the craptacular

Summer’s such a slow time for theater, right? WRONG. Here’s a recap of all the stuff we’ve seen in the last bunch of sweaty, summery weeks…

Koberet
This summer Andrew Kober snagged a plum spot in the NYMF lineup for the latest edition of his cabaret show appropriately entitled Koberet. The lineup of songs and stories has changed a bit, but Kober’s self-depricating humor remains fully intact, which we always appreciate. Something we also appreciate? Guest appearances by Steel Burkhardt, obviously. Steel joined Andrew to sing a cover of “Call Me Maybe” for which Steel was hopelessly unprepared — miraculously, Steel is the only person on earth who doesn’t know the words. We’re guessing that number won’t stick around for the next iteration, but we hope he never removes the French whorehouse story because… it’s the best we’ve ever had heard. And obviously there are a lot of French whorehouse stories floating around these Broadway cabaret gigs.

ShakesBEER
This summer’s edition of ShakesBEER featured — gasp — another playwright. Edmond Rostand, to be exact. You know, the dude who wrote a little play called Cyrano de Bergerac. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Anyway. Turns out we weren’t too bothered by the dramatic shift because a) we were already a little drunk and b) Vince Gatton, Virginia Donohoe and the very cute Danny Rivera — as Cyrano, Roxanne and Christian, respectively — were pretty damn great.

The Last Smoker in America
A summer trifle for those who feel oppressed by NYC’s anti-smoking laws: The Last Smoker in America, which takes a Urinetown-y, basic-freedoms-are-banned take on one American family. The book is an incoherent disaster and the jokes are more for your grandmother than you, but it’s pretty lovely to see Natalie Venetia Belcon — amazing in Avenue Q as Gary Coleman the super — onstage again.

Broadway Stands Up for Freedom
Our favorite charitable event of the year combining two of our favorite things — Broadway and lawyers — rocked NYU’s Skirball Center back in July. Highlights: Seth Rudetsky’s jokery, the wee child from Once singing “Free to Be You and Me” in sequined sneakers, Tony Kushner officially coining the term “Arizonian,” and Lindsay Mendez’s pink Cynthia Rowley dress, which she admitted, onstage, was purchased at T.J. Maxx. Why did we love this? Lucky has the same dress, only in green. And hers is from Marshalls.

Richard III
Can’t manage three hours of Shakespeare on a weeknight? Girl, neither can we. Enter the Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit, which is presenting a rad Richard III this summer in community centers, soup kitchens, prisons, and even The Public Theater itself. It’s $15 a ticket and 90 minutes long, which spares you all the play’s obscure politics and leaves all of would-be King Richard’s cray cray intact. Post-show drinks following some weeknight performances at The Public are a fun bonus. Again, because Shakespeare + alcohol = genius.

Starcatcher’s New Stache
Matthew Saldivar doesn’t do it the way Christian Borle did it. But really, who could? Filling Borle’s Tony-winning shoes in Peter and the Starcatcher basically required a wholesale re-imagining of the character Black Stache. We’re not complaining. Saldivar’s ‘Stache is a little beefier and a little hammier. One thing he’s not: Chicken. It’s a brave new world — and really, a whole new show — over at the Brooks Atkinson. It was worth our second trip.

Norbert Leo Butz at 54 Below
We laughed! We cried! We were totally bummed that they were out of oysters! If you had to pick a place to start with the new cabaret space, 54 Below, you did well if you chose Norbert Leo Butz. His moody, bluesy, emotional set ranked among the best things we did this summer besides lie on the beach with our Les Miserables logo towels. Bonus points forever for rocking a Jason Robert Brown song that’s not even in The Last Five Years anymore, and for making Dad Jeans look good.

