TOOT, toot — we have our “Rebecca” whistle-blower!
The man who brought the curtain down on Broadway’s biggest fiasco in years is none other than the show’s very own press agent, Marc Thibodeau.
A veteran Broadway publicist who has represented such shows as “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Les Misérables” and “Miss Saigon,” Thibodeau sent the “poison pen” e-mail to a potential “Rebecca” investor warning him that Manderley really was about to go up in flames.
The investor quickly fled for the hills, forcing embattled “Rebecca” producer Ben Sprecher to scuttle his $10 million Broadway musical.
As it turned out, Thibodeau did the investor a favor.
A few days after Thibodeau fired off his anonymous e-mail, Sprecher was forced to admit he’d been duped by Mark C. Hotton, a Long Island stockbroker mired in bankruptcy and allegations of fraud.
The feds nailed Hotton last fall, charging him with concocting phony investors and fleecing Sprecher of $60,000 in fees and expenses.
Hotton claimed one of his investors, a “Paul Abrams,” died of malaria right before he was going to hand Sprecher a check for $4.5 million.
Sprecher sued Hotton last fall. And yesterday, he added Thibodeau’s name to the suit, claiming the press agent had misused “confidential information” and took “malicious actions” against the production by sending out the anonymous e-mail.
“If he thought there was fraud going on here, you go to the authorities — you don’t send an e-mail to the last investor to put in money and crash the play,” Ronald Russo, Sprecher’s lawyer, said yesterday.
Jeffrey Lichtman, Thibodeau’s lawyer, responded: “Ben Sprecher is now suing the innocent whistle-blower with an impeccable reputation on Broadway who anonymously warned an innocent investor not to sink $2 million into the sinking ship that was ‘Rebecca.’ ”
Lichtman said Thibodeau would soon fire back with his own lawsuit, claiming that Sprecher ignored his doubts about Abrams’ existence and his warnings about Hotton’s shady background.
“Despite Sprecher’s assurances that he had done his ‘due diligence’ on Mark Hotton and Paul Abrams, Marc’s 10-second Google search revealed that Hotton was knee-deep in fraud and that the home address of Paul Abrams provided to Sprecher was a fake,” Lichtman said.
Desperate producers. Phony investors. Anonymous e-mails.
This whole business is starting to sound like “Sweet Smell of Success,” that brilliant, brutal 1957 movie about a Broadway press agent, Sidney Falco, and his back-stabbing ways.
Except for one thing: Thibodeau is woefully miscast as Sidney Falco.
I’ve known him for more than 20 years, and back-stabbing he is not.
But don’t take my word for it. Check with Cameron Mackintosh. Or Hal Prince. Or Andrew Lloyd Webber. Or any of his other high-powered clients who’ve known and trusted him for years.
Thibodeau declined to comment, but people close to him told me he was distraught about the goings-on with “Rebecca” from the beginning.
Fearing he’d get caught up in what he believed to be fraud, Thibodeau, says a source, scurried off to a Starbucks, opened his laptop and typed up the anonymous e-mail that capsized the production.
I’m told that as soon as he hit the send key, he regretted it — but what’s done is done, and there’s no such thing as an “anonymous e-mail” in this day and age.
Thibodeau has co-operated with the authorities, turning over e-mails and documents he sent to Sprecher and other people involved in the show, sources said.
And so the “Rebecca” saga continues.
As they say in “Sweet Smell of Success,” It’s “got more twists than a barrel of pretzels!”
Additional reporting by Mitchel Maddux and David K. Li