Crawford’s Vampires Closes 25 Jan with $12m Lost

Hopes of Michael Crawford returning triumphantly to the West End in his stage “comeback” vehicle, The Dance of the Vampires, came crashing down yesterday as the production confirmed its obscenely premature New York closure. The much-hyped musical will close at Broadway’s Minskoff Theatre next week (25 January 2003) after a mere 56 performances.

Crawford – who became an international star for originating the title role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s blockbuster The Phantom of the Opera, premiered in the West End in 1986 – made headlines last August when the British press reported that he was being lured out of semi-retirement for the part of Count Von Krolock, a seductive and diabolical bloodsucker, with a pay packet of £20 million. This “astronomical” sum, which Crawford has denied, would have made him the highest paid performer in theatre history. As it is, Dance of the Vampires will now go down as one of the expensive flops in Broadway history.

Though box office advances initially broke records, following numerous delays and prolonged previews (61 in total), the show’s opening night notices last month were nothing short of devastating and trade quickly petered out (See News, 10 Dec 2002). The musical comedy, based on Roman Polanski’s 1967 schlock horror film, cost some $15 million to mount and will lose its producers an estimated $12 million.

Charles Isherwood, theatre critic for trade newspaper Variety, wrote that “Michael Crawford will live to rue the day he chose this ludicrous musical as the vehicle for his Broadway return” while the all-powerful New York Times‘ Ben Brantley described Crawford as “a Goth version of Siegfried, Roy and Wayne Newton combined” and Elysa Gardner, writing in USA Today, decided the actor “looks disturbingly like a cross between an aging David Hasselhoff and Donald Trump, and likely couldn’t sing his way past either of them.”

The show itself was variously described as “spectacularly idiotic” (USA Today), a “musical of mind-numbing silliness” (Associated Press) and ” campy, preachy, lewd and romantically rhapsodic all at once” (New York Times).

– by Terri Paddock & Mark Shenton