Broadway's 'Beach' closes
Neil Simon play shutters after one week
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The Depression-era comedy-drama, loosely based on the early life of playwright Neil Simon, struggled with low sales since it began perfs Oct. 2.
"A lot of nice people on stage and off will be out of work, and a lot of good partners and investors will have lost a great deal of money," producers Emanuel Azenberg and Ira Pittelman said in a statement. "They all deserve better. It makes us sad."
The decision to shutter "Brighton Beach Memoirs" entirely scuttles the related revival of "Broadway Bound," which was to have played in rep with "Brighton." "Broadway Bound," already in rehearsal with largely the same cast as "Brighton," was planned to begin previews (in rotation with "Brighton") Nov. 18 ahead of a Dec. 10 opening at the Nederlander Theater.
In the frames since "Brighton" began perfs, weekly box office barely cracked $130,000, and the production played to audiences at about 60% of capacity or lower.
The show opened Oct. 25 to reviews that ranged from lukewarm to glowing, but sales did not much pick up in the days that followed.
The production's troubles in drumming up auds underscores the difficulty of producing a nonmusical without stars in the current Broadway landscape. This season's Rialto lineup has been particularly crowded with attention-grabbing celebs cast in limited engagements of plays, including Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig in "A Steady Rain" and Jude Law in "Hamlet."
Along with Azenberg and Pittelman, who also teamed on the hit 2005 revival of Simon comedy "The Odd Couple" starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, "The Neil Simon Plays" was produced by Max Cooper, Jeffrey Sine, Scott Delman, Ruth Hendel, Roy Furman, Ben Sprecher/Wendy Federman and Scott Landis.
Both "Brighton," which bowed in 1983, and 1986's "Broadway" are parts of a semi-autobiographical trilogy from Simon. For the revivals, David Cromer ("Our Town") helmed an ensemble cast that included Laurie Metcalf.
