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"The Producers" Scores
Mel Brooks' $10 million Broadway musical version of his classic flick, which opened to near-euphoric reviews Thursday at New York's St. James Theatre, is not only raising the roof with audiences, but raising ticket prices to heights rarely seen on the Great White Way--$100 a pop.
While other shows have hit the $100 mark (mostly limited-run productions), this is the first show with an open-ended run to charge that amount. All told, about 1,300 of the theaters 1,700 seats will carry the C-note charge (technically, $99 is for the show and one buck goes to theater renovations).
Not that theatergoers are turned off by the price tag. The stage version of the 1968 film (which starred Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) is Broadway's biggest hit since The Lion King; it opened with an advance of $17 million and tickets are sold out through November. On Friday (the day the reviews came out) alone, the show sold $3 million worth of tickets--a single-day record for Broadway.
The Producers stars Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick as two--yes--producers who concoct a scheme to make money by putting on a Broadway show, Springtime for Hitler, that is so bad it is sure to flop, allowing the producers to abscond with their backers' cash. To their surprise--and doom--the show becomes a smash hit.
Not unlike the actual show, which opened to near-universal acclaim last week. "The real thing, a big Broadway book musical that is so ecstatically drunk on its powers to entertain that it leaves you delirious," gushed the New York Times. "The first Broadway smash of the new century," said Daily Variety. "Brooks and the cowriter of the musical's book, Thomas Meehan, have crafted a story--cutting here, adding there--even more persuasive and funnier than the original movie," claimed the New York Post "It's the musical that puts the "hit!" in Hitler," crowed the Los Angeles Times "This is the kind of show that reaffirms a longtime theatergoer's profound conviction that a great Broadway musical, particularly one filled with as many gut-busting laughs as this one, provides as delirious a feeling as you'll ever experience in the theater," Hollywood Reporter proclaimed. "The Producers is a cast-iron, copper-bottomed, super-duper, mammoth old-time Broadway hit," said a breathless review in the New York Daily News. And in a four-star review, USA Today's reviewer called it "simply the funniest, most fearlessly irreverent thing I have ever seen on a Broadway stage." Thanks to the incredible demand and the steep ticket prices for the show, which was nominated for 10 Outer Critics Circle Awards earlier this month and seems a lock to clean up at the Tonys, it could gross as much as $1.1 million a week. If the production keeps going strong, its group of small-time backers should get their original investments returned by Thanksgiving.
"It's taken me 74 years, but for the first time in my life, I feel like I've hit the jackpot," Gloria Clyne-Greenberg, a retiree who staked $10,000 on the musical, told the New York Daily News.
Broadway sources say Lane and Broderick will likely pull in over $1 million each during the show's first year.
The only other shows to charge $100 was the limited-run Kevin Spacey-headlined The Iceman Cometh, the two-part, eight-hour version of Nicholas Nickleby, the two-part, six-hour Kentucky Cycle and Miss Saigon, which reduced top ticket prices to $65 after its inaugural year once it recouped its costs.
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