Saturday, January 26, 2013

Bloody Flop

When a German journalist learned of the problems to mount a production of Rebecca last year he commented - not without schadenfreude -  that this was the second time Michael Kunze's Broadway dreams had come to naught. It is useless to correct such a statement, but it is wrong. First of all, I do not regard the short run of Dance of the Vampires  as a failure.  As everyone in the business knows,  the Broadway version had only little to do with my original. But even if it would have been my version I could be kind of proud of having a Broadway flop. Sure enough, it would have felt better to have a hit, but for a German playwright and lyricist even a Broadway flop is not so bad at all. While  German composers such as Frederick Loewe and Kurt Weill  made it big in New York, none of their book writers ever reached the Great White Way. Who tried hardest was Bert Brecht.  His Threepenny Opera  only made it to an Off-Broadway theater. Who am I to compare myself to Brecht? A Broadway flop suits me very well.

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