Every producer on Broadway wants Hugh Jackman to star in a show.
The Shuberts pursued him for years to play Littlechap (Littlechap!) in “Stop the World — I Want to Get Off.” Someone else wanted him for “The Music Man.” Another hoped he’d get him for “Houdini.”
I’ve even heard of a group of producers who toyed with the idea of asking him to star in a revival of “Hello, Dolly!”
“We’ll gender-bend it and call it ‘Hello, Danny!’” they said.
So how did Sonia Friedman, a prolific producer whose hits include the recent revivals of “Twelfth Night” and “Richard III,” land Jackman for “The River”?
“It was very complicated,” she says. “We sent him the play and he said, ‘Yes.’”
“The River,” a sinister but poetic drama by Jez Butterworth, begins previews Oct. 31 before opening Nov. 16 at Circle in the Square for a 13-week run. Jackman’s co-stars will be English actresses Laura Donnelly and Cush Jumbo, who will be making their Broadway debuts. The director is Ian Rickson, who staged Butterworth’s acclaimed drama “Jerusalem,” starring Mark Rylance, a few seasons back.
I can’t give too much away about “The River,” since it has quite a nifty little twist at the end. It does, however, take place in a remote cabin on a cliff on a moonless night (that should tell you something) — and it received rave reviews last year at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
Now, once you’ve lined up Hugh Jackman, you can have your pick of Broadway theaters. And the more seats the better, since Jackman has a tendency to break house records wherever he plays. I believe the haul from his one-man show at the Broadhurst for 10 weeks in 2011 was something like $15 million.
So it’s odd that Jackman has decided to go to Circle in the Square, which, with just 776 seats, is one of the smallest theaters on Broadway. Do some quick calculations and you can see that Jackman and his producers are leaving at least $1 million, probably more, on the table.
“I understand that,” Friedman says. “But frankly, I have seen plays and stars in theaters that are too big. It’s my job to protect Jez’s play. We could have easily gone to a 1,000-seat theater, but the work is too delicate. You need to feel you can touch the characters. You need to see the whites of their eyes. I know it sounds weird, but it’s the truth.”
Friedman has a soft spot for Circle, since it’s where she put on her Tony Award-winning revival of “The Norman Conquests” in 2009. Once Jackman toured the theater, he was on board as well. But what clinched the deal was that Paul Libin, who runs the place, told them that a river — a tributary of the Hudson, actually — runs underneath the theater.
I don’t know if it’s true, but I have to hand it to Libin: That’s one hell of a sales job. It’s probably just a leaky water fountain.
Of course, to make the show financially viable in a small theater, Friedman’s going to have to charge premium prices. But, she says, “We are not going to go bonkers.” And she says there will be at least 40 or 50 seats a night priced at $35, an idea Jackman endorsed immediately.
“Anybody can see this play, if you work at it a little bit,” she says.
Friedman managed to make a nice packet on her revivals of “Twelfth Night” and “Richard III,” which had some 250 seats priced at $25 throughout the run. The productions grossed $14 million, returning their $3.1 million investment in just eight weeks.
The plays have been nominated for eight Tony Awards, including nods for actors Mark Rylance, Sam Barnett, Stephen Fry and Paul Chahidi.
“I had zero idea the plays would work,” Friedman says. “I just backed them because I believed in them.”
She won’t have to take that kind of a flier on “The River.” The only thing sure in this business is that Hugh Jackman sells tickets.
So, as long as that creek beneath the theater don’t rise, the new theater season already has its first hit.