Foxwoods Flops- Page 2

[JRybka]

Posted: 2/1/11 at 1:32pm

I thought the Marquis was the cursed theater...

[Famebroadway2]

Posted: 2/1/11 at 2:04pm

The Marquis is cursed. Just go in and look at the "Wall of Flops" in the lobby. I am very happy they put it back up after Come fly away closed.

[Phantom of London]

Posted: 2/1/11 at 2:07pm

The 'Gershwin' is a huge house to fill and kind of struggled before Wicked, which is now nearing its 3000 performance, but it did have some long running shows, such as Showboat (947 performances), The Pirates of Penzance (787) Starlight Express (761) The King and I (695), Riverdance (605) and Sweeney Todd (557).

Althought Starlight Express didn't recoup and probably some of the others didn't, they however had decent runns, you could think of them as 'flop-hits'.

As for the Marquis there debut show 'Me and My Girl' was a big seller 1420 performances, other respectable run shows are Annie Get Your Gun (1045), Thoroughly Modern Millie (903), Victor/Victoria (734), The Drowsy Chaperone (674) and Damn Yankees (533).

I guess some of the shows above didn't make money, if they didn't you could think of them again as a 'flop-hits'. However The Hilton (foxwood sic) is definitely a house that has played many flops and I always thought the same for the 'Minskoff' which had the Tony winning Sunset Boulevard play for 977 shows and still flop.

[inlovewithjerryherman]

Posted: 2/1/11 at 6:20pm

there's no curse. it's all math. really, you can't fill a theatre as big as the Foxwood, Broadway or Marquis (I'm gonna throw the Palace into this discussion too) without a show that has big production values, or at least, you typically don't, because more technically advanced shows require theatres that can house them. If said shows are not massive hits, it takes a lot to break even on that kind of stuff.

also, I believe that if a house is smaller and has a hot ticket show, the fact that ticket buyers have trouble securing seats for specific performances actually increases positive word of mouth. If someone overhears their friend saying "I can't get a seat to (insert show name)", something in that person's brain says, "wow that must be a good show to sell out all the time".

Those big theatres rarely have that fortunate problem. I think only "Wicked" during busy times of year and occasionally "Mamma Mia", "Billy Elliot", or "The Lion King" could say that of any show in a biiiig theatre.

What surprises me is that producers continue to put money behind these enormus shows, when clearly the money is in plays, like this upcoming revival of "House of Blue Leaves", which will make BANK, and recently, sleeper hits, like "Million Dollar Quartet" and "Memphis". Perhaps producers put money into these big shows because since so many people want to invest in something "safer", there's less of an investment to put up for each individual producer.

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 2/1/11 at 7:38pm

The Foxwoods seems better suited to a Vegas type show like O

[Phantom of London]

Posted: 2/1/11 at 7:39pm

Out of interest London has a few theatres that have over 2000 seats, such as;

Victoria Palace, which has Wicked, must of played for about 5 years now.
Lyceum, Which has The Lion King, has played over 10 years.
Dominion, We Will Rock You, must of played over 10 years.
Theatre Royal, Shrek is going to open in June, Oliver has just closed after 2 years.
The Palladium, The Wizard of Oz is opening later this month, Sister Act played the venue for 18 months.

London has a similar population to New York.

[chewy5000]

Posted: 2/1/11 at 8:40pm

London also has seemingly little artistic merit.

[Jonwo]

Posted: 2/1/11 at 10:29pm

The Apollo Victoria is home to Wicked, not The Victoria Palace that is home to Billy Elliot.

The London Palladium's longest running show was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang which ran for three years, it doesn't seem to have long runners, The Theatre Royal Drury Lane hasn't had a long runner since Miss Saigon but both 42nd Street and My Fair Lady ran for five years.

[fingerlakessinger]

Posted: 2/2/11 at 12:41am

I honestly would not be shocked if WICKED ups and moves to the Foxwoods if Spidey closes. The Gershwin was the largest theater on Broadway and they were literally selling out almost every show and it still is....so a move would not be out of the question.
Just something I thought of...a lot of big hits have done that.

Foxwoods has how many seats?

Also, for some odd reason I could have sworn that there was talk of a new theater being built...I might have just imagined it but I dont know, I just thought that was in the works.

[Hanna from Hamburg]

Posted: 2/2/11 at 8:49am

I wonder how long it would take to make back the COST of a move for Wicked at 122 more seats per show. They would probably have to go dark for a short period of time to move, also. I just don't see it happening, but who knows.

[Skywalker3]

Posted: 2/2/11 at 10:29am

Young Frankenstein closed at The Hilton Theatre on 4 january 2009.