Matt Doyle Gig
So yes, we posted a bit of scoop after Matt Doyle’s album release gig at Joe’s in early July, but did we ever mention there was also some amazing music, too? Because there was, and we loved it. In June we caught Matt’s acoustic gig at Bon Soir Supper Club, but we loved hearing Matt with a full band even more. And we’re still obsessed with his soulful cover of Foy Vance’s “First of July” all these weeks later. And in case you didn’t know it, Matt is an absolute darling — which always comes across on stage — who hung around to chat and take photos with every single fan who lined up to say hello after the gig.

Turn of the Screw
Our favorite thing about finding new musicals while they’re still in development? Getting to hear the stories behind them straight from their creators. After a reading of Michael Kimmel and Drew Gasparini’s new musical Turn of the Screw in July, we chatted with the guys and Drew told us he’d written the vast majority of the music in a three weeks. A whole show in three weeks, you guys! It was pretty cool to see how much they’d done in such a short time and we’ll for sure be keeping tabs on how this dark, spooky new musical develops.

The Into The Woods Party
After the show it’s the after party and once a year at Shakespeare in the Park, that party is up at Belvedere Castle. Extra apropos when that party is following Into the Woods, non? Besides the show’s stars — we spotted the very handsome Ivan Hernandez, Paris Remillard, Russell Edgington Denis O’Hare, Gideon Glick, Sarah Stiles, and Josh Lamon, among others — Alan Cumming and Stephen Sondheim held court in the corner near the bar/buffet, Arian Moayed and Rajiv Joseph milled about in the crowd and Jack McBrayer joined Amy Adams to celebrate. We sipped on beer and wine and noshed on corn salad and mini-sandwiches and truffles, sweating it out until the park closed at 1:00 am and everybody had to move on.

For West End theatre nerds, this week marked the very emotional closing of an old haunt and haven: Dress Circle, a London shop specializing in musical theatre-related stuffs. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it and for those of you who never had the chance to shop there, it was a very special place. But for everybody else it was just another week of wondering whether a musical could influence American politics…

• A CNN show asked if the newly launched Book of Mormon tour could possibly influence the American presidential race. All we were asking, after we hauled our jaws up off the floor, was why the show used file photos of Andrew Rannells and not Gavin Creel.
• Deep breath, guys: Jeremy Jordan is leaving Newsies for good on September 4th. Time to hold hands, cry a lot, and listen to “Santa Fe” until it becomes a dirge of sadness and despair. You know, the way it sounds in Christian Bale’s mind all the time.
• Rock of Ages briefly became an actual fucking rock concert in London on Tuesday when Alice Cooper crashed the stage. He performed “School’s Out” with the cast to celebrate the 40th anniversary of it hitting No. 1 in the UK charts.
• Bradley Cooper wants to bring The Elephant Man to Broadway next fall for a limited run. It’s really lovely to see how passionate he is about this play, but maybe he skipped that whole part of theater reality where most film actors consistently and epically bomb when they’re asked to do acting live and in real-time? Good luck to his handsome self, though. We’ll cut a bitch to get a ticket.
• In other (possible?) Broadway transfer news: Into The Woods might be hitting the Great White Way late winter or next spring. It’s a big “might,” not helped by some scathing reviews and up-in-the-air funding. But here’s hoping. If you’re not Michael Riedel, that is.
• Rumors — we love those — that Aladdin could be headed to Broadway have been circulating since Alan Menken made an announcement at a concert at Disneyland. Because anything uttered off-the-cuff at Disneyland simply must be true. Disney hasn’t commented yet.
• Smash casting update: Sean Hayes will be starring in a recurring role as a TV and movie star making his Broadway debut. Oh hey, it’s a reunion of our favorite TV show — Jack & Grace.
• The New York Philharmonic’s production of Company is getting a DVD release on November 13th. No, of course I didn’t yell “Finally!” at my computer when I saw this.
• Speculation has begun on who will replace Ricky Martin in Evita after he leaves next year. Not having a reality show to watch Antonio Banderas, Marc Anthony and Enrique Iglesias battle it out seems like a waste, no?
• Something for the SuFo fans, because they’re the only ones who aren’t cutting their wrists yet over the helter-skelter narrative monstrosity that is Bunheads: The show is getting more episodes in December.
• The musical Kinky Boots is hitting the Al Hirschfeld in Spring 2013, opening on April 4th. Clearly there must be at least one musical with a drag queen on Broadway at all times.

