New York Magazine's Scott Brown has the final word on the Rebecca blow-up. He phrases it much more elegantly than I did. It's almost like the guy's a professional writer or something. Brown is thrilled about the play's highly dramatic implosion—not because it means good professionals will be out of work, but because it's a signal that, "the stereotype of the sharp-lapeled Broadway bullshit artist endures." He goes on:
Rebecca may prove that maybe the Max Bialystocks haven’t been priced out by a post-Producers, post-Disney Broadway after all. The theater biz, decades since Times Square was sterilized and laminated, remains uncorporatizable, immune to ruthless Romneyesque efficiences, financialization, and scientific management.
This has nothing to do with Brown's point, which I've already echoed plenty, but god do I love The Producers. The original movie is a strange case. It peters out terribly in the last thirty or so minutes, but the first scene of that movie is the tidiest introduction of characters, conflict and planning that you'll ever see. Whenever I start a play, at some point I end up going back to that movie—everything up to when Gene Wilder runs around the fountain—and I try to rip off Brooks' structure. I usually can't make it. You know why?
Because writing is hard.
And that sucks.