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Why West End shows are no longer flopping



The 2012 Spice Girls musical Viva Forever! sounded good on paper.

The producer was Judy Craymer, who’d produced 1999 hit Mamma Mia!, which had made £1.3billion worldwide. The script was by Jennifer Saunders. And, of course, there were the songs of everyone’s favourite Nineties girl band. It would be spectacular: thousands of Swarovski crystals glued on to costumes, hundreds of costume changes per performance. The show made more than £2 million in advance ticket sales from fans. Every seat at the 1,200-seat Piccadilly Theatre would be filled. What could possibly go wrong? 

Quite a lot. It sure takes hubris to name a show Viva Forever! And in classical Greek tradition, the fall came swiftly. Shocking reviews (The Telegraph: ‘definitively, monumentally and historically bad’) and a consensus that the Spice Girls’ back catalogue didn’t have the same narrative weight as that of Abba in Mamma Mia! meant that ticket sales fell off a cliff. Seven months after opening, Viva Forever! closed with losses of at least £5 million. It was a flop.

Viva Forever! didn’t last long

At least it had company. Buried deep beneath the West End is a graveyard of multimillion-pound losing theatrical flops (rather a good premise for a musical itself — call my agent). Below the Shaftesbury lies Lionel Bart’s 1965 musical, Twang!!, which lasted 41 days before closing with a loss of more than £100,000 (Bart sold his rights to Oliver! to finance it, which ultimately lead to his bankruptcy). Beneath the Palladium, there’s Ned Sherrin’s 1988 production, Ziegfeld, which lost £3 million and closed in five months. Under the Prince Edward, you’ll find 1991’s The Hunting Of The Snark, a £2 million production with hundreds of video screens and a 50-piece orchestra that closed after seven weeks. Then there’s former Radio 1 DJ Mike Read’s 2004 musical about Oscar Wilde, which lasted one performance, personally losing Read £80,000. Then, 2007’s fantastical The Lord Of The Rings musical at Theatre Royal Drury Lane lasted a year — but also lost £12 million, thanks to an onstage cast of 50 actors, cancelled previews when someone was crushed in the revolving stage, and decidedly mixed reviews. In each case the investors who’d stumped up the required millions lost it all. 

In theatreland, musicals are at the biggest risk of flopping, simply because they cost far more than a play with a modern minimalist set and a cast of 12. The average West End musical costs around £3.5 million to stage, most of which comes from long-suffering investors, who typically buy shares in the show for £500-£10,000. Producer James Seabright, currently behind Adam Kay’s This Is Going To Hurt, breaks down the cost of a West End ticket like this: up to 20 per cent goes on marketing, which frequently costs millions; another 19 per cent on renting the theatre and staff. VAT is 20 per cent. Then there’s box office and third party reseller commissions (9 per cent); restoration levies at the older theatres (4 per cent); actually paying the cast and crew (16 per cent); technical equipment and stage set (at least 5 per cent); wages for management and creative team (5 per cent); rights and royalties (2 per cent). 

Paying back investors happens only when all costs have been met and there’s profit in the kitty, which can easily take 18 months. Even if a show continues with seeming success for several years, it might only ever make enough to cover costs: see the Olivier-winning Legally Blonde, which played at the Savoy for two years but never made any money for its investors. Richard Howle, former commercial director of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s theatre group, suggests that only 15-20 musicals in the past 30 years have recouped initial investment plus 100 per cent — ie, brought significant returns for investors (Billy Elliot and Wicked are two).

But the West End seems to be in a golden age. No multi-million-pound flopping productions have hit headlines for years. ‘We in the theatre industry have just got better and better at writing and creating the shows,’ says Nica Burns, co-founder of Nimax Theatres and producer of 2017’s home-grown juggernaut, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. Nowadays ‘it’s a buyer’s market’, as producer Kenny Wax puts it. ‘There are producers literally queuing up for theatres. If you want a theatre as a West End producer, you are trying to court the landlords and persuade them that yours is going to be more successful than your fellow producer. That enables the landlord to be much more discerning.’ A spokesperson from the Society of London Theatre points to a surge in regional theatre and increasing co-operation between the subsidised sector (such as the National) and commercial West End theatres, meaning shows such as Jamie (which started in Sheffield) have had all potential floppiness smoothed out by the time they reach the expensive West End.

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (Alamy Stock Photo)

And producers themselves are financially savvier. Burns put on Jamie for what she calls an ‘extremely economical’ £1.2 million, in part due to the relatively low number of cast members and the lack of star names. Even so, adds Burns, Jamie has only just recouped that initial investment after two years. Wax, who produced the grassroots success Six, which has sold out the Arts Theatre for months, says he managed to stage the musical for a mere £500,000 thanks to an unchanging set and a tiny cast of six actors and four band members. ‘So it’s more the size of a play [rather than a musical]’, says Wax. ‘The margins are very tight, so in London it doesn’t make lots of money. It has to play to 100 per cent, which it does, but being sold out is a calling card for the rest of the world.’ Six now has shows concurrently in Australia, the US, Canada and around the UK, and is heading to Broadway in February.

Being seen to sell out is more important than ever. Think about Hamilton — a key attraction is the illusion of unavailability. Basic psychology dictates that we want what we can’t have. Hence why ticketing technology has been such a boon. Apps like TodayTix make it easier than ever to offload unsold tickets, and it is not unusual for TodayTix to sell up to 20 per cent of seats on the day of the performance. Even if tickets are sold at a loss, the larger the audience, the greater the priceless bonus of word of mouth. 

We Will Rock You (Getty Images)

This ‘word of mouth’ is the key to success: the general public raving to friends and faithfully returning several times a year. See Ben Elton’s We Will Rock You, panned by critics on opening in 2002 (Daily Mirror: ‘Ben Elton should be shot’) but which ran for 12 years, carried by people’s adoration of Queen. And with Twitter and Facebook, word of mouth now has global reach. Seabright points out that ‘in the era of social media, people start to express opinions from the very first performance, so it isn’t really possible to hide a bad show behind never-ending previews, as they attempted with Spider-Man on Broadway [the 2010 production had seven months of previews and eventually cost investors $60million].’ There’s more pressure than ever to make it excellent from the start. 

Social media is critical. According to Howle, there are ‘producers casting shows with people you haven’t heard of, asking them how much of an Instagram following they have’. Actor Hayley Tamaddon has spoken of being passed over for a West End role for someone with 20,000 more Twitter followers. Spotify has become a crucial marketing tool, too. See Six, for which Wax capitalised on its pop concert feel to release an album early on. He says Six now streams more than 300,000 songs every day — the second highest streaming musical in the world after Hamilton, despite not having had a Broadway run. ‘I’d say 90 per cent of people hear about Six through the studio album.’ 

Staging a show without a big name (and therefore big fee) attached also saves money. Besides, a big name doesn’t guarantee safety. This year’s Man Of La Mancha, produced by Michaels Linnit and Grade, starred Frasier’s Kelsey Grammer. Although not a flop — no financials are available — there are stories of ticket prices being slashed in an attempt to fill the 2,400-seat London Coliseum. 

The West End isn’t bulletproof, then, but it is undeniably on fire: in 2018, audiences totalled 15.5 million, with box office revenues approaching £800m. Forget flops. As Wax says, ‘There aren’t many theatres now that don’t have people queuing for tickets.’



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