A singular trait of theatre is its own ephemerality. Every performance is unique, never to be repeated again, only to be reported on and remembered by those who were there to witness it. The same goes for productions. All shows, regardless of their success, must eventually close (except The Phantom of the Opera, which has been running for 30 years and will never end).

However, few productions are likely to inspire the same mourning as that of The Band’s Visit when it was announced earlier this month that the show would close on April 7th. The Band’s Visit will have played nearly 600 performances on Broadway when it closes, garnering critical acclaim and an awards run that few Broadway shows can rival, sweeping the major categories at the Tony Awards for a total of ten wins, including Best Leading Actress for Katrina Lenk, who has performed in the show for the entirety of its run, and longtime TV/film actor Tony Shalhoub, who finally won Best Leading Actor after three previous Tony nominations. Similarly, David Yazbek, who composed the music, won the award for Best Original Score after three nominations in the same category. And the awards are still trickling in—only a week after the show announced its closing, the original cast recording won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album.

Despite the obvious potential of its cast and creative team, the musical did not strike most industry insiders as a commercial hit when it was first produced off-Broadway at Atlantic Theater Company in late 2016. Based off of a 2007 Israeli film of the same title, The Band’s Visit centers on a troupe of Egyptian musicians who are marooned in a small Israeli desert town after taking the wrong bus on their way to a concert. The minimalist dialogue consists of a mixture of Hebrew, Arabic, and (often-broken) English, and the energetic score utilizes various Middle Eastern musical instruments (played onstage by the ensemble) likely unfamiliar to a theatre-going New York audience.

Still, the show’s themes of longing, boredom, and cultural difference endeared it to critics, who praised it for its subtlety and adult nature, but those same traits might have doomed it in the 2017-2018 Broadway season, where it would face stiff competition from musical adaptations of popular films/franchises, jukebox bio-musicals and revivals of established classics. When Orin Wolf, the green-but-dedicated producer who spent nearly a decade getting the rights and developing The Band’s Visit, was asked whether he thought The Band’s Visit was “commercial” enough for Broadway, he responded, “I didn’t know, but the idea of a world where it is excited me. I want to live in a world where something like this can be commercial. That warms me. That warms my heart to think about that.”

The Band’s Visit managed to warm the hearts of critics and theatregoers alike, opening at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in November 2017 to sold out audiences, standing out among its more recognizable competitors and gaining attention as a “rule-breaker” among the more crassly commercial musicals dominating Broadway. Although numbers dipped when Tony Shalhoub exited the show due to filming conflicts, its massive success at the Tony Awards renewed audience interest and gave it a strong summer showing, and in September 2018 the show announced that it had recouped its $8.75 million capitalization.

This might require a brief explanation: recoupment essentially means that a show has paid back all of its investors, and is now officially profitable. This might sound like a low goal for any business venture, but only somewhere between one-third and one-fifth of all Broadway shows recoup. And while The Band’s Visit’s $8.75 million investment was relatively low for a Broadway musical (typical capitalizations are well over $10 million), some musicals take years to recoup, while The Band’s Visit did it in only 11 months. The welcome announcement suggested that the show might have staying power going into the 2018-2019 season.

The box office grosses, however, have become sluggish in 2019, and The Band’s Visit has only been pulling in just over $500,000 for the past few weeks. For context, throughout 2018, it frequently broke one million, and never grossed below $700,000 in any given week. Although the current numbers are not disastrous, the producers’ decision to pull the plug is not quite a mercy killing. Orin Wolf said in a statement, “We’ve accomplished so much and now my feeling is that I want this show to go out in a manner that is elegant, that is deliberate, and that is celebratory… the thought of going into a spring that’s going to be inundated with very big, loud shows that are going to be spending a lot of money on advertising—and a summer that is traditionally meant for family audiences and tourists—I didn’t want my show to soften beyond a place that’s acceptable to me.”

Wolf’s decision sets what should be the gold standard for Broadway producers. Despite how difficult it must be to close a show that: A. is profitable, and B. you’ve spent ten years of your life working on, Wolf’s example eschews a common tenet of commercial greed: that the show must go on, even if no one wants it to.

By coincidence, Kinky Boots, which has run on Broadway for six years, is finally closing on April 7th, which happens to be the same day The Band’s Visit closes. There are some unlikely similarities between the shows: like The Band’s Visit, Kinky Boots is a musical adaptation of a lesser-known foreign film, it also won the Tony for Best Musical, and it features an esoteric story about a man who inherits his father’s failing shoe factory and saves it by designing boots for drag queens. OK, so they’re not all that similar. But while The Band’s Visit is closing with its dignity intact, the same cannot be said for Kinky Boots, which, in recent years, has become a revolving door for celebrities looking to try out Broadway, replacing its lead roles every couple of months to renew interest in the show—this is commonly known as stunt casting.

Although this method succeeded when the show cast natural-born performer Brendan Urie from Panic! At the Disco in the lead role of Charlie Price back in May 2017, which raised the show’s grosses astronomically, the producers of Kinky Boots have gotten increasingly desperate in their attempts to fill Urie’s shoes (or boots, as it were). Recent cast members over the past two years have included, but are not limited to: Wayne Brady, David Cook, Kirstin Maldonado, Jake Shears, Todrick Hall, Tyler Glenn, Conor Maynard, Mark Ballas… don’t worry, I’m expecting that you’re probably not familiar with a lot of these names. This isn’t to suggest that some of these performers are any less talented because they’re not as famous as others, but it does speak to the fact that Kinky Boots’ producers will cast anyone with a Wikipedia page if they think it will bring in sales. Ironically, none of the post-Urie replacements have had a profound effect on Kinky Boots’ sales, and the trend recently became even more pronounced when the show added Tiki Barber, a former NFL player who, as far as I can Google, has zero performing credits to his name, to the cast. Maybe because the show is already closing they’ve simply decided to cut costs further by giving roles to whoever will take them?

The moral of the story is, when people start going to a show just to see famous people, that means the show has run its natural course. Broadway real estate is scarce, and hoarding space for a dying brand prevents a new production from taking its place. There is no shortage of stories that still need to be told. I enjoyed The Band’s Visit, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who don’t want to see it go. But do we really want the show to continue running for six years, exhausting every reputable performer possible until the producers finally decide to cast Bhad Bhabie in the lead role? There’s no need to see a musical so inherently personal and anti-commercial become corrupted by the greed that pervades most commercial theatre endeavors. Orin Wolf expressed his desire for The Band’s Visit’s unique success to change the way theatre producers view new work, writing, “I hope other producers see this as an opportunity to do work that pushes the envelope and doesn’t try to satisfy the most basic expectations of what Broadway musicals are, but dares to ask audiences to lean in a little harder and listen a little more carefully.”

So let’s not mourn The Band’s Visit as an anomaly. Let’s ensure that it’s the first of a new breed.

 

https://youtu.be/jLccBnIy1xo