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It was a very messy thing. There was an organization called New Musicals, and it was a great idea,
and they made a deal with the theatre up at Purchase, New York, so we could have the theatre
and work on a show and run it for six week or eight weeks and change it all the time,
and the audience would give you feedback, and you’d learn about your show, and at
the end of that time you could stop and go back and rewrite from what you had learned.
We were the first show up, and there were three other shows to follow us. My Favorite
Year was one of them and a couple of others. Anyway, the important thing was that you should
be able to work in perfect safety and with no critics. Everybody had agreed to that except
The New York Times. And their justification for it still makes no sense to me. At one
point, when we found out that they were going to send somebody, seventeen of us, not just
from the show but from the whole theatre community, including Peter Stone who was the head of
the Dramatists Guild at the time, went down to try and explain to them that they would
then destroy the whole project. Well to make a long story short, they did send Frank Rich
who hated it, and then that meant all the other critics came, and the program was destroyed,
and we were the only musical that got a shot. The fact is, because we did have that experience,
when Garth Drabinsky, who is from Canada, came to produce it, we had had that experience,
and we could rewrite with some sense of… My Favorite Year, which was one of those almost
shows, probably would have been a big success if it would have had that experience. I think
Secret Garden was one of the things coming up too. Anyway, they would have all benefited
from that experience, but the whole thing got shut down.