Time For A Gypsy Revival — Page 4

It’s interesting to take a look at this thread five years later, as many of you appear to have been correct about the financial prospects of a Gypsy revival.

I remember when this revival was announced, essentially as AUDRA GYPSY, and wondering whether Audra McDonald was enough of a star to drive sales beyond the sorts of people who turn up for prestige revivals of classic musicals.

Barring a dramatic turnaround, the skeptics have been proven correct, even though a good argument can be made that the Audra McDonald-led revival outperformed reasonable expectations. Gypsy has been revived three times in the last 22 years, has never won Best Revival once, and lost money in its 2003 and 2008 versions.

Audra, like Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone before her, is a Broadway star. All three have done other things, but they don’t get tourists excited in the way that movie, TV and music stars do. But you can’t just trot out the celebrity of the moment to be Mama Rose. And once this revival closes, I suspect it will be a long while before Gypsy is on Broadway again.

The other week, I asked Imelda Staunton if she would ever come to Broadway and she said no, she doesn’t want to be that far from home. But then said she turned down doing “Gypsy” here twice, once fairly recently which i found interesting.

It’s perfectly fine we didn’t get an Imelda-led one “Gypsy” revival. The only thing that makes me upset about the current revival is that we’ll now probably never get the genius that is Donna Murphy headlining a Broadway “Gypsy.” She’d have been incandescent in the role. Regardless, I hope not too long passes between revivals, it’s the kind of show I think should be on Broadway every few years (not saying this makes sense financially, more of a wishful thinking/in an ideal world situation).

I did think the Audra revival would turn into the event of the season. I didn’t expect it to be such a commercially challenged enterprise.

The thing with AUDRA GYPSY is the sales are quite good, all things considered. The show is just prohibitively expensive to run. I don't think Broadway can handle a 26-person orchestra and 40-person cast nowadays without a star of a level above Audra (Jackman, Midler, Groban, etc).

At this pace there is no expectation that the investors will see any of their initial capitalization back, or so I'm told.