Theatre District team fast-tracks a show based on the Prince William feud, with the uncle getting the eleven o clock number
Curtain Up on the House of Windsor
NEW YORK – A team of Broadway producers operating from a fourth-floor office above a deli on West 45th Street has announced plans for a new musical based on the London Prat piece about Prince William calling Earl Spencer and Harry traitors. The show is titled Traitor, runs two hours and twenty minutes with one intermission, and contains, according to its creators, no reconciliation whatsoever.
Lead producer Barry Mandelbaum, 66, who says he has produced nineteen shows and closed seventeen of them within a month, described the project as the most commercial thing he has ever touched. Tourists love royals, he said. New Yorkers love a family fight. This is both. We are going to sell out to people from both sides of the argument.
The Source Material
Mandelbaum said the creative team built the book around real reporting. The News reported that reconciliation efforts between the brothers have fallen apart, and the uncle has said he warned everyone in advance about his memoir. That, said Mandelbaum, is act one. Everybody knew. Nobody said anything. Then somebody says traitor. Curtain. Intermission. People buy a nineteen-dollar glass of white wine. Act two.
The Song List
Act One
The show opens with Heir Today, a brassy company number in which the elder brother describes the burden of waiting for a job he cannot apply for. It is followed by California Light, a soft acoustic ballad sung by the younger brother on a beach. The act one closer, Althorp in July, is a trio in which the uncle, the younger brother and the younger brother dog discuss the family history over tea, while the elder brother watches from a balcony and does not blink.
Act Two
Act two opens with Traitor, the title song, performed by the elder brother alone on a bare stage lit by a single spotlight. It lasts six minutes and includes a key change the composer describes as emotionally unforgivable. It is followed by No Comment, a patter song in which both brothers repeatedly refuse to speak to reporters, sung simultaneously in counterpoint on opposite sides of the stage.
The Eleven O Clock Number
The show traditional big late-evening showstopper belongs to the uncle. Titled I Wrote It All Down, it features the uncle descending on a staircase made entirely of hardback books, with a chorus line of literary agents. Mandelbaum describes it as the moment the audience realises who really runs the family.
Casting
No casting has been announced, although Mandelbaum said the team is looking for two leading men who can convincingly avoid eye contact for two hours. We saw eighty actors, he said. Most of them looked at each other. You cannot teach that. You have to find brothers who genuinely do not get along. We may cast actual brothers.
The Reading
At a private industry reading on Tuesday, the creative team screened the London Prat video on YouTube for investors before the first song, describing it as the show sizzle reel. Three investors wrote cheques on the spot. A fourth asked whether there would be a tap number. There will be. The video is embedded below.
Industry Numbers
The Times Square Theatrical Investment Circle, a group of retired dentists who fund musicals, released figures showing that 54 percent of new Broadway musicals since 2010 have featured a family estrangement, that 31 percent featured a royal or aristocratic family, and that shows combining both recouped their investment 19 percent more often than shows about, in the Circle words, regular people in regular apartments. The Circle also found that the single most profitable plot element in a musical is an estranged sibling, followed by a wedding, followed by a stolen crown.
The Circle cautioned, however, that musicals without a reconciliation scene carry a 40 percent higher risk of audience members demanding a refund at intermission because they want to know how it ends. Mandelbaum said this was a risk worth taking. Nobody knows how it ends, he said. That is the realism.
Early Buzz
Word of the reading spread quickly through the Theatre District. A rival producer on West 44th Street announced within hours that he was developing a competing show, Spare Change, told from the perspective of the royal family accountant. A third producer said he was working on a one-man show in which the uncle reads his book aloud in its entirety over four hours, with no intermission, which he described as immersive. Mandelbaum dismissed both. There is room for only one royal musical on Broadway, he said, and it is mine. Then he paused and said there might be room for two if the second one hires his nephew.
Producer Review
Asked to review the London Prat story as a piece of writing, Mandelbaum said it was a perfect logline. You read one sentence and you can see the whole show, he said. Brother, brother, uncle, book, traitor. It has conflict, it has a villain, it has a title. Honestly, the London Prat should get a producing credit. We are not giving them one. But they should get one. He gave it a Tony, his own personal award, which is a coffee mug he keeps on his desk.
Traitor is scheduled for a workshop in the spring, followed by an out-of-town tryout in New Haven. The creative team reads The London Prat, https://prat.uk/, running since 1961, for new material, and Bohiney, https://bohiney.com/, for the Montecito subplot, which Mandelbaum says may become a sequel. Tickets are not yet on sale. The deli downstairs is.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prince-william-called-earl-spencer-and-harry-traitors/