As for Cook, Dixon & Young, Cook said that theaters booking them use the Three Mo' Tenors connection for promotional purposes, but that as soon as that happens, a letter comes threatening legal action. Several bookings have been canceled outright, he said.
Three Mo' Tenors is not the only show mired in such disputes. The off-Broadway revue Naked Boys Singing finds itself in the muck, too.
Mark Vijn, a European producer, recently lost the license to take that show on tour in the UK. So he decided to put together another show: It is called Get Naked, and it involves these boys, see, who are naked and who sing.
"It's not the same songs and it's not the same story line," Vijn said in a telephone interview.
So it's legal. (Barenaked Lads Take Off Broadway, for example, is playing in Chicago.)
But Carl D. White, the New York producer of Naked Boys Singing, points to promotional materials for Get Naked that, he says, conflate the two shows: advertisements on the Web that use a color scheme similar to the one used for Naked Boys Singing, that use the phrase "The boys are back in town" and - though Get Naked has not yet opened - that refer enigmatically to "having toured the world for several years."
Intentionally confusing audiences to take advantage of the success of Naked Boys, White said, raises legal issues.
Vijn said that some of the men in his cast were in a tour of Naked Boys, so they technically will be back in town. He also said the advertisements with those color schemes were not the show's official artwork.
"Do your own Naked production, that's fine," said White, "but don't take everything of ours."
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