‘Viva Forever!”?
If producer Judy Craymer has anything to say about it, it’ll be “Viva, at Least for a While!”
“Viva Forever!,” the much-ballyhooed Spice Girls musical, opened in London last month to the kind of scathing notices that can send a producer over the ledge.
“A prize Christmas turkey!” proclaimed the Daily Mail.
“A show that’s so bad it ought, if there were any justice, to be accorded a minus-star rating,” sniped the Daily Telegraph.
The Guardian gave it three (out of five) stars — but only because it’s better than its West End rival, “We Will Rock You,” the Queen musical the paper called “so shoddy it makes your average infant school nativity play look like Sondheim.”
Talk about faint praise!
London’s theater insiders have also gotten their licks in. (One theater owner refused to read the script because he didn’t want a Spice Girls musical on any of his stages.)
A cheeky West End shutterbug snapped a picture of a “rubbish removal” van parked right under the “Viva Forever!” marquee on the Piccadilly Theatre. Under the headline “Could this be prophetic?” the photo was e-mailed to dozens of influential theater people on both sides of the Atlantic.
Craymer and Jennifer Saunders, the “Absolutely Fabulous” creator who wrote the musical’s much-maligned script, told a London paper they were “crestfallen” when they read the reviews.
But they’ve latched onto the now-legendary story of “Les Misérables,” which received some scathing notices when it opened in 1985 at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Cameron Mackintosh, its producer, didn’t think he could move it to the West End with such bad reviews. That is, until he called the box office and was told people were lining up for tickets.
His decision to buck the critics and transfer the show to the Palace would eventually make him the richest producer in theater history.
Craymer and Saunders are heartened that the audience for “Viva Forever!” — teenage girls — doesn’t read stuffy old newspapers. They say the kids are dancing in the aisles and that the box office is holding up pretty well despite the onslaught of criticism.
Still, Craymer’s taking no chances. She is, in fact, overhauling the entire production. Cast and crew are doing double duty, rehearsing the new version by day while performing the old one at night.
Sources say the cost of such an overhaul could exceed $1 million.
But Craymer can afford it. She owns something like 18 percent of a little show called “Mamma Mia!” — which, the last time I checked, had grossed about $2.5 billion around the world.
She’s also nothing if not tenacious. She spent years trying to persuade Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus to give her the rights to the ABBA catalog.
She begged and borrowed and mortgaged property to get the money for the show. Its success has made her one of the richest women in England.
“Judy loves ‘Viva,’ and she’s not about to let it peter away,” says a source. “She believes it delivers to the audience it’s intended for, and they’ll support it.”
The overhaul, sources say, is geared to making “Viva” more audience-friendly. Out: much of Saunders’ script about a group of teenage girls seeking fame on an “American Idol”-type show. In: more dancing, singing and audience participation (that is, dancing in the aisles all night long!).
In other words, “Viva Forever: The Concert!”
Will it work?
Not, I think, if the show were running here. In fact, it would be a monumental mistake to bring “Viva Forever!” to Broadway.
But West End audiences have a taste for the cheap and easy: “Flashdance,” “Fame,” “Michael Jackson’s Thriller — Live” and, the Queen of them all, “We Will Rock You.”
If Craymer can tap into that, she’ll have even more millions to play with.