Will Chase and Jen Collela in High Fidelity, which is to close after 14 performances. Photograph: Joan Marcus/AP.
I see that the musical of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is closing on Broadway after only a month: just 14 performances, following 18 previews. But there have been far bigger, more spectacular flops.
Home Sweet Homer, a musical version of The Odyssey starring Yul Brynner, lasted one night. Carrie, the musical of the Brian de Palma movie, instantly went up in flames. And Lieutenant, a rock opera based on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, unsurprisingly disappeared after only nine performances.
Broadway, in short, is a casino: either you hit the jackpot or you suffer instant death. When I was there recently I noticed that The Phantom of the Opera, Mamma Mia and The Producers were all still going strong. But each season a number of new musicals crash and burn. People often attribute the hit-or-flop syndrome to the awesome power of the New York Times. But while a bad review in the local paper can ruin a post-show party - as I gather happened with David Hare's The Vertical Hour - it isn't the real reason why shows come and go so quickly. The key determinant is economic logic: if a show costs $5m to stage, as High Fidelity apparently did, and fails to catch on, it is cheaper to cut your losses than to haemorrhage money week by week.
What really disturbs me is that London is going the way of Broadway: as costs spiral, the West End is becoming a similar theatrical lottery. I shed no tears over joke-flops like the Mike Read musical, Wilde, which closed after one performance or Murderous Instincts at the Savoy where the director was phoning his notes to actors from Paris and where the producer terminated the show by email while en route to Puerto Rico.
But it does worry me that perfectly decent shows now quickly go down the plughole. A few weeks back, a little-known Tennessee Williams play, Summer and Smoke, arrived in the West End from Nottingham Playhouse. It got very appreciative reviews, starred the beautiful Rosamund Pike and was given a lovely, lyrical production by Adrian Noble. But words like "poignant" and "poetic" counted for nothing in an autumn season filled with blockbuster musicals. Faced with dwindling houses and wage-bills for a 12-strong cast, the producers were forced to withdraw a show that, in less pressurised times, might have struggled on.
All theatre is a gamble. What worries me is that the West End is becoming more and more like Broadway. A bagful of big musicals. A tiny handful of hit plays. And a quick curtain for anything that doesn't instantly catch on. Some shows have failure written all over them and deserve to disappear. But when a rare Tennessee Williams play suffers the same fate in London as High Fidelity in New York, the writing is on the wall. The question is: what are we going to do about it?
