Broadway's 'Brighton' gets beached

It wasn't supposed to end like this. Certainly not after the warm reception "Brighton Beach Memoirs" received from many of the New York critics a week ago, a response that seemed to augur if not a boffo commercial run, then at least a fairly healthy one.

But in an episode that could surely be added to a textbook of extinct Broadway assumptions, the Neil Simon revival abruptly closed at the Nederlander Theatre on Sunday night, a victim of anemic ticket sales from which it gave no signs of recovering, according to producers.

The news of the show's closing, and the cancellation of the start-up of a revival of Simon's companion piece "Broadway Bound," electrified Broadway: Rarely, if ever, has a show garnering such encouraging notices shuttered so rapidly. And it was especially devastating to the plays' crews and casts, including 19-year-old Noah Robbins, the Potomac teenager making his Broadway debut as "Brighton Beach's" young leading man, Eugene Jerome.

"It was a complete bolt out of the blue," says Robbins's mother, Leslie Danoff, who had moved the family's center of gravity from Maryland to the Upper West Side for her son's run in the play -- a performance that earned virtually across-the-board praise. "Nobody had any inkling."

Danoff says her son and the rest of the cast, which also featured Laurie Metcalf, Jessica Hecht and Dennis Boutsikaris, received formal word of the closing backstage half an hour before the Friday night performance. The young actor called her just before going on. "I was in as much shock as Noah," she says.

So what happened? Was it, as some are speculating in online chat rooms and in the mainstream press, that "Brighton Beach" lacked the necessary star power of a Hugh Jackman or a Jude Law -- both currently in high-grossing plays? Did the marketing strategy fail to adequately represent the $3.75 million production's contemporary relevance? Was this a sign that Simon, once Broadway's box-office monarch, had fallen from his throne?

Emanuel Azenberg, one of the show's lead producers, says he's too close to events to give a verdict on what went wrong. All he knows is that after he took out large ads last week in the New York Times -- a traditional way to stimulate the box office after an opening -- "nothing happened. And when I say 'nothing' . . . " At 5 p.m. on Friday, he says, he was notified that the show would lose $200,000 in the coming week alone. At that point, he says, "you have no choice."

For Robbins, the weekend was a struggle to deal with a lot of conflicting emotions: the elation after the reviews (the Times' Ben Brantley approvingly described Robbins's "comic's face" as a cross between Woody Allen and Buster Keaton) followed almost immediately by the grief that comes with the sudden death of a play.

He's decided, though, to think ahead. Robbins says he realizes he's lucky to have had even this brief exposure on Broadway. This week, he's meeting with his agents, to see what else might turn up, acting-wise. (He had been accepted at Columbia University this fall, but has put off college for the time being.)

"I don't really know what's in store for me, but we're hopeful there is something," he says. "But I really can't complain. If I had been told when I got the part that the show is only going to run for a week, I still would have said 'yes' in a heartbeat. 'Law and Order,' " he adds with a laugh, "here I come!"