Rebecca In Peril, and Only Captain Planet Can Save Her Now

​The Long Island flim-flam-fellow behind giving Rebecca her final curtain—or is it?!—has been arrested on Long Island. And here, perhaps, I should make some joke about Long Island already being a prison to begin with, but I'm feeling a bit lazy even for that kind of lazy humor. Onward we press—with the news!

"To carry out the alleged fraud, Hotton faked lives, faked companies and even staged a fake death, pretending that one imaginary investor had suddenly died from malaria," reiterated the United States Attorney Preet Bharara. "Ultimately, Hotton’s imagination was no match for the FBI which uncovered, with lightning speed, his alleged financial misdeeds."

Truly, the FBI should always be depicted as some kind of fraud-fighting superhero supergroup. If Preet Bharara were a member of the Captain Planet team, which one would he be? Fire, I bet. Seems like a fiery guy. And, I did not realize this, but the closing credits for that 90's classic start with the unbeatable credit, "Original Idea By: TED TURNER." Between Chipper, Cap'n P, and the Gulf War, the 90s were really Big Ted's decade, eh?

And a note to Mary E. Galligan, the acting assistant director of the New York FBI—fraud is not the only crime that is plaguing Broadway. The strip also has a terrible problem with belabored metaphors, and you are not helping!

Ms. Galligan said  Mr. Hotton “wrote, directed and starred in the work of fiction he took to Broadway,” adding that a “convincing portrayal on stage can earn you a Tony” while “a convincing act that fleeces a production’s backers can earn you a prison term.” 

The Times piece ends with a quote from Ben Sprecher's beleaguered lawyer, who insists his client is "totally committed to bring Rebecca to New York." Poor, poor Ben Sprecher. Totally committed may be the right phrase.

Off Broadway And The Five Decade Headache

I'm planning a long post for either later in the week or later today about the history of the term "off off Broadway," and the fact that it is an indisputably awful mouthful. Look forward to it—my trenchant analysis and amateurish research will both amuse and disgust you.

In the meantime, I turned up a May 5, 1957 Times article which appears to be the first time the paper used the term. At the end of a long article complaining about the woes of Off Broadway producers:

One steady observer of off Broadway drama suggested that what was needed was off-off Broadway. As a matter of fact, there is a troupe that calls itself the "Way Off Broadway Players."

Since this was the Old Gray Lady's first use of the phrase, they had yet to settle on the house style, which calls for capital Os when it's used as a noun or an adjective—"An Off Broadway producer," "Off Off Broadway is flourishing,"—but teeny-weeny Os when it's serving as an adverb—"The play was performed off Broadway." Oh, and never hyphenate it.

Anybody who doesn't own the Times Manual of Style and Usage is a chump.

More interesting than these five decade old copy-quibbles is the fact that the complaints of Off Broadway producers have not changed at all—they are still caught between artistic ambition and the nightmarish realization that, "the path to quality is paved with producers' greenbacks."

A few quick figures illustrate the situation. In 1953, a play, "Climate of Eden," was opened for $500. Today the average cost is between $7,000 and $15,000, with $20,000 no longer unusual. The revival of "Johnny Johnson," which ran for seventeen performances, cost $40,000. One of the most experienced off-Broadway producers estimated recently that of approximately 600 off-Broadway productions in the last five years, not more than twenty had made a profit.

That forty grand, internet inflation calculators will tell you, is over $300,000 today. It's been a long time since producing off Broadway was cheap.

Various scourges are blamed. The producers of the '50s criticize the rent charged by theater owners—as high as $800 a week in Eisenhower-bucks—they rage about Actors' Equity wage demands—$40 to $70 weekly—and they complain that competition among the thirty or so Off Broadway houses has forced them to raise standards and spend money in desperate hope that their show will be a hit and transfer to Broadway. "Each producer," reporter Murray Schumach tells us, "clings to the hope that his project will be another 'End as a Man,' 'The Iceman Cometh,' 'The Threepenny Opera,' 'Way of the World,' 'Uncle Vanya' or 'Purple Dust.'"

Those titles reflect one thing about the Off Broadway of old that surprised me—a heavy reliance on "the vastness of literary public domain, where prestige is high and royalties non-existent." This was a day when new plays could find a home on Broadway, and didn't need to take refuge below Fourteenth Street. What was on stage might have been old fashioned, but the front of house headaches have hardly changed at all.