By all rights, the new Broadway play “The Motherf**ker With the Hat” should be a feather in a cap.
Chris Rock heads up a strong cast including the excellent Bobby Cannavale and the sexy Annabella Sciorra.
The playwright, Stephen Adly Guirgis, is a critics’ darling whose works — “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” “Our Lady of 121st Street”–are performed all over the world.
Director Anna Shapiro won a Tony for the brilliant “August: Osage County” and producer Scott Rudin just opened “The Book of Mormon,” the biggest hit Broadway’s seen in years.
But “Motherf**ker” is in trouble. Last week, the show took in just $239,000 in a theater with a gross potential of $867,000. The advance is well under $1 million, and Saturday night, as rival shows played to packed houses, “Motherf**ker” went up before just 600 people.
Rock, who’s making his Broadway debut, is valiantly trying to sell tickets by appearing on high-profile TV shows like “Late Show With David Letterman.”
But he’s getting almost no traction.
“For whatever reason, nobody wants to see this show,” one person says.
The situation is so dire that unless “Motherf**ker” opens Monday to raves, it will close the following Sunday, production sources say — the first high-profile casualty of the spring.
Rock and his co-stars are painfully aware of their predicament, and their mood is grim. Guirgis, who’s admitted he struggles with depression, is so distraught that he sometimes stays in bed all day with the covers pulled over his head.
In Shubert Alley, the postmortems are under way.
Some people blame the show’s co-producer, the Public Theater.
In its misguided drive to be a Broadway player, the Public is trying to send as many of its productions uptown as possible. But the theater can’t raise the money needed to play in the big leagues.
Last fall, the Public bailed out of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” forcing the show’s lead producers to scratch and claw for cash during previews.
The same thing happened with “Motherf**ker.” The Public couldn’t come up with $600,000, its share of the $3 million capitalization. Rudin and his team scrambled for money when they could have been laying the groundwork for a big publicity campaign.
The Public didn’t return a call for comment.
Another problem for the play is its title. At first, “Motherf**ker” seemed titillating; in fact, it’s proved debilitating.
“We simply can’t get the name of the play out there,” a source says. “Chris can talk about it, but he can’t say the title, so nobody knows what it is.”
The subject matter, about drug addicts and alcoholics, may not be suited to Broadway audiences, who generally prefer lighter fare.
Rock’s failure as a box-office draw is something of a mystery. He may be the victim of a celebrity pileup, competing against Robin Williams (“Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”), Kiefer Sutherland (“That Championship Season”) and Ben Stiller (“The House of Blue Leaves”).
“They’re cannibalizing each other,” says a producer.
Guirgis comes in for some sniping. Asked for revisions, he turned in what amounted to a new script while the actors were still struggling with the old one. Then he disappeared for days at a time.
There was talk about closing in previews, but that would have been too embarrassing for all involved.
And so Rock and the cast will perform Monday night with grim determination.
If Guirgis shows up, he’ll be the guy in the pajamas.