Your Thoughts on Best Musical Nominees? — Page 2

1. The Woman in White (THIS HAD BETTER BET NOMINATED, OR I AM GOING TO THROW SOMETHING!!!)

2. Jersey Boys (The most likely winner.)

3. The Color Purple (Maybe this will win if Oprah is hosting the TONY'S, and makes the voters biased. Still has a pretty good chance of winning anyways.)

4. The Wedding Singer or Tarzan. (Most likely the former.)

And I have to agree with ddtruitt that LESTAT doesn't have a chance anywhere it goes.

I REALLY want Woman in White to win, but there is another reason it probably won't: Because it is a very serious and heavy show. Look at the winners and competitors for the past few years. THE PRODUCERS winning over JANE EYRE, THE LION KING winning over RAGTIME, SPAMALOT winning over THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA, LA CAGE AUX FOLLES winning over SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE and so on and so on.

And I don't care if it's by Andrew Lloyd Webber or not. Oh, and jv92, I did some math and it appears that 60% at the Marquis is better than 90% of the Circle in the Square. My point is that it would be doing better business if it wasn't in such a huge theatre.

Sorry for the long post.

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60% at the Marquis means that the show lost money that week, while 90% at Circle in the Square translates into a very healthy profit. It's not just about the number of people attending. WiW cost roughly three times as much as Spelling Bee (which recouped its initial investment in an incredible 20 weeks) to mount and its rent and weekly running costs are AT LEAST twice what Spelling Bee's are. Most shows are budgeted so that they will break even (and this is a rough estimate) at around 65-70% attendance (depending on discounting and average ticket cost -- if you did 70%, but most people only paid half price, then the show probably lost money that week).

Because of the huge difference in weekly expenses, 12,000 people seeing WiW versus 5,000 people seeing Spelling Bee mean two completely different things. Perhaps the producers made a mistake putting WiW in the Marquis, but what's done is done and it's too late to do anything about it now (a move to a different theatre would be prohibitably expensive -- it would cost millions). The bigger problem is that audiences simply are not warming to this show. Word of mouth must be pretty lukewarm (or even bad) for the show to be performing so poorly. Plus, the buzz for the show within the industry has been consistently negative, with critics and theatre professionals (including Tony voters) calling it boring recycled Webber. Frankly, the show will be very very lucky to get a nomination for Best Musical and given the sentiment against it in the community, it has almost no chance of winning.

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Right on Margo...

WiW has a weekly operating cost of roughly $685,000

Bee has a weekly operating cost of about $235,000

That is almost exactly 3 times as much. WiW is in real trouble, and if the show keeps loosing money each week, it will be closed by April.

Updated On: 1/28/06 at 03:53 PM

ddtruitt is absolutely right. Sunset won in one of the weakest years in Broadway history, along with 1989 (only three best musicals -- Jerome Robbins' Broadway, Black & Blue and Starmites; they eliminated the book category that year) and 1985 (Big River, Grind, Leader of the Pack, Quilters). Sunset did well at the box office until Close left the show, after which the numbers began to plummet with each succeeding leading lady (Buckley, Page et al). It ended up losing millions.

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Jersey Boys
Wedding Singer
Color Purple

the 4th slot is anybody's guess. WiW, Tarzan, or Dancer's Life will take that last slot.

Lately?

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