Producer Vaud E. Massarsky announced in a statement, "Unfortunately, some of the financing did not come through and it is with great sadness I announce that Allan Knee's beautiful play Syncopation, will not get to Broadway this season as we had hoped."

The dance-inspired romance between two blue-collar New Yorkers would have begun previews at the Longacre Broadway theatre Oct 2.

John Tillinger, a frequent hand at small-cast plays (Say Goodnight, Gracie, Tea at Five), was the slated direct.

The plot of the play follows the romance of "an impassioned meat packer and a soul-searching seamstress in turn of the century Manhattan." The two find love in a dance studio in the Lower East Side. "As the characters change and grow," reads press material, "their relationship shifts not unlike the syncopated beats of the ragtime music that accompanies them."

Allan Knee wrote the book for the upcoming Broadway musical Little Women, which will star Sutton Foster. Little Women will play on Broadway in late 2004. Syncopation premiered at the Long Wharf Theater in 1999. David Chandler and Lorca Simons starred in that staging. A production at The George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, NJ, followed.

In spring 2000, Syncopation was on the fast track for an Off-Broadway mounting, but a theatre logjam scotched those plans. At the time, the project had different producers, Ted Tulchin and Kenneth Waissman, and a different director, Pamela Berlin.