Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  “You have the theater,” Jacobs told him. 42nd Street was there, but Jacobs would move it out for The Phantom of the Opera.

  Mackintosh knew about Jacobs’s illness, that his memory was not what it once was. “Are you sure I have the Majestic, Bernie?” he repeated several times. Then he turned to Smith for confirmation. “You have the theater, Cameron,” Smith said. “It’s the perfect place for the show.”

  “Thank you,” Mackintosh said. “I’d love to linger, but I have a lot to do today. See you tonight!”

  The opening night audience adored the show, giving it a ten-minute standing ovation.9 The reviews, as usual for a Lloyd Webber show, were mixed. But the reviews were irrelevant. Phantom already was on its way to becoming the most successful show in the West End.

  Jacobs and Smith enjoyed the show tremendously. They knew the Shuberts stood to make a fortune from it at the Majestic. But something nagged at Smith. At the opening night performance he spotted James H. Binger in the audience. Binger, the head of the Honeywell Corporation, owned the five Broadway theaters not controlled by the Shuberts or the Nederlanders. They were bundled together in a company called Jujamcyn, an amalgam of the names of his children—Judith, James, and Cynthia. Except for the St. James on West Forty-Fourth Street, they were not the most desirable houses on Broadway. Jujamcyn never posed much of a threat to the Shuberts or the Nederlanders. Binger attended the opening with Dick Wolf, who ran Jujamcyn. Smith thought their presence was odd.

  “I couldn’t figure it out,” he said. “They were not the type of guys you normally saw at these type of events in London.”

  He’d find out why soon enough.

  • • •

  Back in New York, construction began at the Majestic. The basement of the theater had to be dug out to accommodate the candelabras that rise from the stage as the Phantom ferries Christine to his lair. The construction cost would total more than $1 million, but it would be worth it. The Phantom of the Opera looked like it would run a long, long time.

  And then Jacobs got a phone call from Jeremy Gerard at the Times. Gerard told him he had it on good authority that Mackintosh was taking The Phantom of the Opera to the Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld), which was owned by Jujamcyn. Jacobs was shocked. “Don’t write that story because it’s not true. We have the show.” Gerard did not back down. He had a quote from Mackintosh to the effect that as the Beck, at twelve hundred seats, was smaller than the Majestic (1,655 seats), it was more suitable to the intimacy of Phantom, which in London was still running at Her Majesty’s Theatre, one of the West End’s smallest houses.

  Jacobs paused and then said to Gerard, “You know, Cameron is negotiating with me through you.”

  True enough, Gerard conceded. But the story was a good one, and he wanted a comment. “I disagree that the Majestic isn’t right for the show” was all Jacobs would say.

  Jacobs had an affectionate nickname for Mackintosh. He called him “the Wooden Spoon” because Mackintosh always liked to stir the pot. But this time the Wooden Spoon had stirred too much. Jacobs was furious. He summoned the producer to his office for a meeting with him and Phil Smith.

  They sat around a coffee table, Mackintosh nervous, fiddling with the bric-a-brac on the table.

  “What are you trying to do to us, Cameron?” Jacobs demanded.

  “You have to understand, Bernie,” he said, “this is a delicate show. It needs an intimate theater. The Majestic is too big.”

  Jacobs and Smith disagreed, but Mackintosh stood his ground. They went around and around until Jacobs, tired, said, “Enough. We’ll talk to you later, Cameron.” A few days later, they met with Mackintosh again in Washington, D.C., at the Willard Hotel for the pre-Broadway opening of Les Misérables. Again, they went around and around. This time Schoenfeld was with them, pressuring Mackintosh, too. But the producer would not budge. The Majestic was too big for Phantom, he insisted. Schoenfeld, furious, stormed out of the room. Phil Smith continued the debate until Jacobs said, “Enough, Phil. Forget it. Just forget it.”

  Talking about his decision to go to the Martin Beck many years later, Mackintosh said, “Maria [Björnson] and I were following an artistic impulse of the show. We were acutely aware that the intimacy of Her Majesty’s Theatre in London was part and parcel to the original success of the show. I also remembered how well Dracula [starring Frank Langella] had worked at the Beck. The Majestic, at the time, looked like a sort of frumpy place where you’d hold a bar mitzvah. And it had a huge overhang from the balcony. About fifty percent of the audience in the orchestra would not be able to see the chandelier, which had become an icon. Maria and I were driven by art.”

