Out of nowhere — a hit!
If you had said to me a few weeks ago that “After Midnight,” the elegant and joyful celebration of the music of Duke Ellington at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, would upend the Broadway terrain, I would have taken a nice long toke from my (completely legal) pipe, blown a silky, sexy cloud of smoke in your face and said, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got Hugh Jackman.”
Well, “After Midnight” doesn’t have Hugh Jackman, but, suddenly, it does mean a thing.
The terrific reviews for this show that nobody was talking about now have them all talking.
Where did it come from?
How come I didn’t see it coming?
Why didn’t I invest?
What does this mean for my show?
Will I still win a Tony?
Too soon to say, my dears, but you certainly have some competition.
“After Midnight” — a musical that no one, no one, had given a thought to — opened yesterday to some of the best reviews of any Broadway show this season.
The box office was taking in zero dollars last week.
Yesterday morning, it took in $300,000.
There were a lot of Tony nominators at the opening. I spoke to some of them this week, and they loved it.
Mark my words, “After Midnight” is going to be nominated for Best Musical, Best Direction, Best Sets, Best Costumes and Best a whole bunch of other things.
What makes the success of this show so delicious is that one of its producers has labored for years as an ad man for a bunch of big-time producers who used to order him around.
His name is Sandy Block, and he was standing at the back of the theater the other night telling a producer he once worked for, “I’m a producer now.”
He is indeed.
But everybody who used to order him around is jealous.
Watch out for the knives, Sandy.
But I, of course, have your back!
I called Joe Machota yesterday to congratulate him on his promotion as the head of CAA in New York.
He didn’t call me back.
Best of luck to you, Broadway Joe.