IN a parallel universe you could be deciding tonight whether to try to score a hard-to-get ticket to Annette Bening’s play or Spike Lee’s Broadway directorial debut, or to grovel for a spare ticket to Jake Gyllenhaal’s Off Broadway play. Or, in a season heavy with musical revivals, whether to take in “Pal Joey” or “Guys and Dolls.”
This was, at one point, a real possibility for spring ’08. But though most of these shows may still reach New York, they obviously aren’t here now. What happened?
Putting up a Broadway show is like staging a giant musical number in the middle of a hailstorm with people who don’t speak the same language, have different agendas and all too often are sworn enemies. Agents, actors, directors, theater owners, union officials and investors have to line up and dance in unison.
“Delays are a normal part of the process,” said Rocco Landesman, president of Jujamcyn Theaters. “When a date is announced as an opening date, it’s really a hoped-for date. When a show arrives perfectly on schedule, that’s actually more anomalous.”
So consider the following phantom calendar — a gallery of the postponed and the canceled — less as a freak show than as a portrait of Broadway business as usual (which, granted, still makes it a bit of a freak show).
Of course it’s not an exhaustive list. If you had a dime for every show with declared Broadway aspirations, you could put on a full production of “Young Frankenstein” in your kitchen.
There are always a half-dozen or so maybes in each season, shows that are assumed to have Broadway intentions simply because of the scale of the project or the pedigree of those involved.
This season that category includes musicals like Trevor Nunn’s production of “Porgy and Bess,” a Des McAnuff-directed revival of “The Wiz,” and “13,” a Jason Robert Brown musical about junior high school students (performed by an all-teenage cast). Even before these shows opened out of town there were public and private noises about their coming to Broadway, though none of them announced specific dates. But aiming a show for Broadway is an exercise in patience not precision. So while none of the three shows are in New York yet, that does not mean they aren’t still Broadway bound (though “Porgy and Bess,” which is in the casting process, and “13,” which has a run in May at the Norma Terris Theater in Connecticut, are more likely at this point).
A possible Broadway transfer of Michael Grandage’s hit production of “Guys and Dolls” in London and a long-awaited revival of “Pal Joey” were assembling casts. “Pal Joey” was the next scheduled tenant for the Richard Rodgers Theater after the Disney show “Tarzan,” and “Guys and Dolls” was aiming for the St. James Theater. Casting difficulties and other problems kept those shows from opening. While “Pal Joey” will probably make it here, perhaps next year, that revival of “Guys and Dolls” is pretty much a dead letter. But neither of those productions were ever formally announced.
“Stalag 17” and “The Female of the Species,” on the other hand, two projects with sparkling marquee names attached, were.
The producers of the revival of “Stalag 17,” the 1951 prisoner-of-war comedy-drama, understood that Mr. Lee was a major name as a director but decided they needed a big star (or two or three) to help sell tickets. They began sending out feelers to agents last fall. This was around the time that the Hollywood writers’ strike was gearing up. Worse, there was — and still is — the possibility of a strike by the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or both, when the contracts for those unions expire this summer.
“The bigger, more in-demand names were all trying to book as many films back to back as they could,” said Peter Bogyo, a general manager with the Sprecher Organization, which is producing “Stalag 17.”
Without a star attached it’s hard to raise money from investors. So in October the producers postponed the production to the fall of 2008, when they imagined the labor situation in Hollywood would be clearer. (The death last month of Michael Abbott, the producer who had been driving the revival, did not derail the production, Mr. Bogyo said.)
The Broadway intentions of “The Female of the Species,” a new play by the Australian writer Joanna Murray-Smith, which was to star Ms. Bening, were announced in June. Three months later, citing “personal reasons,” Ms. Bening pulled out, and despite a scramble to recast the role in order to make the production’s pre-Broadway engagement at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, the producers decided to wait it out.
“Sometimes it’s better to be patient in this business,” said David Richenthal, the lead producer.
So they were. Ms. Bening is now back in, and the play is scheduled for the Geffen in the fall and Broadway in the spring of 2009, a delay of almost a year. But a wait that long doesn’t come free of charge.
“When you delay there are some costs that are incurred,” Mr. Richenthal said. “Some of them you can get back a year later. Some of them have to be absorbed by the producers, which will make the production more expensive but not prohibitively so.”
The play did lose its director, Michael Mayer, whose schedule has filled up. He has not been replaced.
Off Broadway two of the most anticipated shows of the season were “The Starry Messenger” by Kenneth Lonergan, to be directed by Mr. Lonergan and to star his pal Matthew Broderick, at the Manhattan Theater Club; and “Farragut North” by Beau Willimon at the Second Stage theater.
“Starry” was postponed partly because Mr. Lonergan needed more time to finish a movie, “Margaret,” which he wrote and directed (the same reason, incidentally, that the play was dropped from the 2006-7 season at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, where its premiere was initially scheduled). The fate of “Starry” is, so to speak, still up in the air.
But the tale of “Farragut North” is as circuitous and unpredictable as this year’s presidential election.
“There was,” said Jeffrey Richards, the play’s lead producer, “a state of honorable confusion.”
“Farragut,” a play about the idealism and disillusionment of electoral politics, was written by a young author and former Howard Dean campaign aide, Mr. Willimon. Mr. Richards read it and wanted to bring it to Broadway in the 2008-9 season, perhaps with an out-of-town engagement first.
Mr. Gyllenhaal and the director James Lapine participated in a reading, reports of which surfaced in The New York Post, but at that point the play was in a state of flux. Within days the Off Broadway theater Second Stage announced that “Farragut” would be part of its 2007-8 lineup, and the theater started searching for directors. Mr. Gyllenhaal had never officially signed on.
At some point, however, Mike Nichols read the play and wanted to direct it. On Broadway.
So “Farragut North” was now out of the already announced Second Stage schedule and back to opening on Broadway. Plans for a movie version of the play, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, were announced around this time as well.
But Mr. Nichols, who had never formally signed on, did not end up pursuing the Broadway production. And after all the buzz, Mr. Gyllenhaal was out as well.
So where are we now? According to Mr. Richards: Opening on Broadway in the fall. Doug Hughes directing. “Exciting people” in the cast.
