Tuesday Tidbits- "Night Music" set to close

After nearly six weeks of rumors regarding replacement casts, producers announced today that the first Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music will close it's doors on June 20, the same day that stars Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Landsbury's contracts are set to end. At it's closing, the show will have played 20 previews and 217 performances.

The show received tepid reviews (including one from this guy), but played to near capacity crowds throughout it's six month run at the Walter Kerr Theater. Certainly, the pairing of Jones and Landsbury was one of the most inspired casting decisions of the season and helped to overcome a rather bland directing job by Trevor Nunn, whose pacing of the first act was so slow that the show might as well have been moving backwards.

Over the last month, Gwyneth Paltrow, Blythe Danner, and Debbie Reynolds were all rumored to be replacements. In the end, none of it materialized, forcing producers to pull the plug earlier than they would have hoped on their reported $4.8 million dollar production.

Many Sondheim fans have been clamoring for a revival of Merrily We Roll Along. How long until someone loses money on that production?

Director Julie Taymor was honored with a lifetime achievement award today at a luncheon sponsored by the New Dramatists. Taymor's body of work includes the stage adaptation of Disney's The Lion King. She also glued a unibrow on Salma Hayak in the 2002 film Frida that nobody saw, despite getting nominated for a lot of awards. Perhaps one day she will best be remembered for singlehandedly setting $60 million dollars on fire in the soon to be disastrous Spiderman musical.

Taymor was hard at work defending the project today, saying "The audience won't get rooked, so they shouldn't be complaining. They'll pay about the same for this show as they would for a two actor, one set show."

Note to Ms. Taymor-- The audiences aren't complaining yet. You still haven't delivered a show for them to hate. The people who should be complaining are the investors and everyone at Hello Entertainment who have invested the gross national product of Malaysia into a show that will never recoup unless you charge five times the ticket price of that two actor show you mentioned.

Spiderman is still allegedly opening this fall.