If you’ve got $40 million lying around, you, too, can be a Broadway theater owner.
That, I’m told, is the asking price for the Foxwoods Theatre, that white elephant on West 42nd Street, where “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” chugs along despite my best efforts.
(Power of the press!)
Live Nation, which owns the theater, announced last week that it’s putting it on the block.
Potential buyers include Broadway’s three theater owners — the Shuberts, the Nederlanders and Jujamcyn — as well as Broadway Across America, which owns several theaters around the country.
Live Nation has also approached some individual producers who’ve gotten rich off mega-hit musicals.
So far, though, there are no takers — at least at the current asking price.
(If it drops to $400, I might be able to put together a consortium of investors.)
The talk at the Jujamcyn Theaters holiday party this week was what a dud the Foxwoods is.
Sure, if you’ve got “Spider-Man” in there grossing more than $1 million a week, you can make some money. But the history of this cavernous barn (1,900 seats) isn’t a happy one.
It is, in fact, a flop house. Here are some of its losers:
* “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” (bye, bye, $15 million)
* “Hot Feet” (music by Earth, Wind and Fire — and $10 million up in smoke)
* “Young Frankenstein” (Mel Brooks still hasn’t recovered)
* “The Pirate Queen” (I still haven’t recovered)
Directors, writers and performers don’t like to work in the Foxwoods. It’s way too big, and there are dead spots where sound doesn’t travel.
“God, we hated that theater,” says a member of the “Young Frankenstein” production team. “We did all sorts of things to fix the sound, but nothing ever worked.”
The theater, with its huge staff, is also expensive to carry when it’s empty. And it’s had long periods of being empty over the years. “Spider-Man” should be there for another year or so — I’ve stopped making predictions about its longevity — but sooner or later the theater will need a new tenant.
And that’s when the money starts draining away.
“Very difficult theater to book,” says an executive at one of Broadway’s theater chains. “You have to have a really big show, and they don’t come around all that often.”
The Foxwoods has always been under a cloud. It was constructed in 1996 from two legendary 42nd Street theaters — the Lyric and the Apollo — by one of Broadway’s biggest crooks, Garth Drabinsky.
Drabinsky, founder of the defunct company Livent, is being forced to listen to the score of “Hot Feet” over and over again in his cell at the Beaver Creek minimum-security prison in Canada.
He’s serving a five-year sentence for fraud.
Drabinsky’s old theater is up for sale right at the time a documentary about his criminal exploits is about to be unveiled in New York.
Director Barry Avrich’s “Show Stopper: The Theatrical Life of Garth Drabinsky” is being screened Sunday night for an audience of Broadway VIPs, including several who might one day wind up with the Foxwoods.
The movie charts Drabinsky’s rise and fall as the founder of Cineplex Odeon, and then, after he was pushed out of that company, his rise and fall as the founder of Livent.
It’s a compelling tale, vividly told by both champions (Chita Rivera, Elaine Stritch, Diahann Carroll) and detractors (Sid Sheinberg, Frank Price, yours truly).
After the screening, maybe we should auction off the Foxwoods.
Forty cents on the dollar!
Last week, I plugged a couple of shows for the holidays — “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” and “The Holiday Guys.” In so doing, I managed to provoke my good friend Jackie Hoffman, whose show, “A Chanukah Charol,” gets a warm review from Elisabeth Vincentelli
.
Jackie sent me an e-mail after her opening last Saturday: “It was an uproarious triumph. Too bad you weren’t there to share it with me. I guess you were at your favorite holiday show, ‘The Christmasy Mystery of Edwin Drood,’ voting on another ending. My favorite is when the Maccabees win.”