Monday, November 2, 2009

Broadway Forgets Brighton Beach Memoirs

Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 11:49 AM

Brighton Beach Memoirs closes on Broadway
Theater bloggers were all besides themselves over the weekend after the announcement that the Broadway revival of Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs at the Nederlander Theater would close yesterday, only one week after opening and less than one month after its first performance. By most accounts, the sequel to Simon's Broadway Bound (ha! the irony), was very good, and Garrett Eisler at Playgoer went so far as to call it the "best American play on Broadway" (take that, David Mamet).

After Patrick Healy's piece in the Times two weeks ago explaining that a few star-studded plays were skewing the numbers in an otherwise lukewarm, musical-driven Broadway season, most have concluded that the absence of significant star power is what precipitated Brighton Beach's demise. All of which basically confirms the sad fact that, much like blockbuster movies, Broadway relies more on spectacle and celebrities than critics and public opinion for its (financial) success.

(photo credit: Janna Giacoppo)

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