“I’m sorry it didn’t catch on the way we had hoped, but I have no deep regrets. I love the show and I loved this production.”Adolph Green
THE Public Theater’s battered revival of “On the Town” will shuffle off the stage Sunday after playing just 65 performances and 37 previews, George C. Wolfe, the Public’s artistic director, announced yesterday.
The red ink-spewing show will close at a loss of nearly $7 million, making it the costliest flop of the current Broadway season and one of the most expensive revivals ever produced on the New York stage.
“It is with deep regret that ‘On the Town’ must close this Sunday,” Wolfe, the director of the revival, said in a statement.
“We had hoped that with a television commercial and a direct mail campaign, as well as a number of extremely positive reviews, we would be able to surmount the annual January doldrums … This was, unfortunately, not the case.”
Wolfe broke the bad news to his cast backstage at the Gershwin Theater last night, just a half-hour before they performed the show.
“It’s a blow, and I feel very sorry for everyone in the show,” said Adolph Green, who, along with Betty Comden, wrote the book and lyrics to “On the Town,” which has music by Leonard Bernstein.
“I’m sorry it didn’t catch on the way we had hoped, but I have no deep regrets. I love the show and I loved this production.”
Wolfe’s revival of “On the Town” was troubled from the start. The show opened to mixed reviews at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in 1997. When several commercial producers involved with the show decided not to move it to Broadway, the Public financed the venture itself.
Wolfe, who declined to use the show’s original dances by Jerome Robbins, also went through several choreographers, including Eliot Feld, Christopher D’Amboise and Keith Young.
Just weeks before the show opened on Broadway, Wolfe brought in yet another choreographer, Joey McKneely, to work on the show.
“On the Town” again opened to mixed reviews, but even though the show had a paltry advance of just $1.5 million, Wolfe refused to shut it down. Instead, he got the taxpayer-funded Public to pony up an additional $700,000, production sources say, to finance a marketing and ad campaign – all to no avail.