What Makes a Broadway Hit?

So I'm sitting at lunch with a gentleman who is interested in being on our Board of Directors for our theater company, and he wondered how we chose our scripts, what our purpose was, etc. (not a bad question for me to ask myself from time to time). When I told him our goal was to move shows on to the next level he said, quite innocently, "Well, that should be easy. Just pick the best scripts!" Huh. Now really, why didn't I think of that?

Why is it so hard to pick the right scripts? Why is it that smart, intelligent, experienced producers constantly get it wrong, failing to see the strengths of a "Wit", a "Next to Normal", a "Race", an "Angels in America", and put their money instead into shows which close after a few weeks? Even the very best get it wrong more often than not. Why? Is it that hard?

Well, yes. And the answer is the same for Broadway as it is for Hollywood. As Oscar winning screenwriter William Goldman put it, "No one knows anything". As evidence of this, you can take the top actor and top actress in the world at the time, add in one of the hottest television stars of the time, put them all in a movie together and no doubt people will flock to see it, right? Do you remember "The Mexican"? Does anyone? It starred Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and James Gandolfini.

In 2005 "In My Life" closed on Broadway to terrible reviews, and the theater chat boards were filled with countless 'I told you so's'. Here's a situation where a rich guy (Joseph Brooks) had a megahit a long time ago (You Light Up My Life) and moved the show to Broadway, writing the book, music and lyrics all by himself, and produced it with his own money. Looking at it in hindsight, there's no way this could possibly succeed. And it didn't. But not too long ago I heard of a similar situation, about an egomaniac who hadn't had a hit in years, never did much theater, thinking he could do most of the work himself, put his own money in and make it work. Twenty-five hundred performance later, Mel Brooks' "The Producers" did quite nicely, thank you.

If you're a producer of musicals, you look to the top musical talent of the past forty years and you say, "I want to work with that guy". That guy, by almost all counts would be Stephen Sondheim. Over the past fifty years, no one's achieved the reputation and success that Sondheim has. There are classes which teach pure Sondheim, festivals which do nothing but Sondheim musicals, and books and books dedicated to understanding the genius which is Stephen Sondheim. And he is unquestionably a genius. Of the top 100 longest running Broadway shows of all time, how many do you figure are Stephen Sondheim musicals? Not just ones he wrote music and lyrics for, but any ones that he was connected with? We're talking "Gypsy", "West Side Story", "Company", "A Little Night Music", "Follies", "Sweeney Todd", "Sunday in the Park with George", "Into the Woods", "Passion", "Assassins", etc. How many? Five? Ten? Twenty?

The answer is, not one. Not one Stephen Sondheim show is in the top 100 shows of all time. You want to hear some of the ones ahead of his? Shows like "My Fair Lady", "Guys and Dolls" and "Hello, Dolly!" are understandable, but "Hairspray", "Aida", "Jekyll and Hyde", "Grand Hotel" "Same Time, Next Year", "The Magic Show" and "Big River" are also in there. So you're a producer, Stephen Sondheim walks into your office and says, "I want you to put money into my musical." What are you going to do, say no?

Ok, so let's say you steer clear of Sondheim as a producer and you go across the pond to embrace the human hit-maker, Andrew Lloyd Webber. Only two shows have gone over seven thousand performances and he wrote both of them. From 1979 to 1988 he had "Evita" (1,567 performances), "Cats" (7,485 performances) and the still running "Phantom of the Opera" (9,300 and growing). Whether you cotton to his music or not, surely this is the bandwagon to hitch your financial ponies up to. Well, no. After Phantom the hits stopped coming for Sir Andrew, with shows like "Tell Me On a Sunday", "Starlight Express", "Aspects of Love" and "Whisper Down the Lane" generating disappointing sales. His latest ("The Woman In White") closed after 109 performances.

So if you can't go by reputation (Sondheim) and you can't go by history (Lloyd Webber) how do you pick? You can steer clear of jukebox musicals and you'll avoid backing flops such as "Lennon", "All Shook Up" and "Good Vibrations", but you'll also miss out on "Mama Mia!", "Movin' Out" and "Jersey Boys". Shunning musicals made from movies seems like a great idea as "Big", "Footloose", "The Red Shoes" and "Urban Cowboy" sink into the annals of musical flop lore, but I seem to recall "The Producers" was a movie at one time. So was "Hairspray" and "La Cage Aux Folles" and "The Full Monty" and "Billy Elliot" and "The Lion King". Musicals made from classic books don't fare that well, as "Anna Karenina" proved, but Victor Hugo doesn't seem to have done so poorly, and "Les Miserables" continues to play to sell out crowds all over the world.

In the end, there is no sure way to know. It's a crazy business and your gut is probably as good an indicator as any other. Perhaps it can all be boiled down to the scene in "Sunset Boulevard". Joe Gillis has just been criticized by one of the readers for his script and he turns to her and says, "I see you're one of the 'message kids'. I expect you'd have turned down "Gone with the Wind". Whereupon the head of the studio chimes in with, "No, that was me".