Peter Crawleymarvels at a miracle on 44th Street
It is a story so carefully stage- managed, it could even warm the cockles of a heart that's two sizes too small. Last week, a plucky little underdog of a Broadway show overcame the picket line and the barricades to clamber back onto the stage. The show must go on, of course, but with Broadway brought to its knees by a stagehand strike, that apparently requires a court injunction.
"I think one Grinch in town is enough," said the Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Helen Freedman, as she ruled that Dr Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical could reopen.
The story, as every five year old knows, involves a curmudgeonly green thingumybob who attempts to cancel Christmas by stealing every gift in town, only to learn that you can't put a price tag on the true Christmas spirit. To learn this lesson from the $6 million show will cost you up to $250 (€169).
Frankly, it's hard to know what other ruling the judge could have made.Anyone who finds against the Grinch may as well sentence Li'l Orphan Annie to eight more years of a hard knock life, or declare the defendant Kris Kringle insane while they're at it. Add to this the fact that the courtroom was full of wide-eyed child actors from the show, and there is a sense of calculated schmaltz about the whole thing.
Actually, it's just business as usual. The striking stagehands may have closed 27 shows on Broadway at the most lucrative time of its year - and could cost Broadway $135 million in lost ticket sales - but they were all in favour of the Grinch, who it seems engineered a separate and agreeable contract with them.
Only the owner of the St James Theater on 44th Street, where it was to be performed, resisted the show and tried to wait out the strike in solidarity with the League of Producers, who are seeking to hire fewer stagehands to open a show.
The Grinch has now been open for a week, putting in a staggering 15 performances in that time. With little competition on a largely dormant Broadway, the box office has been boffo.
It's a shame no such legal recourse is available to Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, his Broadway directorial debut which never managed to open, or to Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention, a one-time Abbey Theatre commission that is also in strike limbo.
They, too, might benefit from this courtroom pageantry. The Grinch's return, in fact, could be sneaky detente.
"The theatre is filled with imagery that moves people," said the director of Actors' Equity, who happened to attend the reopening. "This theatre being open, all these people crowding the street outside - that's the image I hope will break the logjam."
Broadway has always traded on glitz and sentiment while keeping its eye firmly on the bottom line. If The Grinch hastens negotiations and saves what remains of the season, it will be the fairytale the commercial theatre deserves: a Christmas miracle by court order.
