Broadway is Dark Tonight

[Hear Steve's podcast interviews with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Harvey Fierstein, Hal Prince, Kevin McCollum and many others by clicking here]

June 22, 2006

By DAVID MCKEE

Broadwayis sizzling. Broadway-in-Vegas is fizzling. Even as the Great White Way is seeing record attendance and its boffo-est box office ever ($862 million this season), it's a different story out here. Attempts to transplant the Broadway musical to the Las Vegas Strip have found the soil infertile and the tilling arduous.

If the uneasy marriage of art and commerce that is Broadway theater is enjoying one of its periodic honeymoons, Vegas and Broadway are still negotiating the pre-nup. Casino resorts want shows that will act as "tentpoles," running year after year. But while a Showboat or Miss Saigon might sustain business for months or even a year, as tentpoles they're wont to collapse like Britney Spears' first marriage, another Strip spectacle that didn't go the distance.

The latest attempt to consummate the Vegas-Broadway marriage occurs Saturday, when Phantom: The Las Vegas Spectacular, an adapted-for-the-Strip edition of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera, is rolled out at the Venetian. If it's a success, the timing will be fortuitous indeed.

On June 11, Broadway was throwing itself a party, in the form of the annual Tony Awards. That same night, over at Luxor, the curtain was descending for the last time on Hairspray, the John Waters musical that arrived on a wave of ballyhoo and lasted less than four months.

It's been a bad spring for theater on the Strip. The off-off-Broadway song-stylings of the Kinsey Sicks' Dragapella failed to find an audience at the Las Vegas Hilton. And Steve Wynn, who'd prophesied with characteristic overstatement that Avenue Q would play for a decade in Vegas, pulled the plug on the quirky puppet musical on May 28, after nine months. Wynn's run of bad news continued when, a few weeks later, he forked over $16 million to buy longtime sidekick Franco Dragone out of Le Reve, a demi-Cirque du Soleil spectacle that Wynn deemed insufficiently Wynntastic. Having already retooled the aquatic show last year, Dragone couldn't (or perhaps wouldn't) make the rock 'em, sock 'em changes Wynn wanted, so a team of show doctors will now try to rev it up.

BLAME IT ON CHICAGO

When Mandalay Bay opened a limited run of Chicago in March 1999, it set up inflated expectations for Broadway-ized Vegas, according to national freelance journalist Steve Friess. "Chicago actually did better than it was supposed to," he reports, although ticket sales flamed out when the original stars were replaced by lesser luminaries.

"Broadway is becoming more and more like Las Vegas," contends New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley, but the reverse equation doesn't compute. For casino consultant Jeffrey Compton, "We're talking about such different animals. You'll occasionally get a crossover, but it's few and far between.

"There's so much to do in Las Vegas that is free," adds Compton, echoing observations made by Avenue Q executive producer Kevin McCollum. "There isn't a real demand that every night we have to go to a show. You can watch the fountains [or] whatever they do in front of Treasure Island."

Or, as McCollum puts it, "Vegas is a town where people are at a more heightened state, in terms of their adrenaline pumping. Wherever they are, they're thinking about what they're going to do next." Not a good thing if you're trying to keep them focused on the second act of what Variety described as "a small-scale, raunchy show featuring puppets that sing comic tunes about racism and porn."

HITS, MISSES AND QUESTION MARKS

The news isn't entirely grim. Down at Mandalay Bay, Mamma Mia! keeps the Broadway brand going through good times and bad, but it's an exception to so many Sin City rules that few useful conclusions can be drawn. In a town where the intermission-less, 90-minute spectacle is God, Mamma Mia! runs 2 1/2 hours with an interval. Avenue Q had Tony Award buzz and exclusivity west of the Mississippi. Mamma Mia! has played around the globe, lacks critical approval and is buoyed by songs that were the subject of ridicule not so many years ago (before Bono made it safe to like ABBA again). Its appeal transcends languages, though, a (near) guarantor of success.

There's a Mamma Mia!-like boomlet taking place over at the Las Vegas Hilton, where the similarly estrogen-intensive, Los Angeles import Menopause: The Musical has become a pint-sized blockbuster, enough to justify double casting and an expanded performance schedule. Of course, the Hilton isn't trying to fill 1,800 seats with the show, but it's flourishing while nearby Dragapella withered on the vine. "This show has a dynamic of its own," says the Hilton's Ira David Sternberg, of Menopause. "You can't couple it with any other trend."

On the other hand, Harrah's answer to We Will Rock You was, "No, you won't." Having unplugged the Queen-themed musical, it now puts its eggs in the basket of The Producers, bowing at Paris Las Vegas late this summer. If the early buzz is optimistic on Phantom is and guardedly pessimistic on The Producers, the wild card is Spamalot. For good or ill, the handwriting will already be on the wall for both of its predecessors when Spamalot begins rehearsals in November for a spring 2007 Vegas debut, climaxing the second wave of the Broadway invasion. While we wait for the Killer Rabbit and Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, what lessons can be learned from the Great Musical Massacre of 2006?

Sometimes you're just stuck with a lemon. Hairspray has been losing money on the road, and on Broadway it's only number eight among the top 10 shows. Spamalot, Mamma Mia!, The Producers and venerable Phantom are all drawing better -- and box office champ Wicked is rumored to have been spurned by Vegas.

"Harvey [Fierstein] is a very good actor and he's a very hard worker," says Compton, "but he's not a name that translates well in Las Vegas."

Friess agrees: "Don and Mary from Des Moines didn't know who he was and it didn't sell any tickets." Nor did it generate positive word of mouth, which Sternberg cites as central to the continued hot streak of Menopause and to which Compton credits some of the staying power of Mamma Mia!

Friess thinks part of the problem boils down to matching the show with the property. In other words, beehive hairdos and Egyptian pyramids make an odd fit. "The brilliant match of a show and a property is O at Bellagio," he explains. "The elegance, the beauty, even the name fits that property like a glove." He cites Cirque's pan-sexual, envelope-pushing Zumanity as a show that actually redefined its host casino, New York-New York. The Gotham-themed resort had always planned to reach for an urban demographic, Friess says, and Zumanity has "got a cutting edge to it and the rest of the property followed suit." By contrast, the earlier Madhattan offered too much rap and hip-hop for tourists' taste.

Phantom's producers appear to buy Friess' theory. "The Venetian fit best in marrying the themes of the show plus the scenery, the elegance and the architecture," co-producer Scott Zeiger told Variety. Ironically, Paris-set Phantom isn't playing Paris-Las Vegas, which even replicates the show's central location, the Palais Garnier. Friess cites Paris as a casino that's really struggled to find a show to fit its image. In addition to We Will Rock You, inauspicious predecessors to The Producers include Notre Dame de Paris, a notoriously ill-fated show Review-Journal theater critic Anthony Del Valle sums up as "two hours of whining."

Avenue Q, according to Friess, suffered from a disconnect between its young-urbanite subject matter and Wynn's aging-urbanite customer base. Shirty comments to TripAdvisor.com, like "revolted ... we could only stomach the political leftist agenda for 20 minutes," conjure up the vision of so many Eustace Tillys and Margaret Dumonts storming out of Wynn Las Vegas in high plutocratic dudgeon.

GIVE 'EM THE OLD RAZZLE-DAZZLE

The Gray Lady's Brantley speaks for many when he says, "The ideal shows for Vegas would be things that don't demand your unconditional attention -- or else they're splashy enough to command your unconditional attention," a point Del Valle seconds. Or, in the words of Variety correspondent Phil Gallo, "Las Vegas audiences have little patience for story and characters." But spectacle never goes out of style. The proliferation of Cirque du Soleil shows on the Strip is nowhere near saturation point. Cirque's newest, the Beatles-themed Love, is universally expected to do blockbuster business, and Cirque already has an Elvis-centric follow-up on the drawing boards.

Cirque Lite, however, is a brand for which Vegas consumers have less appetite. Imitations like Storm are already half-forgotten and Dragone's Le Reve has been dogged by negative buzz from its opening. "Only Cirque doing Cirque will work. There's just something Cirque knows how to do," says Friess, and part of that is to have more going on than can be digested in one sitting, practically forcing repeat business. So too Phantom, which is being re-tooled into a sort-of theme park attraction.

'KEEP IT GAY'

Not for nothing is that a song title in The Producers. Spamalot augurs favorably, in Variety logic, because "the Monty Python antics ... hold unusually high appeal for straight men, among the most elusive auds for tuners," as the magazine delicately phrases the matter in its customary argot.

But do Vegas audiences flee when the gay is in the house? "Vegas, in its persona, is dedicatedly heterosexual," says novelist and playwright David Kranes, for whom the city -- longtime home to Liberace and Siegfried & Roy-- is a favorite source of subject matter.

Compton says it's not the city's fault. "I do not think the town is homophobic," he contends. "They like gay tourists because they like gay tourists' money. Las Vegas is not so much the red-state entertainment capital," he argues, as it is the entertainment Mecca of Middle America. Visitors equate Vegas with escape, "including getting away from how society accepts gay people."

SAME SONG AND DANCE

Even before the expensive lesson of Hairspray, its producer, Michael Gill, was contemplating bringing Broadway's The Wedding Singer (from the Adam Sandler movie) and a Riverdance knockoff to Vegas. After all, if there is one point of overwhelming consensus on the cul de sac that was Avenue Q, it's that Vegas customers cleave to the comfort of familiarity. "People feel safer with things they know," says the Avenue's McCollum. Kranes seconds the notion: Vegas audiences are uncomfortable with "things that are funky and quirky, unless they are un-narrative like Cirque du Soleil. It's not enough to know this won a Tony Award if you haven't seen it."

What that almost certainly means is more "jukebox musicals," which Friess describes as "a fancy version of the low-rent tribute concerts that are all over the Strip." It's no longer enough that people leave singing the tunes -- they have to be humming them on the way in. Even Phantom, thanks to 18 years on Broadway, a steadily selling album and more touring companies than you can shake a chandelier at, has the kind of pre-sold cachet that keeps Mamma Mia! rolling, even at less-than-sellout numbers in Las Vegas.

Pointing to the niche-market success of Menopause, Compton says it shows there's a theater audience in Las Vegas -- just not a big one. Del Valle thinks productions like Avenue Q will eventually survive, but only when eight or nine Broadway shows are running on the Strip: "At least it's a question mark now. Maybe in a few years it'll be an exclamation point."

For the moment, though, everything is riding on the man in the mask. "If Phantom doesn't work {here}, then nothing will work," proclaims Friess. "Period. End of story."

Kranes proposes another solution, elegant in its brutal simplicity: "Somebody should write a musical about the Chippendales."

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