Archive for September 22nd, 2025

Car bomb explodes in Beirut.

Monday, September 22nd, 2025

Lawrence and I have a running joke about overused headlines:

“Car Bomb Explodes In Beirut”.
“Rosie O’Donnell Goes On Unhinged Rant”

And, to that list, we can add:

“The Broadway Musical Is in Trouble”.

None of the 18 commercial musicals that opened on Broadway last season have made a profit yet. Some still could, but several have been spectacular flameouts. The new musicals “Tammy Faye,” “Boop!” and “Smash” each cost at least $20 million to bring to the stage, and each was gone less than four months after opening. All three lost their entire investments.
Lavish revivals of much-loved classics are also fizzling. On Sunday, a revival of “Cabaret,” budgeted for up to $26 million and featuring a costly conversion of a Broadway theater into a nightclub-like setting, threw in the towel at a total loss. A $19.5 million revival of “Gypsy” that starred Audra McDonald and earned strong reviews closed last month without recouping its investment. Even a buzzy production of “Sunset Boulevard,” which won this year’s Tony for best musical revival, failed to make back the $15 million it cost to mount.

…

Only three new musicals have recouped their investments since the pandemic. Two are jukebox musicals: “MJ,” which features the music of Michael Jackson, and “& Juliet,” which features the songs of the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin. The third, “Six,” reimagines the ill-fated wives of King Henry VIII as pop stars.

So “Suffs” didn’t make money? Interesting to know.

But wait!

All three got assistance from the government. “Six” and “MJ” each got $10 million from the federal government in the form of Shuttered Venue Operator Grants, designed to help the arts recover from the shutdown. And “& Juliet” benefited from a $3 million tax credit through a New York State postpandemic program. The federal program ended, and the state program, which has aided almost every Broadway show to open over the last few years, will end this fall unless it is renewed.

Why was this money not going to the Montana State University Angling Oral History Project? Or the USCSB?

Producers and general managers say that every element of making musicals has gotten more expensive in recent years: labor (paying actors and musicians and stage hands as well as the creative teams), material (the lumber and steel, as well as the technology, that go into sets), rent (to theater owners) and fees (to all kinds of vendors who work on shows).

…

A decade ago, the big musical comedy “Something Rotten,” with a cast of 25, cost $14 million to capitalize; last season’s “Death Becomes Her,” another big musical comedy with a cast of 20, cost up to $31.5 million. The high capitalization costs, combined with high running costs, means shows have to run much longer to become profitable.

…

One Broadway investor, James L. Walker Jr. of Atlanta, is so frustrated by the current economics that he’s litigating. After putting $50,000 into the “Cabaret” revival, he filed suit against the producers, alleging fraud. In an interview, Walker pointed out that the show has grossed nearly $90 million in ticket sales, plus whatever it made in sales of liquor, food and merchandise, and that he can’t accept that the investors who raised up to $26 million to finance the show have gotten nothing back. “How is that a good business model?” he asked.

I wish him all the luck in the world, but this sounds like “Hollywood accounting”, and I don’t think any of the suits around that have had much success.

The two this fall include “The Queen of Versailles,” based on a documentary and starring Kristin Chenoweth, and “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York),” a British rom-com with just two actors. Next spring’s slate has not yet taken shape, but among the new musicals circling are stage adaptations of the films “The Lost Boys” and Prince’s “Purple Rain,” of the book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” and of the streaming series “Schmigadoon!,” as well as an original title, “Wanted.”

“Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”, the musical? Maybe the problem is that Broadway is out of ideas.

And haven’t people been saying “The Broadway Musical Is in Trouble” since…1942?

Posted in Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 22, 2025.

Monday, September 22nd, 2025

Playing catch-up from the last few days:

Marilyn Hagerty. If you’ve been around the Internet for a while, that name may ring a bell with you.

Ms. Hagerty wrote a restaurant review column (“The Eatbeat”) for the Grand Forks (North Dakota) Herald. In 2012, she wrote a review of the new (and first) Olive Garden in Grand Forks. It went viral on the Internet.

