IT’S “All Whos on Deck” in Boston for the next two weeks, as the $8.5 million “Seussical, the Musical” undergoes major revisions before opening in New York in November.
Writers Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty are focusing the second act; William Ivey Long is designing new costumes; and Eugene Lee is coloring his very dark set.
Two performances next week have been canceled to give the cast a chance to rehearse new material.
Most theater people who’ve seen “Seussical” believe it is eminently fixable. But reworking any show out of town is far more complicated today than it was in the past, when musicals like “Oklahoma!” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Hello, Dolly!” and “My One and Only” were famously turned around before their New York debuts.
For one thing, it’s a lot more expensive. The tryout alone adds at least $1 million to the show’s budget. Start changing the physical production and the costs can spiral out of control.
The price of redoing the costumes on “Seussical,” for instance, is at least $250,000 – that’s in addition to the $500,000 already paid for the originals.
New songs have to be orchestrated, a painstaking and labor intensive process that costs thousands of dollars per tune. Round-the-clock workcalls to hang new lights or put in new scenery means substantial overtime payments to stagehands.
“Everything you do, you’re doing on time-and-a-half,” says Emanual Azenberg, producer of “Broadway Bound,” “Side Show” and “Lost in Yonkers.”
“And the price of poker has gone way up.”
Another problem: big, complex, computerized sets that are not easy to reconfigure as a show changes.
“In the old days, you had painted backdrops you could throw out in the alley if you cut the scene,” says Elizabeth I. McCann, whose producing credits include “Dracula” and “Nick and Nora.”
“Now sets are on tracks and once you put the tracks on the floor, it is very difficult to change the running order of the show.”
“The mechanical aspects of the business are beginning to hurt the creativity,” adds Jim Freydberg, who shepherded “Big” through a rocky tryout. “Once you’re in previews, you are beholden to the set.”
Mechanical sets are also dangerous, especially if, as they often do, they go haywire the first time out.
“If you have a set problem, you can’t concentrate on anything else,” says Freydberg. “On ‘Big’ I spent two days explaining the danger of the set to the actors. That was two days I did not spend on the book and the score.”
Today, big musicals try to iron out content problems in workshops before “they’re encased in their set,” notes John Weidman, who wrote the books for “Pacific Overtures,” “Big” and “Assassins.”
The problem is that workshops are performed in front of investors, friends and theater insiders, who are there to offer encouragement, not criticism. The true test of any show is how well it plays to a theater full of people who have paid for their tickets.
Producers also feel the pressure of the New York theater press, which no longer honors the old, unwritten rule about keeping its mitts off a show until the New York opening.
The Post writes about shows out of town, as does the Times, the Daily News and Newsday.
Why?
To fill space, for one thing. In the summer, there is very little happening in New York theater, so theater reporters turn their attention to New York-bound shows running in other cities. This year, for example, The Post covered the opening of “Mamma Mia!” in Toronto, while the Times reviewed “The Full Monty” in San Diego.
To raise capital or build up advance ticket sales, producers also try to stir up interest in new shows long before those shows have gone into rehearsals.
But they can’t have it both ways: If they use the press to generate early buzz, then they have to expect the press will report on the show when it opens out of town.
The Internet has also changed the rules of the game. The day after “Seussical” played its first Boston preview, theater Web sites were full of unofficial “reviews.”
Every twist and turn of the show is being chronicled on the Web, with, it would seem, help from e-mail-happy cast members, who have posted “blind” items on Web sites like BroadwayStars.com, which is regularly checked by theater people.
Says Freydberg: “With the Internet, news travels fast, and it would be irresponsible for newspapers to ignore that. I wish we didn’t have articles in New York papers about our out-of-town tryouts. But we’re in a new era of tabloid and Internet journalism. That’s the way it is, it’s not going to change, and we’re just going to have to accept it.”
The lack of show doctors is another reason why it’s difficult to fix musicals quickly out of town.
Years ago, writers like Abe Burrows, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart shuttled around the Eastern Seaboard, helping (usually uncredited) theater friends who were in trouble out of town. Broadway also had directors like Jerome Robbins, George Abbott, Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett, who, schooled in the rough-and-tumble of the out-of-town tryout, could take the reins of a troubled show and bring it to heel.
The only director working today who grew up in that world is Tommy Tune, and he’s been tied up in Las Vegas for the past several years making gazillions of dollars starring in that ghastly jumped-up floor show, “EFX.”
(That thing doesn’t need a show doctor; it needs Jack Kervorkian.)
“The top musical directors now are English,” says McCann. “They can’t get on a train and come to Boston.”
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SPEAKING of show doctors, last week I wrote that the Dramatist Guild contract gives writers a lot more control over their material now than in the past, thereby making it difficult for producers to spirit in new writers in to fix a troubled musical.
But John Weidman, the president of the Dramatist Guild, told me in a letter this week that such control is nothing new. In fact, he notes, it has been a part of the Guild contract since 1926.
Had I bothered to check my facts, he says I would have discovered that “a composer or lyricist out of town with a new musical today has precisely the same ‘control’ over his show as did Rodgers & Hammerstein when they were out of town with ‘Oklahoma!'”
Thanks for straightening me out on that point, John, and I stand corrected.