'Success' a failure
Tuner to close June 15 with $10 mil loss
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The show's producers posted a closing notice for June 15, at which time the tuner by composer Marvin Hamlisch, lyricist Craig Carnelia and book writer John Guare will have played 108 regular performances and 19 previews. It opened on March 14 and, according to the Variety Crix Tally, received two favorable notices, 13 unfavorable and four mixed.
Star John Lithgow took the Tony Award for actor in a musical, but the honor did not give the show enough commercial bounce to reverse its ongoing slippage at the box office. Last week, "Smell" played to only 50.5% capacity, doing $331,879 on its gross potential of $904,253.
The show's failure reps a loss of its entire $10 million investment, making it the biggest casualty of the just-finished theater season and on a par with the "Seussical" loss the previous year. In addition to several other producers, Clear Channel Entertainment produced both "Seussical" and "Sweet Smell of Success."
'Smell' and the press
The "Smell" team had an especially acrimonious relationship with the press. In an unusual letter to Tony voters, 10 of the show's producers accused the New York Times, the New York Post and Variety of having "gone out of their way to undermine 'Sweet Smell of Success' at every opportunity."
Earlier in the season, after receiving negative reviews from the Times' critics Ben Brantley and Margo Jefferson, as well as a critical financial assessment in Jesse McKinley's Friday theater-news column, the creative team canceled a Times-sponsored theater seminar at the Y.
In further Tony-voting analysis in Tuesday's Times, reporter Robin Pogrebin wondered why "Millie" and "The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?," another show disfavored by the Times, took top Tony honors over the more critically lauded "Urinetown" and "Topdog/Underdog." The Times headline called the voting patterns of the Tonys this year "impenetrable and inexact."
Some observers, however, found a definite logic in the award choices. As one producer assessed the situation for Daily Variety, "Sometimes a pan in the Times positively galvanizes the theater community behind a show more than a rave does."
