UPDATED WEDS 3:25pm: Hard figures show that once reviews came out, “Queen of Versailles” plummeted. They went from just over $1 million to $877K. You can see producers had no choice but to post closing notices. The writing was on the wall.
On Broadway, that’s it for “The Queen of Versailles.”
The musical based on a documentary about lavish living starred Kristen Chenoweth and F. Murray Abraham.
The show opened last week to negative reviews — except, strangely enough, in The New York Times. Everything else was mixed or very bad.
Including previews, the six weeks “The Queen of Versailles” been playing have yielded about $5 million — not enough to keep going and no advance sales. It costs at least a million dollars a week to keep a show like this going.
The cost of putting on the show in the first place was around a staggering $27 million That money is gone with the wind.
The irony here is that the musical reunited Chenoweth with her “Wicked” composer Stephen Schwartz. As the “Wicked” movie is booming at the box office, the magic they once made could not be re-created.
Broadway is tough right now, so a show without the reviews or advance sales has no chance of survival after the holidays.
As for the New York Times, their review was a head scratcher, and totally out of tune with the consensus. It wasn’t enough to save the show.
Condolences.