Sophie is The Craptacular’s UK-based intern. Follow her on Twitter at @SophG6.

The first time I saw Dogfight at Second Stage, I wasn’t with Lucky. (Yes, sometimes we do unglue ourselves from each other and do things independently.) But on the walk back to the subway after the show the first thing I did was text her feverishly: You HAVE to see this show.

I loved Dogfight so much I doubted the clarity of my judgment. I was afraid to even say it out loud until someone else agreed with me. Not because I’ve ever been afraid to love anything before, but, I think, because I was afraid hearing anyone else’s opinion would somehow ruin things. I couldn’t take the heartbreak of disagreement.

We never quite got around to writing a review this summer, but as the show’s closing approaches, it felt fitting to compile a list of reasons I loved Dogfight—why I hope to see it live on and maybe even grace the Broadway stage someday.

The Book.
There’s something to be said for a book that makes you instantly and completely care about its characters. The Book of Mormon has one. Baby It’s You did not. See the difference? This is especially important to Dogfight’s tale—of Eddie, a Jarhead on the eve of deployment, the buddies he’s beginning to see anew, and Rose, the girl he wanted to use but ends up falling for—which is more about character than action. Dogfight falls completely flat if the audience doesn’t become fully invested in the characters on that stage. Thank goodness, then, for Peter Duchan’s book, which achieves the kind of clarity of character that creates an emotional bond between the people on stage and the people in the audience almost immediately. You root for Rose to stand up for herself and squirm in your seat as Eddie awkwardly attempts to woo her back. You occasionally want to kick Boland in the face. Or the jugular. By intermission you care, and you’re dying to know how it all ends. That’s what the best books do.

The Music.
The largely quiet, contemplative score makes Dogfight feel a bit like a chamber musical, which is the last thing I expected to hear when I entered the theater. I was waiting for jangly keyboards and electric guitar—the sort of non-descript blend of difficult to place styles that is musical theater’s answer to modern pop/rock, but is neither authentically pop nor authentically rock. Which is to say, I was waiting to be disappointed, really. And then I just wasn’t. Composers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul have put together something original and beautiful and several songs stuck with me for days, in particular Rose’s song and “Pretty Funny” and the song Eddie and Rose sing as they head out on their real first date.

The Direction.
Director Joe Mantello knocks this one out of the park with a language so unique to him—a perfect blend of the directorial grace of Harold Prince and the emotional grit of Michael Grief—that its success shouldn’t have been a surprise. You know. Except for the fact that he directed Wicked, which just… throws all my sensors off. In Dogfight Mantello married the kind of stripped down, painfully real human moments you’ll remember from The Normal Heart, with the grand sweep of a musical that requires a turn table in the stage. It was nearly bursting at the seams of the tiny Second Stage theater, but that only made me wish to see it in a bigger space, not to see the show rendered in a smaller way.

The Boys.
Though much of the central story is about Eddie and Rose, Dogfight is chock-full of guys. Jardhead Guy’s Guys, to be exact, and their characters and relationships are beautifully imagined and portrayed on stage. The Three B’s (Eddie) Birdlace, Bernstein and Boland come to life through pitch-perfect performances by Derek Klena, Nick Blaemire and Josh Segarra, respectively. Blaemire, as the Jewish virgin dying to get laid before being shipped out, is a particular treat, but Segarra slips from chummy to menacing with remarkable ease, and Klena wears Eddie’s transition from macho jerk to tentative romantic hero quite well.

Lindsay Mendez.
Oh fuck it you guys, LINDSAY MENDEZ IS THE BEST, OKAY?! I mean. She’s not ugly—the whole point of this character being that she’s kind of unattractive—so that does kind of test our suspension of disbelief. But Mendez is otherwise completely perfect, so much so that you don’t even care that homegirl is way too hot for this. Allowed to drop her usual role as brash belt-ress and explore the smart, introspective, sensitive Rose, Mendez gives a totally revelatory performance. She’s a star, man, and this understated performance blows the roof off, not through soaring vocals, but through sheer emotional force and quiet determination.

