ANDREW Lloyd Webber isn’t letting a flop show break his stride.After posting the closing notice for his London musical “The Beautiful Game” this week, the mighty British composer picked up the phone to New York and lined up a Broadway theater for a revival of his 1975 musical, “By Jeeves.”
The show, based on P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster novels, will open in November at the Helen Hayes Theatre.
It has a book by Alan Ayckbourn, who is also the director.
This production began life at the Goodspeed Opera House in 1997 and has been touring the country to generally strong reviews for the last two years.
“There are a lot of details still to put in place, but I think we are headed for an opening in the fall,” Michael Price, the head of Goodspeed, said this week.
Though Lloyd Webber is not producing the $1.5 million “By Jeeves” – it will be billed as a “Goodspeed Production” – he has been instrumental in getting the show to New York.
He booked the theater himself, and is said to be brimming with ideas about how to market and publicize this charming and tuneful pocket-size musical.
“He is hellbent on getting this on,” one theater executive said this week.
Lloyd Webber is said to be smarting from the fact that, since the closing of “Cats” last year, he has only one show – “The Phantom of the Opera” – running in New York.
Once the undisputed king of the Great White Way and the West End, he has not had a hit show in years.
“Sunset Boulevard” – his last musical to reach Broadway – closed at a loss of $2 million in 1997.
His next show, “Whistle Down the Wind,” collapsed out of town, losing $10 million (a retooled version ran in the West End for more than two years and is said to have recouped its investment).
Critics hammered a revival last season of “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the Ford Center. It lost more than $7 million.
Prospects for “The Beautiful Game” – about a high school soccer club in Ireland during the late 1960s – seemed brighter.
The show has one of Lloyd Webber’s best scores and opened to strong reviews last fall in London.
But it didn’t catch on with audiences and, Lloyd Webber has argued, was hurt by a slump in British tourism following months of bad press about hoof and mouth disease.
“The Beautiful Game” shutters Sept. 1, at a loss of nearly $2 million.
There are no plans to bring it to New York.
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Herb Gardner was unable to attend the Wednesday opening of the revival of his 1962 play “A Thousand Clowns.”
Jeffrey Richards, the show’s producer, said the playwright is suffering from a “chronic operative pulmonary disorder,” which requires him to be hooked up to an oxygen tank. Gardner – whose plays include the Tony Award-winning hit “I’m Not Rappaport” – has been battling the disease for years, and was in and out of the hospital during the out-of-town tryout of “A Thousand Clowns.”
Richards said Wednesday’s show “was dedicated to Herb, and we hope he will be better soon.”
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