“Big Fish,” little splash.
I don’t want to sink the hook in any deeper, but “Big Fish,” the $12 million musical that opened Sunday, looks destined to become an early casualty of the fall season.
There were long faces at the opening-night party as one lukewarm review followed another over investors’ iPhones.
The faces got even longer Monday when the box-office numbers came in. I’m told the show sold about $60,000 worth of tickets by the end of the day, a depressingly low number for a multimillion-dollar musical.
“Big Fish” opened with a $2.5 million cash advance, which may be enough to keep it going until the end of the year, but it’s going to be swimming against the tide.
By January, you’ll find it on ice at the Fulton Fish Market.
The vultures — or should I say seagulls (and that’s it with the marine metaphors) — are already circling the Neil Simon Theater. I hear “The Last Ship,” the new musical by Sting, is likely to open there in the spring.
“Big Fish” arrived in New York with little fanfare. The word-of-mouth from Chicago, where it tried out, was muted. There was a sense that the critics there went too easy on it, which gave the producers and creators false hope.
(I’ve noticed that out-of-town critics have gotten soft on Broadway-bound productions. My hunch is that they’re so eager to have their hometown be a tryout mecca, they’re reluctant to put the knife in. I may have to start traveling with my Ginsu knife collection again. Had I gone to “Big Fish” in Chicago, I would have brought my maguro bocho, which is excellent for filleting tuna.)
Production sources say everybody fiddled around the edges of the show, but never solved the big problem, Andrew Lippa’s score, which came in for a drubbing.
The Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli, who hails from Corsica, called his score “witless junk,” adding that “those who heard his disposable contribution to ‘The Addams Family’ can’t say they weren’t warned.”
(Whoa! Talk about a Corsican vendetta!)
Lippa’s a nice guy, and I hate to dance on his grave, but the music’s playing and I’ve got a column to fill.
He’s one of these young(ish) composers who are all Sondheim and no tunes. Jason Robert Brown’s another one, though I hear his score to “Honeymoon in Vegas” is surprisingly catchy. Ricky Ian Gordon is one, too. They’re smart, accomplished musicians, but if you put a gun to their heads, they wouldn’t be able to write “Happy Birthday.”
Years ago, they all contributed songs to Audra McDonald’s CD “Way Back to Paradise,” about which a legendary Broadway producer said, “If you want to know what’s wrong with the American theater, buy Audra McDonald’s new CD.”
One by one they’ve fallen by the wayside in the commercial theater, but Lippa clung on with “The Addams Family,” which the critics hated but which ran for nearly two years, thanks in large part to Nathan Lane.
Norbert Leo Butz, the star of “Big Fish,” is always a favorite with critics, but he’s no Nathan Lane at the box office.
And so when “Big Fish” closes, Lippa’s likely to wind up back in the non-profit pond for awhile, where he’ll be hailed as a genius by music critics who write for academic journals.
A footnote: While “Big Fish” was in Chicago, I almost wrote about how one of its producers, Stage Entertainment (owned by billionaire entertainment mogul and Gene Hackman look-alike Joop van den Ende) almost pulled out. The company had a handy excuse: They’re up to their necks in the new musical “Rocky,” which opens at the Winter Garden in the spring. But they were prevailed upon to stick with “Big Fish.” They did, and so I never ran that story.
After Monday’s reviews, I bet they wish I had.