From yesterday’s New York Post:

November 10, 2006 — PANIC is starting to set in at “High Fidelity,” the new Broadway musical, based on Nick Hornby’s popular novel, that begins previews Nov. 20 at the Imperial Theater.

The reason: Ticket sales are so awful that unless the show gets over-the-top raves, it could close faster than “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

According to production sources, “High Fidelity” so far has sold about $600,000 worth of tickets, an appallingly low figure for a $10 million show.

In Boston, where the show recently wrapped up its out-of-town tryout, the box office was a disaster. The owner of Colonial Theater is said to have taken a $1 million bath.

The problem, sources say, is that the show’s target audience – straight males in their 20s and 30s – would rather be caught in a gay bar than at a Broadway musical.

Well, that kind of reminds me of what my wife and I experienced at the end of our attendance of The Times They Are A-Changin’. People were still applauding when one of the actors spoke up (no longer in character, naturally) and gestured for everyone to sit. He asked us to wait just a few minutes before leaving in order to hear him talk about a worthy cause — which happened to be an AIDS related charity. It was indeed a few minutes — not just a quick “please give what you can,” but a spiel of significant length, and one to which we were a captive audience. It included — get this — a number of gloating jabs about the Republican losses in the mid-term elections. That got applause from a significant part of the audience, naturally, but I’m relatively confident it also annoyed a significant number of people, like it did me. Hardly a great fund-raising technique — i.e., alienating potential donors.

The question as to whether Broadway is “too gay” is beyond my scope. But, as the above story in the Post intimates, it is at least a factor in limiting the potential audience for certain shows. And merely being gay is one thing, but smarmily forcing your politics on an audience full of people who’ve paid substantial money for an evening’s entertainment is quite another. The actor was literally insulting people who had been applauding him moments before — not a polite thing to do at all.

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