(Patrick Healy’s article appeared in The New York Times, 11/4.)
The Broadway producer Bob Boyett had never heard so much bad news in a single week: Four longtime investors in his shows had each backed out of his latest, a $12 million Broadway-bound revival of the hit 1964 musical “Funny Girl,” he said in an interview on Friday.
He had been counting on $750,000 to $1 million from each of them, he said, but now they were skeptical about the profitability of “Funny Girl” in a theater season when six other classic musicals — including “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” and “Evita” — were also opening in revival on Broadway. Some of the investors were also feeling the pinch of the nation’s economic troubles, which New York commercial theater has largely escaped so far.