By Adam Hetrick
26 Jun 2010

Going back to the intimacy of the Menier, is it limiting to produce in such a confined workspace?
DB: Bizarrely, what we do have on the Menier stage is quite a large footprint. Most of the shows that we've moved to the West End, we've had to make the footprint of the set design slightly smaller rather than larger, but we don't have a humongous amount of height. So, by having that smaller footprint is why we can do shows with 17, 18, 19 people and not have it look like a car crash on the stage. We do have that size, but again, you don't normally find a venue with that sort of size and only 140 seats, but ultimately, though it's very limiting financially, I think it's sort of the secret to our success and it's something that – "who'd a thunk it?" It's a thrilling experience both for the audiences and the practitioners involved, and so far so good. We've had really good people really enjoy working on our space and hopefully making good theatre.

It is rare these days that a Menier production doesn't transfer to the West End, if not cross over to Broadway at some point. Do you feel pressure to create programming that has commercial legs?
DB: Well, there's always pressure, but I have to say, we always have done and hopefully will always try to create productions for our space, and I think that's the best thing that we can possibly do. If we create productions for our space and they work out critically and they work out with audiences and it's right that we should explore to try and give them a future life, fantastic, but we work very hard to not try to cynically put on a show that is guaranteed to go the distance. Because, ultimately, that's when you get complacent and that's when you make mistakes and you start to take things for granted.

I think one of the other things that's so unique about the Chocolate Factory in the [London theatrical] landscape is we don't have any subsidy at all, so even though we're only 140 seats and we produce hopefully very high production values, we sort of live by the sword and die by the sword. We don't have any funding from the government helping prop us up and make the difference between, [what] will it cost and what will ticket sales bring in. We have to do that ourselves and we do that through our own restaurant and our own revenues, our royalties that come through our own productions, which are now playing all over the world. It's a very delicate balance, which means we can't afford to produce flop after flop after flop. So, it means that...when we're deciding if we're gonna do a production, we have to be really, really careful that we think it's gonna kick the boxes, it's gonna entertain our audiences, it's gonna hopefully sell tickets, it's gonna hopefully please the critics, and it's gonna hopefully be something that people actually want to see.

Is there any apprehension about bringing Menier revivals to Broadway, to American audiences who may have loved them the first time around?
DB: Are you kidding? Of course! You're quaking in your boots! You're pinching yourself and you think, "Surely not. This is crazy. What do we know?" And to have done it three times in a row with two Sondheims in their first revival on Broadway, both with Sunday in the Park with George and Night Music, and then also La Cage, which is almost the antithesis, the third [production] on Broadway, of course you think, A: "We're gonna get found out at some point" and B: "Who are we to do this?" The amount of raised eyebrows, I'm sure, with the announcement we were bringing another La Cage to Broadway, far outweighed the number of people that said, "Yeah, sure, that's a great idea." But hopefully, we've been vindicated. The show is wonderful, it has fantastic reviews, the audiences love it, we've had these wonderful Tony Awards bestowed upon us. So you know, it feels like the gamble was the correct gamble and a lot of people truly believed in this production and it's so wonderful that between all of our co-producers and investors who really went out on a limb. On paper, the show seems madness. It's one of those wonderful "the little show that could" stories and, again, I'm so proud to have been a part of it.

Do you have a wish list for future Menier productions?
DB: Oh, God, yes! I have to say, City of Angels is one of my favorite, favorite shows of all time, and I would love to be allowed to work on that and have a creative production of City of Angels. I just think it's one of the most perfect musicals ever written and I think it's brilliant. I'd like to do a little bit more classic work. We did The White Devil, a Jacobean tragedy, two years ago, and it was one of my favorite productions we've ever produced. I'd love to do maybe some Shakespeare or another piece of Jacobean tragedy. We are hopefully looking at doing a couple of new American plays, as well, so hopefully, if all that works out, that would be very exciting. So it's a whole mixture, and that's another thing — although we've become known for our musicals and indeed our musical revivals, we work really hard across the board to create a really balanced year of programming. And I guess musicals are naturally a sexier product, but whether it be new plays or old plays, new musicals or old musicals, we work really hard to create quite a really interesting and quite challenging year set of shows for our audiences, and what I'm so proud and excited about is that they've really responded. Somebody who comes to see The White Devil who might never go to a musical might trust us to come and see something like Sweet Charity and then go and see something else. It's about broadening people's pace of interests. And we take that very seriously, it's part of our duty, I think, as being at the forefront of musical theatre to use the trust of our audience to hopefully introduce them to things that they wouldn't necessarily otherwise pick to go and see.

(Adam Hetrick is a staff writer for Playbill.com. Write to him at ahetrick@playbill.com.)