric look at life in the Soviet Union, with songs by Michael John LaChiusa. And coming from the Old Globe Theater in San Diego is ”The White Rose,” by Lillian Garrett, directed by Christopher Ashley. It is based on a true story of Munich University students who resisted the Nazis.
