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Mullen resolved his dispute last November, and the agreement sealed his lips. “All I can tell you is it’s always about the money,” he says. The joint statements issued in both the Chicago and Akron cases pretty clearly favor the Broadway team. Both Mullen and Carousel wound up paying an extra fee, above and beyond the music-and-book-licensing tariff they’d already paid, “for their use of the material originating in the Broadway Production”—material that included the work of the director, choreographer, lighting director, set designer, and costume designer. The takeaway: if your production of a show that was originally produced somewhere else looks like that show, you’d better have made those extra licensing arrangements.
Tomorrow Morning, by British composer Laurence Mark Wythe, came across as an engaging tuner with a surprising emotional punch when it got a staged reading at Stages, the Theatre Building’s new musicals festival, in 2007. Last winter Wythe and executive producer Hilary Williams recruited Mullen to direct and coproduce the Greenhouse show. If it works here, they hope to take it back to London and then, maybe, to New York. Mullen says his staging will include an innovative “filmic” treatment, with a video by Mike Tutaj running as continuous background to the stage action. That sounds both risky and copyright worthy.
Care to comment? Find this column at chicagoreader.com. And for more on Marcelle McVay’s resignation, visit our Onstage blog.
