If you have watched any television in New York or listened to a Broadway radio show in the last two weeks, you have probably heard about In My Life, the new Broadway musical currently at the Music Box Theater.
Its commercials, after all, have been everywhere, complete with heartfelt audience testimonials, snippets of cheering crowds and mentions of rave reviews.
All of which might give you the impression that In My Life is a hit.
You would be wrong. In fact, In My Life, which was written (music, lyrics and book), directed and produced by the composer Joseph Brooks, is losing tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. It also received some of the worst reviews in recent memory, an almost unanimous wave of pans calling it
everything from bizarre to just plain bad.
Ben Brantley, the chief theater critic of the New York Times, found In My Life a boring, logic-free exercise in which one drowns "in a singing sea of syrup," and which has "jaw-dropping moments of whimsy run amok."
But that hasn't stopped Brooks -- who made a fortune as a writer of
ballads like You Light Up My Life and advertising jingles for products like Volkswagen and Dr. Pepper -- from mounting an aggressive and expensive, campaign to save his show. Indeed, even before the opening on Oct. 20, Brooks had planned to counteract bad reviews and has now blanketed the area's airwaves with ads costing an estimated US$1.5 million of his (and his media-shy partner's) money.
"This is a war," Brooks said, after a matinee at the Music Box. "You have to bring out your biggest and best guns, and you better bring them out fast."
Nancy Coyne, the veteran Broadway advertising executive at Serino Coyne who is in charge of the show's marketing, seconded that. "They decided to take the budget allocated for the next six months and spend it in the next six weeks," she said. "This is a man who is passionate about this show and he puts his money where his passion is."
The advertising blitz may be working, at least to an extent. According to figures provided by Brooks and Ed Nelson, the show's company manager, In My Life showed markedly increased sales last week, compared with the previous week, with daily box office totals
ranging from about US$35,000 (Nov. 1) to a peak of nearly US$85,000 (Nov. 3). By contrast, ticket sales on Oct. 24, just as the advertising campaign began, were less than US$5,000.
For all the recent improvement in ticket sales, however, Brooks concedes his show is still falling short of breaking even, despite having a weekly running cost of about US$320,000, which is very low by Broadway musical standards. But he predicted that In My Life would be turning a weekly profit before the holidays were over, saying the show would be playing to audiences of "85 to 95 percent by Christmas."
For those who haven't seen it, In My Life tells the story of a young singer
suffering from a broken heart, a brain tumor and Tourette's syndrome who finds a girl whom he loves and who loves him. Little do they know that their lives are being observed -- and fiddled with -- by a transvestite angel named Winston and a slouchy, bicycle-riding deity named Al. There are more than two dozen musical numbers, including one involving break-dancing pirates, and no intermission.
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