Hearing that the circus is coming to town usually evokes idyllic reveries of a parade of animals trouping down Main Street, the Big Top going up, the smell of sawdust and cotton candy. But when the circus in question is the multinational behemoth Cirque du Soleil, and they ditch the Big Top to stand in the reflected glare of Broadway’s lights, the effect on the Great White Way is somewhat chilling.
Cirque’s Zarkana made its debut last summer at Radio City Music Hall, just one avenue away from Mamma Mia! and Wicked. While Cirque had played New York many times over the years, they’d previously pitched their tent, literally, at the outlying Battery Park City or Randall’s Island, or occupied the unloved Theatre at Madison Square Garden with an oddity called Wintuk. But Zarkana changed the playing field, putting up to 54,000 available tickets a week on the market barely outside the Broadway district, accompanied by a marketing campaign commensurate with that capacity and a nearly four month residency.
While it’s impossible to cite any single cause for what anecdotally seemed a down summer in 2011 for shows that were less than smash hits, there was a lot of murmuring about the Cirque effect. That murmur approached a grumble when tickets were made available at TKTS, the Times Square half-price booth, vying for customers using the exact same tool as Broadway shows with available seats.
On the one hand, the presence of tickets at TKTS suggested that Zarkana was less than a smash. But it also meant that when tourists were seeking entertainment options, the widely marketed brand of Cirque was competing with shows that may have only had a couple of months to begin establishing themselves in the public consciousness. If a family was choosing between a new musical unannointed by the Tonys or the pinnacle of modern circus arts, the choice wasn’t necessarily hard. And the scale was daunting: with more than 5400 seats per performance and as many as ten shows a week, the ticket inventory in midtown Manhattan was expanded considerably; all of Broadway – if every theatre has a show on concurrently, which is rare – has just under 400,000 seats to sell each week.
The plan, it was generally known, was for Zarkana to return annually for five summers. As it turns out, Zarkana must have truly underperformed, because this year is already being advertised as the last chance to catch the show in NYC, the run was dropped from 152 to 121 performances, in June the balcony isn’t even being put on sale, the show has been trimmed from two acts to a 90 minute one-act, and more. While hardly the debacle that Cirque’s previous original Manhattan show, Banana Shpeel, had been (it was radically altered with little success during a protracted preview period at The Beacon Theatre), Zarkana is certainly one of the Montreal company’s rare misfires (although they’re hoping its fortunes will change in Las Vegas, its next home). No doubt this is a relief to Broadway producers, who are more than ready to wave goodbye to the clowns and acrobats that, for their money, can’t depart fast enough. But Cirque may not give up: thwarted in their effort at a permanent home on 42nd Street a few years back, they may not be ready to admit defeat in establishing, if not a year-round beachhead, at least a perennial success in such a prominent international destination.
It does raise the question of what happens to the cavernous yet elegant Radio City Music Hall now. Its management has been after a sit-down summer attraction for some time (35 years ago, they produced their own summer spectaculars, running some 150 performances as well). So do they have a back-up plan of their own– or might Cirque rotate in another show from its menu of productions? Is it possible that Radio City will return to a summer of one and two night concert stands, including the return of The Tony Awards, which were displaced in favor of a months-long booking? We know that while nature abhors a vacuum, the owner of an entertainment venue hates empty seats or an empty hall even more. Broadway may have dodged long-term Zarkana damage, but perhaps something equally threatening, or even more so, is waiting in the wings.