Photo: Joan Marcus

Let’s be clear at the outset: It’s really, really easy to royally fuck up Into the Woods.

The world is littered with the festering corpses of high school, community theater, dinner theater, and one huge, putrid Broadway revival production of this show, all because its respective directors and performers are under some dim delusion that it’s a raucous comedy. Or a kids’ show. Or a sweet, simple crowd pleaser. 

Yeah, no, said Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, who with this show created a complex universe of slippery morals, trauma, and tragedy in the guise of a fairy tale. Yeah, it’s funny sometimes. And yeah, Cinderella is here. But Into the Woods, like the witch who scuttles across the stage wrecking lives at every turn, is not to be crossed. You disrespect it, and it will dis you so hard that you will be removing its foot from your ass until the Tony Awards. Into the Woods, whether you’re the director or you’re in the audience, should always be approached with caution.

But here’s the good news: The new Shakespeare in the Park production of the show, which is currently playing at the Delacorte Theater, doesn’t fuck it up. This reinvention of the 1988 show, directed by Timothy Sheader, fully grasps the darkness and weirdness in the material, and its utter sense of hopeless unresolve. Even with a kid narrating things — and maybe because there’s a kid narrating things — there are no true happy endings, or even fully graspable endings at all. Told from his perspective, the show is constructed as his dream, or an act of imagination, as he runs away from his scolding dad. Indeed, all the designs look like cobbled-together nightmare versions of his toys, right down to the Ewok-ish set. The childlike take works here — and it’s certainly not more annoying than the suited narrator in the original. But it gives us a scaled-back, patchwork take on the show. On the night I went, even the singing seemed to be amped down from typically overblown Broadway proportions — a development that wasn’t unwelcome. Without all the vocalizing, the emotional core of the story felt clearer, the action more swift. A stark story benefits sometimes from stark telling.

The proceedings are bolstered by a couple of great performances — namely, Donna Murphy as the Witch, Sarah Stiles as a pitch-perfect Little Red Riding Hood, Ivan Hernandez as the Wolf and Cinderella’s Prince, and Jessie Mueller as Cinderella. Donna Murphy is Donna Murphy — regal and forcefully sung, as always. But Sarah Stiles in particular is a standout, playing Little Red Riding Hood as a tough little kid trying to act grown up. It was easy to imagine her as a friend of the young narrator, a fellow survivor of familial trauma. Even Chip Zien, a holdover from the show’s amazing original Broadway cast, finds an affable humanity in the Mysterious Man.

I wish the same could be said for two of the show’s most important leads — the Baker and his wife. If this Into the Woods could be said to go badly wrong in any single place, it’s in the casting of Denis O’Hare and Amy Adams in these crucial roles. Adams can find exactly no subtext (or grief, or irony, or a pulse) in Sondheim’s childless housewife. I get that we’re watching a boy’s idealized version of a mother he never knew, but this take is too dumbed-down for the smart material, which gives the character so much wry humor and irony. To blunt all that good stuff with straightforward geniality just feels like a cheat. O’Hare, on the other hand, is at least attempting something specific with his herky-jerky, dunderheaded Baker. I wish I knew what the hell it was. My best guesses have included Homer Simpson, an impression of Chad Kimball in Memphis minus the accent, and a dimwitted basset hound. It’s… weird.

Still, though, even with the two of them so off the mark, this bold production is unique. Even when Into the Woods makes its treacherous switch from a comedy to a slightly macabre morality play, this production rides the twists and turns, rather than trying to hide them or play them for laughs. People die. Lives are ruined and thrown badly off course. The unsentimental treatment of these events, ironically, gives them a resonance. Even Jack’s parting with his beloved cow has a sweet, realistic sting. None of it is cute, but life’s drama and trauma seldom are. Now if only other directors who attempt this show could understand as much.

photo: Joan Marcus via The Associated Press

There’s a saying; “If you love something, let it go. If it comes back to you, it’s yours forever.” That’s all sweet and everything, but sometimes it doesn’t come back to you because it’s meant to be forever. Sometimes it comes back to you because someone saw an opportunity to make money.

At least, that’s sort of how it feels when closed Broadway shows bring their touring productions back to Broadway for a “limited engagement.” Hair did it last summer; Fela! did it this summer. But box office performance for both runs wasn’t exactly blockbuster.

Fela! originally ran at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre from October 19, 2009 (opening November 23) through January 2, 2011. The show’s capacity percentage held steady around the 70% mark for most of the run, and took in well over 50% of its gross potential. It never recouped, but it was a critical darling and was nominated for Best Musical at the Tonys.

Its four-week summer engagement didn’t go so well. Sure, it was at bigger house than before (the Al Hirschfeld), but only by about 200 seats (or 15%). And while it did solid business during its last week, the numbers aren’t so impressive when you compare the numbers to the show’s original run over the same weeks in 2010.

Yikes. The 2010 version of Fela! wins almost every time.

The 2011 engagement of Hair followed a similar pattern. The original production of the revival ran at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre from March 6, 2009 (opening March 31) to June 27, 2010. A widely popular production, the show recouped in less than six months, and after a 2009 Tony win for Best Revival, was regularly in the million-dollar club at over 100% capacity (based on how many times we saw it, we may be partly responsible). After the original revival cast left for London, grosses and capacity took a dive (lesson: don’t cast American Idols in American Tribal Love Rock Musicals), but it closed its run with a respectable $712,008 gross and 85.3% capacity.

The summer run? Not such a hit. It opened at the massive St. James (more than 1,600 seats!), and had a summer run from July 5, 2011 to September 10, 2011. Its grosses never made it higher than $385,942 and its capacity never higher than 56%. If we compare opening and closing weeks of the summer run to those same weeks in the original, you’ll see just how big that gap was.

So it’s safe to say that limited summer runs aren’t exactly a surefire way to make money, but you can kind of understand the logic here: If shows are touring anyway, and a Broadway house is open, why not? In the meantime, we just make one plea: please don’t let this happen to Memphis. We can’t handle that again.

I think this week has taught us that Laura Benanti and Julie White are hilarious in their new show, The Book of Mormon’s first national tour company is delightful, and everybody loves Matthew Saldivar. On to things that actually are news…

• To start on a somber note: RIP to the wonderful Marvin Hamlisch, EGOT and Pulitzer Prize-winner and composer of A Chorus Line. He also wrote “Nobody Does It Better” from The Spy Who Loved Me and scored The Way We Were and Sophie’s Choice. If anyone deserved to have the lights dimmed on Broadway…
• Elf is returning to Broadway for a limited run this November. No news on casting yet. Happy holidays, Charles Isherwood.
• Smash update — because you clearly needed one: Tony-winner and generally handsome dude Daniel Sunjata will play Debra Messing’s new squeeze next season. Points to the creative team for knowing how to (nearly) placate us after getting rid of Will Chase and Brian d’Arcy James — but not the stupid son.
• Speaking of handsome men and good casting ideas: Jason Danieley will play Georges in Sunday In The Park With George in Chicago this September.
• Sweeney Todd is closing in London soon but Imedla Staunton may have her next gig lined up as Mama Rose in a West End revival of Gypsy. There are so many good things about this. Unlike Broadway, the last West End revival was… never. The last time London had Gypsy was the original production in 1973 with Angela Lansbury. It’s time.
• I’m unironically excited about this: A new UK tour of Cats — everybody’s favorite non-existent-book musical about domestic animals — launches in February. A UK tour basically means Andrew Lloyd Webber has “plans” for it again, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up back on Broadway. Is it weird that I want Ryan Steele to be involved, if it does?
• Sheryl Crow’s new musical Diner will skip an announced pre-Broadway run in San Francisco in favor of a downsized warmup in NYC. The Broadway opening is slated for April 10, and anything that gets it to New York quicker is good by us.
• In news that’s been floating about for a while, but is now confirmed: Jon Favreau will direct the Jersey Boys movie. Don’t you sometimes just get the urge to yell “This is never going to work!” at all of Hollywood?
• Hairspray! In concert! Again! Beth Leavel! Nick Adams! John Waters! Micky Dolenz! It really takes something to earn the title of “campest production of Hairspray ever,” but this might just be it. Indianapolis and Baltimore will be getting this concert version in January, 2013.

Remember that time an actress tweeted her distaste for the first preview performance of Into the Woods and the internet exploded? That was crazy, right? Although it seems like ancient history, it was only two weeks ago. And while we’re all grateful that the brouhaha has died down to a barely-there whisper, we still can’t help but wonder: How in hell did that even happen? And why on earth did the story end up on Playbill, The Huffington Post and even across the pond in The Stage and The Guardian?

To give you a little recap: On July 24, actress Morgan James—last seen in the recently shuttered revival of Godspell – tweeted her distaste for this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Into the Woods, a show that opens tonight at the Delacorte Theater.

The responses to her Tweet fell into one of two camps. Some people seemed to think it was rude (not to mention bad for her career) to tweet such harsh, unfiltered thoughts. Others seemed to think theater is subject to enough external criticism already, and thus, should never be attacked from within.

But is Morgan James’ career really a matter of profound public concern? Sure, various members of the Into the Woods cast and creative team, or the Public Theater may not want to work with her in the future. But will this really cost her work? This is Broadway, after all: If she’s talented enough, that’s unlikely. And are strangers really all that worried about her career prospects? Doubtful.

So, then, was it really about how theater should never come under attack from within? Because let’s be real, it’s hard to believe anyone thinks the criticism of one single theater artist is ever going to destroy any single piece of work. Stephen Sondheim himself publicly huffed and puffed and tried to  blow Diane Paulus’ Porgy & Bess down, and his attempt failed—at least according to the Tony Awards. And the notion that theater actors can’t or shouldn’t have opinions in public, ever, is just unrealistic.

So what gives? How did this tweet end up splashed all over the theater news media? After all, this isn’t Stephen Sondheim writing in to the New York Times. And Morgan James is hardly the first person—actor or otherwise—to tweet negative opinions about a show.

Well. On some level, people reacted because reading James’ tweet just felt shitty. Her target of choice—a much beloved and respected not-for-profit theater company—was crappy. And it didn’t help that her timing was crappy, too. Not only was Into the Woods not yet open to the public, but it had just performed its very first preview, after a very short, weather ravaged rehearsal period.  No one in theater likes to see a show criticized so very early or in so very public a fashion.

And that is the heart of the matter, right there. Sure, the content of James’ criticism itself may have struck the match, but it was the very public place in which she chose to express that criticism that lit the fuse. More than anything, her dissenters were weary of the very public nature of social media as it relates to theater.

Social media automatically gives anyone with internet access and an opinion an instant audience. In the case of Morgan James—whose following is more than twenty times the size of the average Twitter user—that audience is thousands of people. James didn’t seem to recognize that her words had real weight, and could end up just about anywhere—including the pages of The Huffington Post. Well, either that, or she just didn’t care.

There’s a huge amount of fear amongst theater creative and marketing folks that social media isn’t just a soapbox but a ballistic missile, one that can’t be controlled once it’s left the launch pad. As bloggers, we grapple with their concerns all the time, but those fears sometimes extend to the entire audience. James struck at the heart of that fear. Her negative opinion was (more or less) heard around the world.

The ultimate irony here is that James’ tweet only landed in places like HuffPo and Playbill because people attempted to stifle her online opining. All the actors, composers and other theater artists who publicly told James to shut up actually handed her the most high profile moment of her career. They made their own worst fears come true.

Of course, social media can carry positive messages as far and wide as negative ones. No one ever balks when someone says they love a show – especially not the show’s marketing team, or the leading man. But we can’t have it both ways, and the James Debacle makes it clear that trying to stifle online conversation – negative or positive – often backfires.

But it also begs the question: In a world where we all have the ability to instantaneously disseminate our opinions to an audience, what kind of responsibility does that create? And as theater fans and practitioners alike, do we have a responsibility to fair and constructive when we Tweet (or blog, or update our Facebook status)? And even if we do, how many of us actually feel the weight of it?

Truth time: we didn’t see the latest revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. Somewhere between the tepid reviews and reports of audience “woo’ing” during the rape scene, we kind of lost interest. And judging from the see-sawing box office, it seems like lots of other people felt similarly. This Streetcar production was a flop.

Streetcar opened April 22, 2012, capping off a week that saw them fill the Broadhurst house to 79.6% capacity and take in a total gross of $311,556. Now, that’s a week that consisted of preview performances, leading up to an opening night during the height of the spring opening season just days before the Tony eligibility cutoffs. It’s likely that the majority of the tickets that week were comps, with the average ticket price coming in at $41.88.

The week after opening, the average ticket price rose to $62.84. It stayed within $5 of that price for most of the the rest of the run. Capacity, on the other hand, dropped. The week ending April 29, it fell to 62% (a 17.6% decrease). The following week, ending May 6, resulted in another drop in capacity of 0.3%, down to 61.7%. A more expensive ticket plus a lower capacity does not equal a huge improvement in sales.

But then Streetcar had a weird week. For some reason, during the week ending May 13, everything was up. Capacity increased 12% to 73.7%. Sales saw an $86,887 bump up to $446,069. Producers quickly announced an extension. The limited run originally set to close July 22 would now spend five more weeks on Broadway, closing August 19.

They spoke too soon. The next four weeks in Streetcar’s sales were a total disaster. By the week ending June 10, Streetcar was at its lowest capacity and gross ever: 50.9% and $299,235 — that’s 29.46% of its potential gross.

Streetcar promptly cancelled its summer extension. Closing would in fact be on July 22. Surprise surprise.

With only six weeks remaining of its run, things started to shift and Streetcar started picking up some box office. Capacity rose steadily each week — first by 2.8% (the week ending June 17) and eventually by 13.5% (the week ending July 15). Grosses also steadily increased, as did average ticket price. Maybe it was summer vacationers itching to see Blair Underwood? Maybe it was the fact that only a handful of plays are really left running on Broadway? Maybe it was the fact that it was closing? Whatever the case, Streetcar was on the upswing.

By the end of the run last week (week ending July 22), Streetcar took in a total gross of $614,897 at a capacity of 84.7% with an average ticket price of $77.65.

Those would be good numbers… if it were the beginning of Streetcar’s run. But the truth of the matter is, the slight improvement over the past six weeks was too little, too late. Even at its height — at the last week of its run — Streetcar only took in 59.76% of its actual gross potential. That’s not enough to make it a hit, or to recoup. With that in mind, we’re seriously wondering about the viability of the planned London production, which is slated for the fall. Goodness knows, things play differently on that side of the pond. We’ll keep our eyes on this one — and our wallets closed.

Grosses are provided courtesy of The Broadway League. Click here to read this week’s complete list of grosses.

More from NineDaves and LovelyLinda can be found on their respective blogs.

So, a while back, we posted this photo of Ben Walker holding a small furry creature. Because hot boys holding small, vulnerable creatures always makes the creature cuter and the boy hotter. The formula here is pretty basic.

Then the controversy began.

Turns out that we don’t really know WTF this animal is. Our first two guesses? Kangaroo and koala. Google and The Discovery Channel tell us that we’re wrong. You know who else told us we were wrong? Some Australian girls who read our site.

So now, because there’s no real consensus here, we’re putting the question to you:

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