When the article first began to ricochet across social media, the initial consensus was that the writer was a kindly Midwestern grandmother who had lost the script. This seemed to be the view of an out-of-town reader who sent her a one-word email: “Pathetic.”
In fact, Ms. Hagerty was following a script of her own. It was her long-running custom to provide factual rundowns of the dining options in Grand Forks, a college town near the Minnesota border that has fewer than 60,000 people and few restaurants intent on culinary innovation.
She covered truck stops, diners and fast-food joints, some of them more than once. Although she wrote about places serving Vietnamese and Somali cuisine in Grand Forks, Eatbeat readers craving a new thrill generally had to look for it in Fargo, about 80 miles to the south.
“If you were going to review the fine dining here, you’d be done in three weeks,” Ms. Hagerty once said of her community.

What she said. It bothered me at the time, and it still bothers me. Why not seriously engage with and critique with what Olive Garden has to offer? (Back when we were still doing regular reviews, the Saturday Dining Conspiracy also reviewed our local Olive Garden, and our logic was the same: why should they be above criticism?)

Reaction to the review shifted as it became clear that Ms. Hagerty didn’t give a flying breadstick what the cynics thought. Within days, she was in New York, being welcomed by the national media. She gave interviews to “CBS Sunday Morning,” NBC’s “Today” morning program and Anderson Cooper’s syndicated talk show.

…

“My son is full of prunes,” she said.

She was 99.

Jim Edgar, Republican governor of Illinois during the 1990s.

Marian Burros, noted food writer. She worked at various times for the Washington Post, Washington Star, and the NYT.

She might offer a recipe for, say, Martha Washington’s Great Cake, usually in the weekly De Gustibus column, which she took over in 1983, while reporting on a sodium labeling bill being debated in Congress or regulatory battles over the wording of federal dietary guidelines.
From her home base in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, she became a close observer of the White House kitchen, reporting on a succession of presidential chefs, inaugural meals and the dining styles of new administrations. She took a particular interest in the White House vegetable garden planted by Michelle Obama.
On the pleasure side of the equation, her plum torte was one of the most popular recipes in the history of The Times, reprinted every September from 1983 to 1989.

“The Story Behind Our Most Requested Recipe Ever” (archived). Recipe (archived).

Martha Washington’s Great Cake (archived).

Ms. Burros alerted readers of The Post to the potential dangers of food dyes derived from coal tar, notably Red Dye No. 2, which the Food and Drug Administration banned in 1976. And, in a widely reprinted article, she revealed that Fresh Horizons Bread, marketed as a low-calorie alternative to regular bread, contained large amounts of powdered cellulose.

Posted in Food, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Your NFL loser update: week 3, 2025.

Monday, September 22nd, 2025

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:

NY Jets
Miami
Tennessee
Houston
New York Football Giants
New Orleans

The worthless Bills are 3-0.
The worthless Chargers are 3-0.
Houston is 0-3.

And as soon as I suggest that Cleveland might go 0-17, they go out and win a game.

But we still have the Jets and the New York Football Giants.

In other news, we’re coming down to the final stretch of the baseball season. The Chicago Cubs have clinched a playoff spot. (No, Lawrence, I’m not betting on the Cubs with you.)

What of our favorite teams?

The White Sox are 58-98, for a .372 winning percentage. That projects out to about 102 losses.

And the Rockies are 43-113, for a .276 winning percentage. That projects out to about 117 losses, which is in the historical range. But at this point, they can’t tie the 2024 White Sox record, or even the previous 1962 Mets record of 120 losses. Wikipedia currently puts them between the 1952 Pirates (.273) and the 1909 Senators (.276).

Their final games are in Seattle (who hasn’t quite clinched a playoff sport, but is very close) and in San Francisco (who hasn’t quite been mathematically eliminated, but is very close). If I had to guess, I’d say they’ll get swept by Seattle and win one in San Francisco, for a final record of 44-118. We’ll see if I’m right.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »