On Theater: Opening cold may not be cool
Broadway history spills over with colorful and/or agonizing stories about shows in their out-of-town tryouts. Now come the stories about staying in town.
Perhaps you've heard the buzz - or maybe it's more like a growl. Several big new musicals - most conspicuously "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" - have been bucking tradition by opening on Broadway before first practicing on somebody else's audience. And "The Book of Mormon," by the scamps behind "South Park," will arrive in the spring without tryouts.
The term is "opening cold," a phrase that André Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, has heard a lot since the unsteady but audacious "Women on the Verge" opened Nov. 4 to mostly disappointing reviews. "It's a topic in the air this season," he says, pausing a moment to muse about the phraseology. "Opening cold? As opposed to opening hot? I find that a terrifying connotation."
Terrifying is hardly an unknown sensation when concocting a musical, especially one as big and complicated as this star-encrusted adaptation of Pedro Almodóvar's passionately stylized Spanish film comedy. In our days of instant global opinion, a show with Patti LuPone, Laura Benanti and Brian Stokes Mitchell - by the creative team responsible for this same theater's magnificent revival of "South Pacific" - is not going to be allowed to tiptoe into previews.
In a little speech before the first preview Oct. 8, director Bartlett Sher told the audience he hoped it would be the first time the show would run completely through without stopping. There followed weeks of calamitous technical snafus. Bishop - who has a rare combination of great taste, good sense and appetite for adventure - could not have been surprised by the flames of the Internet wildfire.
"Even when they go out of town, American musicals are always a kind of blood sport," says Bishop, who ran Playwrights Horizons in the years it nurtured "Sunday in the Park With George" and "Falsettos."
"In the '40s, some audiences would rush on the train to New Haven" to spread the word about a tryout. ("No legs, no jokes, no chance" was the infamous gossip from the road in 1943 about "Away We Go!," which was renamed "Oklahoma!" when it finally got into town.)
"There's a certain amount of romance about the old days, when miracles happened on the road," he says. "We certainly talked about a tryout. But we're a nonprofit, and hooking with another nonprofit is immensely complicated. We didn't want to do a co-production, which would have added problems."
Producer Margo Lion knows the problems, both in town and out, but comes down on the side of tryouts. Despite the ever-rising costs of the road and the inescapable blab of the Internet, she is convinced "it's better to find out the kinks when you're out of town."
Lion is a main producer of "Catch Me If You Can," adapted from the 2002 con-man movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks. Like "Hairspray," another little show she produced, this one has played first at Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre, the rare nonprofit theater with a big 2,200-seat capacity.
"Hairspray" came almost immediately to Broadway. "Catch Me" played Seattle in July 2009 and doesn't open here until April. "Because of the schedules of our creative team , we couldn't come in right away," she says. "It has given us time to do some work, to reimagine parts of the physical production."
The closest she ever came to opening cold was "Jelly's Last Jam," which was almost completely redone in 1992 after a tryout a year earlier. "We had to do all the work in front of everybody," she recalls. "We never saw the sunshine. It taught me a lesson."
Like many commercial productions these days, "Catch Me" is being developed with a nonprofit theater. Such arrangements used to be frowned upon as betrayals of the nonprofit mandate, but today's economic realities have made objections seem quaint.
A commercial producer pays "enhancement" money, the difference between the cost of
the production and the amount budgeted for that slot by the theater. "If you have a big name attached or can raise enough money," says Lion, then a straight commercial tryout is feasible. "The Addams Family" and "Young Frankenstein" didn't go the nonprofit route.
But the most innovative Broadway shows begin today in the nonprofits. "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson," "Spring Awakening" and "Avenue Q" had what might be considered tryouts Off-Broadway. "Next to Normal" got mixed reviews here at Second Stage, was developed more at Arena Stage in Washington and returned to Broadway to win the Pulitzer Prize. "The Scottsboro Boys" began here at the Vineyard Theatre and was polished at the Guthrie in Minneapolis before opening on Broadway this fall.
Lion doesn't envy the very public evisceration of the much-delayed $60-million spectacle of "Spider-Man," which is too big to even think about a tryout. "It's very, very, very hard to put on a show," she says about the production, now promised for Jan. 11. "It's just as hard to put on a show that doesn't work as it is to put on a show that does work."
Bishop admits that opening cold has been "an unbelievably complicated experience. If and when we do another large show and we can find the right matchup with another theater, we would definitely think about a tryout." As he puts it, "Time is the friend of the theater." Time away from Broadway may still be the best friend of all.
