If/Then Closing? — Page 3

Just a note that even though the show may be on the Road Company's website is still not a guarantee that it will tour. The producers have to have a way to gauge if there is even enough interest from the road presenters to make a tour financially feasible.

The set would also most likely have to be modified to tour as well. There is no way that this show would not be going out under the SET agreement, which means a fewer number of trucks and a set that needs to be able to go in relatively quickly, so most likely no show deck and thus no turntable. That's a pretty big element of both the design and direction that would have to be rethought.

You have a marketing challenge, but since this show would be packaged as part of a subscription series in a lot of cities, it is one that likely could be overcome with enough of a name in the leading roles and reframing the messaging to be about the show's content instead of its current framing as a Menzel star vehicle.

I've been a subscriber now in Toronto for about 6 years, and the only 2 examples I can think of where the lead actor in a show was advertised or even mentioned at all were Angela Lansbury this year in Blithe Spirit, and Topol in Fiddler (but he left the tour before it came to town due to an injury and wasn't in it anyway). I was personally excited to see Alice Ripley in Next to Normal, but her presence in that show was not advertised at all by the subscription presenter (Dancap).

Subscriber audiences as a whole do not necessarily care that much about who is in a show, since most Broadway stars are not that well-known to local audiences unless they also take frequent trips to NY to see Broadway shows (which some do) or buy lots of cast albums (probably a larger number). But lots of people are coming to see the shows themselves, based on the description of the plots, themes, etc. provided in the subscription advertising brochures/online. If/Then is an interesting show with an interesting theme for many of the people who go to the theatre (recall that about 2/3 of Broadway attendees are female and the largest age group is middle-aged people, for whom the themes in If/Then would be likely to resonate strongly, as they would for many others as well).

Advertising on tours is not really that big a deal, since a show just has to sound interesting enough for someone to want to see it once, or at least not horrible enough to make someone choose not to subscribe for the other shows in the package that sound more interesting to them. They are not trying to run the show for years on end in the same location (although they sometimes go for it with a different cast when the tour moves on (e.g. Billy Elliot, Once) if demand is high enough. I see no reason why Jackie Burns couldn't do it (i don't mean that i know her schedule; i mean from an audience enjoyment perspective). She played Elphaba on tour here in 2010 and was well-liked.