My column last week about the nonmusical plays struggling at the box office prompted all sorts of emails and calls from producers imploring me to give them a chance.
Nobody likes to come out of the gate a dud.
“Our numbers are growing — word of mouth is great!” one producer said.
“We’ll be just fine once our advertising kicks in,” another said.
“Your numbers are wrong. Our advance is bigger than ‘Hamilton’s,’ ” an investor told me.
I think he was kidding.
The cast of “The Play That Goes Wrong,” a British comedy that begins previews next month at the Lyceum, drafted an email. And so, in the great journalistic tradition of giving your target a chance to respond, here’s what they say:
“Thank you for your extremely diligent reporting. Until we read your column this morning, we had absolutely no idea the box office had even opened. So we phoned up the Lyceum to see what we had sold and we discovered that information in your column was inaccurate.
“We have NOT sold $180,000 in tickets. We have sold $1,800. Sure, the ticket-holders are our mums — but if they can convince our dads to buy tickets as well, we know we can double our advance by next week.”
The cast acknowledged that “The Glass Menagerie,” starring Sally Field, is leaps and bounds ahead of them at the box office, with its advance of nearly $3 million.
But they added: “We are not panicking. After reading about our follies in your column, Sally Field contacted us and offered to let us stay on her fold-out couch so we can save money on housing. She likes us. She really likes us.”
On the off chance you’ve never heard of “The Play That Goes Wrong,” it’s a farce about an amateur college production that goes disastrously and — if the London reviews are accurate — hilariously awry.
It tips its hat to the greatest backstage farce of all time, Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off.”
Written and performed by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields (that’s a tight fit on Sally’s couch), “The Play That Goes Wrong” started at a little pub theater in London and then transferred to the West End, where it won the 2015 Olivier Award for best new comedy.
It’s being produced on Broadway by J.J. Abrams, who wrote and directed “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”
I love a farce, so I wish “The Play That Goes Wrong” well.
And, given the vast influence of my column, the cast should be smiling.
This plug is going to send that advance of $1,800 soaring to $1,850, maybe $1,875, by the end of the day.
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