So if Wicked wanted to move, they would have don it when the theatre was dark for those 1,5 years!

[TheatreFan27]

Posted: 2/2/11 at 1:05pm

I don't believe that WICKED will ever leave the Gershwin. It wouldn't make sense for them to just up and leave when the show is doing SO well, and they probably have some agreement with Nederlander. I think it's safe to say that the Gerswhin will be tied up for the next 25-30 years or so.

I do think that the Foxwoods Theatre is one of the most gorgeous theatres on Broadway and would love to see a great musical call it home. It will be interesting to see how long SPIDER-MAN runs because if ALW's THE WIZARD OF OZ transfers to Broadway then I could definitely see them wanting to book the Foxwoods!

[Justin D]

Posted: 2/2/11 at 1:28pm

I wonder if the Foxwood's chancer would have been better if it were run by one of the 2 main groups (Nederlander or Shuberts). Atleast if it were, and one of them had a big hit they could maybe do a transfer.

But the cost of transfers these days make them liss likely to happen.

Productions make deals with the theatre owners dont they? Thats why we see X show is coming to town to play at a Nederlander house for example. Therefore I doubt Wicked will ever transfer there although it is one of the few shows currently running that could fill that theatre. But from a design aspect (being that wicked was designed with the Gershwin in mind) It would be a shame to transfer it and end up loosing alot of that front of house scenery it has, and it just would not look the same at the Foxwoods.

I do aggree though that posibly Wizard of Oz if it transfers can work well there because people in the states go gaga over Oz.

The other eauqlly expensive and surely a long shot would to somehow go back and convert it to 2 theatres, it seems like a backwards step but I always wonder what they were thinking building such a huge theatre. You can easily loose those side boxes (not the ones that were removed for Spiderman but the ones along the side wall) and bring forward the balconies and you would have a huge ammount of space left over.

[AEA AGMA SM]

Posted: 2/2/11 at 1:43pm

The thing is, though, even the largest Broadway theatres are pretty dwarfed by many of the road houses out there. I still find it somewhat amusing when people talk about how far away they are in some of the theatres here in NY. Clearly they have never had a cheap ticket in any of the Fox Theatres (St. Louis, Detroit, Atlanta, maybe elsewhere?). Growing up seeing shows in the Palace and State in Cleveland (around 2800 and 3300 seats respectively) the Broadway houses still feel tiny to me comparatively after all these years.

While the capacity was being pushed in terms of the Foxwoods I would be willing to bet that Drabinsky wished he could have made it even bigger.

I'm also curious if any of the actual financials from the original production of Ragtime ever surfaced. While it most likely still did close at a loss (the show was indeed huge and expensive to run) I would imagine that its loss wasn't as great as was originally reported and the show probably could have run a bit longer if Livent hadn't been taken down.

[BroadwayBrat]

Posted: 2/2/11 at 2:25pm

Yeah, I agree that size is relative. I live in Boston and saw my first few shows at the Wang theater. The Wang is enormous! You can be very far from the stage, even if you are in the orchestra section. When I went to NYC, I was happily surprised with the smaller size of most of the theaters.

[gvendo2005]

Posted: 2/2/11 at 2:55pm

The Wang is enormous!

Tell me I'm not the only one snickering right now.

[Justin D]

Posted: 2/2/11 at 3:18pm

lol.

But yes, I first saw Phantom at the Pantages in Toronto, that theatre goes way back.

The next time I saw the show was in London and I was startled at how small the theatre up there is.

[fingerlakessinger]

Posted: 2/2/11 at 4:13pm

Hmmm now that you guys said it, it would be a burdened to move WICKED, especially since they did design it for the Gershwin.

I heard the Foxwoods was originally going to be like over 2,000 seats or something, but they cut out a few rows

[Rentaholic]

Posted: 2/2/11 at 4:57pm

Perhaps my memory fails me but I saw the 42nd Street revival at the Hilton/Foxwoods/Whatever the hell it's called now from one of the last rows in the balcony and while I felt somewhat removed from the rest of the theatre, my seats were not awful.

[RemlapLBC]

Posted: 2/3/11 at 12:09am

I must agree with the previous posters. You people in New York are spoiled. You don't know what removed from the action is until you've been in the back of the balcony of the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. :) Pantages seats 2,691

[Justin D]

Posted: 2/3/11 at 7:55am

The one good thing about the Foxwood's design, like the Gershwin is it has very shallow balconies so the sight lines are rather nice (even through you are far away)

I read somewhere that when they designed the Uris theatre the feling was that people would rather sit in the orchestra than in the mezz/balcony, so they did a huge orchestra and a rather shallow balcony with those strange side /not-quite boxes things