Word: shows
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cirque will head next to Toronto, then Washington. Back in Montreal, a new, even more theatrical show is being planned. In the meantime, performers move in and out of the Cirque's cast as the show travels. The youngest so far is seven-year-old Annie Wagner-Bouthillier, one of 14 -- count them -- 14 riders in a bicycle balancing stunt. In Manhattan's Battery Park City, it should not be hard to recognize her. She'll be the one with the big smile...
...best seller, then a multiple Oscar nominee as a 1976 movie. But onstage it set records of a different sort: losing more than $7 million made it Broadway's biggest failure ever. Said President Rocco Landesman of Jujamcyn Theaters, which invested $500,000 and provided a house for the show: "This is the biggest flop in the world history of the theater, going all the way back to Aristophanes...
...Producer Friedrich Kurz, 39, a West German impresario making his Broadway debut. Although most of the reviews had been scathing -- particularly about the superannuated kick line of high school girls, cumbersomely elaborate sets and inadvertently hilarious dance number about slaughtering a pig -- a number of critics nonetheless expected the show to find an audience and thrive. That was what had happened, despite savage reviews from London critics, during a four- week British trial run at the Stratford-upon-Avon home of the co-producer, the Royal Shakespeare Company. And night after night during Broadway previews, while some audience members laughed...
Carrie might have had just such a reserve if it held to its original $5 million budget. The show was eventually capitalized at $7 million, primarily by British and West German investors who had scant Broadway experience. But runaway costs reached, by some accounts, about $8 million, attributable partly to the high-tech fashion in current musicals, partly to the complexity of multinational production, partly to old-fashioned indulgence. Says the Royal Shakespeare Company's artistic director Terry Hands, who staged the show: "It started to be loaded with lavish trappings, none of which I believe were necessary." Sources involved...
...advertising-and-word-of-mouth strategy worked for Evita (1979), which opened to unenthusiastic reviews yet ran for almost four years. But it is not infallible: an additional $1 million enabled the 1985 Singin' in the Rain to survive almost a year, yet apparently did not recoup the show's $5 million- plus investment. Still, says Carrie's composer Michael Gore, whose credits include the movie Fame, "you can't produce a Broadway show without a reserve fund. That is my major dissatisfaction with this show...