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`The Producers' to end run in April
2007-02-23
Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom are bringing down the curtain. "The Producers," Mel Brooks' hit Broadway musical, will close April 22 after 2,502 performances at the St. James Theatre. "The last six years working on this show have been pure joy for me," Brooks said Thursday. "There is not a single person who has ever been involved with this production to whom I am not gratefully indebted." The musical, which won a record-breaking 12 Tony Awards including best musical, was based on Brooks' 1968 film about two charlatan producers who scam little old ladies out of their money to put on a flop Broadway show. It originally starred Nathan Lane as Max and Matthew Broderick as Leo, and featured Cady Huffman as Ulla, Gary Beach as Roger de Bris and Roger Bart as Carmen Ghia. "The sound of laughter is the greatest sound on earth, and I have been lucky enough to experience that sound every day for the last six years," said Susan Stroman, who directed and choreographed the musical. The St. James will house Brooks' next show, a stage version of another of his films, "Young Frankenstein." The musical is expected to open on Broadway sometime this fall after a tryout in a city to be announced. "The Producers" opened April 19, 2001, in New York to rave reviews and frenzied box-office activity. The top ticket price was hiked overnight, from $91 to $100 -- a $99 top price plus $1 for theater restoration. Other shows had charged that amount in the past: the two-part, eight-hour version of "Nicholas Nickleby" and the limited run Kevin Spacey "Iceman Cometh," for example. But "The Producers" became the first open-ended engagement to charge that much for a majority of its seats. The current top ticket price is $111.50. Six months into the run, the musical began charging $480 each for so-called "premium tickets," the best seats in the house. Today, all Broadway shows sell them, with most costing about $100-$230 more than regular ticket prices. "The Producers" has played around the world, including an extended run in London, and generated more than $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales. There were two national tours as well as a film version, which also starred Lane and Broderick. The New York production currently stars Tony Danza as Max and Hunter Foster as Leo.
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