  And money. As the Shuberts later found out, Jujamcyn offered Mackintosh a fantastic deal—he could have the Martin Beck rent-free until Phantom recouped.

  Jimmy Nederlander also made a play for the show. He called up his old friend Hal Prince and asked him to take a look at the New Amsterdam Theatre on Forty-Second Street. Nederlander had picked it up in 1982 in a sweetheart deal with the city. As part of the deal, he agreed to restore it, but the theater was in such bad shape—there were mushrooms growing on seats—that the cost of restoration was beyond Nederlander’s means. The theater sat empty for years, killing Nederlander in real estate taxes. He begged Prince to take a look at it for Phantom. If he could get the show, he could raise the money to refurbish the theater.

  Prince did, and then sent Nederlander a note. The New Amsterdam would have been “ideal” for Phantom, he wrote. “But there’s no way that I would go near Forty-Second Street or ask anyone else to . . . . While we were waiting in front of the theater . . . on one side of us a drug sale took place and on the other, a young girl had her hands in her boyfriend’s pockets—need I tell you why?”10

  • • •

  Although Jacobs, tired and weakened from his illness, had given up on securing Phantom, Smith had not. He began plotting, without telling Jacobs, how to get the show back. Mackintosh did not have sole control over the show. Lloyd Webber and Prince had something to say about its fate in New York. Smith tracked down Brian Brolly, a chipper Englishman who ran Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group. Brolly had organized RUG—and owned 15 percent of it.11 Smith learned that Brolly had just arrived in New York that morning on the Concorde. He knew Brolly’s favorite hotel was the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South. He phoned the hotel and got through.

  “Hello, Phil!” said a jolly Brolly. “I’ve just walked in. I haven’t taken care of the boy who brought up my bags yet. Hold on!”

  Smith waited a moment and when Brolly was back on the line said, “Brian, I’ve got a big story to tell you. So take off your coat, sit down, and relax.”

  Smith talked about Mackintosh’s decision to move the show to the Martin Beck. If Brolly knew about it, he didn’t let on. Then Smith went through the numbers. The Majestic had 455 more seats than the Martin Beck and so the show could gross nearly a third more a week at the Majestic. Everyone expected Phantom to play to sold-out houses for the foreseeable future. Lloyd Webber and Really Useful would pocket a substantial amount of the weekly gross. If Phantom played the smaller theater, Lloyd Webber was leaving millions of dollars on the table.

  “We’ve got to act fast,” Smith said.

  Brolly agreed to meet with Smith and some members of the Phantom production team that afternoon at the Majestic. Smith asked Peter Feller, who was building the set for the show, to attend. He knew Feller was Prince’s favorite carpenter on Broadway. The Shuberts had dispatched Feller to London to look at Phantom. He could make the case the show would fit into the Majestic. Jacobs jumped into the act as well. He called Prince’s lawyer to find out if Prince had theater approval in his contract. He did. “Don’t let him sign anything until you know that you have the Majestic,” Jacobs said.

  After the meeting at the Majestic, Brolly told Smith, “Don’t worry, Phil. We’ll work this out.”

  A few days later, Lloyd Webber phoned Smith. He was in town an
d wanted to know if Smith would show him and Sarah Brightman the Majestic.

  “Anytime you want,” Smith said.

  “How about in half an hour?” asked Lloyd Webber.

  Smith met them in the lobby of the theater. There were hugs and kisses and plenty of “darlings.” Smith led them through the theater, explaining its history, the dimensions of its stage, how the Shuberts were going to excavate the basement to accommodate the special effects. Brightman wanted to see the balcony. Smith escorted her up the stairs and then to the back wall of the balcony, pointing out that, even up in the nether reaches of the theater, every seat had a full view of the stage. “It’s the most beautifully designed theater in New York,” said Smith, laying it on as thick as possible. “There isn’t a bad seat in this theater.”

  “Isn’t this beautiful, Sarah?” asked Lloyd Webber.

  “Yes, darling, it is,” she replied. “But, darling, do you think . . . I worry . . . well, do you think it might be too big?”

  Smith’s heart sank. He could have murdered the little porcelain diva right there on the spot.

  “Oh no, dear,” Lloyd Webber said. “It’s not too big at all. It’s perfect. And can you believe that eight times a week, ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ was sung from that stage.” Richard Rodgers. One of Lloyd Webber’s favorite composers. South Pacific. One of his favorite shows. It opened at the Majestic on April 7, 1949, running 1,925 performances there and, later, at the Broadway.

  As they left the theater, Smith said, “Andrew, we’re delighted to have you in this theater. In fact, it would be wonderful to have you in all our theaters.” Turning to Brightman, he added, “And I’d like to have you starring in all those shows, if that was possible, Sarah.”

  “They tugged on Andrew’s heartstrings with South Pacific and Richard Rodgers,” said Mackintosh with a laugh. “But in the end I saw the sense of it, financially. I still think the Beck would have been better, artistically, for the show. But at that point I had to leave my artistic conscience at the stage door.”

  Phantom played its 11,319th performance on April 12, 2015. The 455-seat difference between the Majestic and the Beck has added up not to tens of millions of dollars, but hundreds of millions of dollars.III

  • • •

  There was one more hitch on the way to the New York opening of Phantom. In the summer of 1987, Actors’ Equity turned down Sarah Brightman’s application to star in the show. That “galaxy of lunatics,” as Jacobs called the union, ruled that in New York, the role of Christine must be played by an American. Lloyd Webber was furious. If his wife couldn’t come to Broadway, Phantom wouldn’t either. He’d take it to Toronto and Japan instead. Quietly, over the summer, Jacobs and Prince brokered a deal with Alan Eisenberg, the executive director of Equity. Eisenberg knew how many jobs, American jobs, were at stake with Phantom. After a lengthy negotiation, a deal was reached. Lloyd Webber agreed that his next show, Aspects of Love, would open in London with an American in the lead.

  Equity’s attempt to ban Brightman from Broadway was the beginning of what would come to be called the British backlash. Lloyd Webber had three shows running in New York—Cats, Song and Dance, and Starlight Express. Mackintosh had Les Misérables. Homegrown hits were rare. The British had colonized Broadway.

  The New York Times played up the backlash. Frank Rich had, by the end of the 1980s, emerged as the most powerful theater critic in the history of the newspaper. He was dubbed the “Butcher of Broadway” because he could close a show in one night with a devastating review. In an essay called THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, Rich took on the British invasion, bemoaning the end of the traditional American Broadway musical. “For the New York theater, the rise of London as musical-theater capital is as sobering a specter as the awakening of the Japanese automobile industry was for Detroit,” he wrote.12 He pointed out that with the near extinction on Broadway of the independent producer such as David Merrick (who hadn’t produced anything since 42nd Street), it was inevitable that “shrewd English impresarios would fill the vacuum by default.” But he noted that British choreographers were nowhere near as sophisticated as Broadway’s best—Robbins, Champion, Fosse, and Bennett. Nor, he said, were British songwriters. For all his success, Lloyd Webber’s work “can’t yet be compared seriously with Broadway’s best of any period.” Thrusting the knife in farther, he added, “His music has declined sharply since he lost the lyrics of his original collaborator Tim Rice.” Ominously for Rice, Rich said that ABBA’s “musical wallpaper” for Chess is “indistinguishable from Mr. Lloyd Webber’s output.”

  Lloyd Webber was the most successful composer in theater history. And now the most powerful critic in theater history had him in his sights. It would not help The Phantom of the Opera that Rich’s favorite songwriter, Stephen Sondheim, had a new show, Into the Woods, scheduled to go head-to-head with Lloyd Webber’s musical in the 1987–88 theater season.

  • • •

  Phantom rode into New York on a wave of publicity, including a cover profile of Lloyd Webber in Time, a distinction he shared with Richard Rodgers, Larry Hart, Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Leonard Bernstein. The publicity helped boost advance ticket sales to nearly $18 million by the January 26 opening night—$7 million more than that for Les Misérables. (There were some who believed the reason Mackintosh tried to stick Phantom into a smaller theater was so that its box office could never rival that of Les Misérables—a charge Mackintosh always denied.) Among the opening night crowd were Barbara Walters, Bill Blass, Beverly Sills, and Mayor Koch, who cheered the effect the success of the show was having not only on Broadway but also on New York itself. “First Les Miz and now this!” he told the New York Times.

  The opening night party was held at the Beacon Theatre, a historic landmark that, with its hodgepodge of Greek, Roman, Renaissance, and rococo grandeur felt, as one partygoer said, “very Belle Époque.”13 Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber spent $250,000 on the bash. The buffet table was laden with caviar, boneless stuffed quail, and leek chiffonade en barquette.

  Fred Nathan, the publicist for the show, had an early copy of Rich’s review, which he hesitated to show Lloyd Webber. But the composer wanted to read it. Rich did not dismiss the show outright as he had Starlight Express, which he called a “bore on wheels.” He admitted Phantom “showered the audience with fantasy and fun,” and he praised Prince’s direction, Björnson’s sets, and Michael Crawford’s performance. But Lloyd Webber got it in the neck—“a characteristic Lloyd Webber project—long on pop professionalism and melody, impoverished of artistic personality and passion.” By this point, Rich’s liberal political leanings had begun to creep into his reviews, and to him Lloyd Webber represented the gauche excesses of the Reagan and Thatcher years—“our own Gilded Age,” Rich wrote. He ended the review hoping that, perhaps, both Lloyd Webber and the Reagan-era boom were “poised to go bust.”

  Lloyd Webber could probably have withstood Rich’s attacks. He was used to them by now. But what incensed him was the critic’s attack on his wife. She “reveals little competence as an actress,” Rich wrote. “She . . . simulates fear and affection alike by screwing her face into bug-eyed, chipmunk-cheeked poses more appropriate to the Lon Chaney film version.” Lloyd Webber erupted. “This is a man who knows nothing about love,” he shouted. He then gossiped with the London reporters at his table about Rich’s private life and his impending divorce from his wife.14

  In the end, the review amounted to nothing. There were lines outside the Majestic box office the next day, the advance clicked past $20 million, and scalpers were getting $250 for a $50 ticket. As the New York Times reported, “there is virtually no such thing as a $50 ticket to Phantom of the Opera.”15

  Mackintosh took time out from counting the money that day to read a telegram from David Merrick, who had been at the opening night performance. “The torch,” Merrick wrote to Mackintosh, “has passed from me to you.”

  At the Tonys that year, Into the Woods picked up awards for its book,
by James Lapine, and Sondheim’s score. But Broadway could not turn its nose up at Phantom, which was contributing to a noticeable uptick in attendance. It won the top prize that year—Best Musical—despite all the carping about “the British invasion.”

  • • •

  Soon after the Shuberts swiped Phantom back from Jujamcyn Theaters, Schoenfeld and Jacobs sat down for an interview with Jeremy Gerard of the Times. The story was headlined SHUBERT STAGES A DRAMATIC (AND MUSICAL) COMEBACK.16 Gerard noted the success of Les Misérables, the impending success of Phantom, and the fact that all the Shubert theaters were booked. Attendance was back up, and business was booming. But Jacobs discussed, for the first time in public, the illness that had robbed him of his memory. “The truth is, I went through a very bad period,” he said. Gerard introduced the touchy subject of who would succeed Schoenfeld and Jacobs at Shubert one day, pointing out their ages—Jacobs, seventy; Schoenfeld, sixty-two. The company would be fine, they said, adding that the board had a succession plan in place should anything happen to them. Still, as Schoenfeld said, “Because of our own talents we brought to this period a lot of different qualities than [the original Shubert brothers] had. So when people say, what will happen in the next generation, I don’t know that you can say there are any criteria out there. There’s no business like this. Shubert is sui generis.”

  Schoenfeld and Jacobs used the piece in the Times to dispel rumors they had lost faith in their next project, a Broadway production of Chess. It would arrive in New York, they insisted, in the spring of 1988, yet another megamusical from London, though with the Shuberts producing.

  Nunn was now fully in charge of the show. But he wanted to do his show, not Michael Bennett’s. He wanted a new script and a new set. He brought in Richard Nelson, an American playwright who had an association with the Royal Shakespeare Company. “He was smart, satiric, bright, and contemporary,” said Nunn. “It was generally agreed that Richard and I should work at the show and see what we came up with.”