It’s Tony Time on Broadway : . . . but Look at ‘Mail,’ an L.A. Hit That Big Apple Critics Marked Return to Sender

Just as a Tony nomination can help a Broadway show survive, not getting any may be enough to finish it off.

Witness “Mail,” the Pasadena Playhouse success that opened on the Great White Way in April. The reviews were “across-the-board slams,” acknowledged co-producer Susan Dietz, but the show held on for a few weeks in the hope of garnering a Tony or two. A modest advertising campaign billed “Mail” as an “abused new musical” and offered a two-for-one ticket deal.

All the effort netted not one Tony nomination. The show closed on May 14, the weekend after the Tony nominations were announced, a $2.5-million production down the drain.

Was it one more example of a successful show from Southern California being ruthlessly crushed by smarmy Manhattanites?

Dietz, who had never taken a production to Broadway before, isn’t sure. But she contends that there is indeed a visceral reaction by New York critics to California theatrical productions like the Michael Rupert/Jerry Colker “Mail.”

“The day after I got back from New York,” said Dietz, safely ensconced after a five-week absence as directing co-producer of the Playhouse, “I woke up in the morning and I said, ‘There’s a club, and they just don’t want us as members.’ It’s really obvious.”

Dietz, who helped nurture the show from a loosely organized collection of songs to Broadway, wincingly recalled opening night the way an accident victim remembers going through the windshield.

“They said this was garbage,” said Dietz. “They said there were no redeeming values here. They said the music was bad, the lyrics were trite, the story was dumb, the main character was lousy and the acting was, well, OK.”

“Mail” tells the story of a struggling novelist (played by songwriter Rupert) who returns to his New York apartment after a four-month “breakdown” to find a stack of mail. The letters--ranging from a power company turnoff notice to a distraught missive from his girlfriend--begin to come maddeningly to life, jazzily dramatizing all of the novelist’s missteps and failures.

“If you don’t hook into the central concept of the show, nothing’s happening,” said Dietz.

In Pasadena, a lot of people did hook into it. Though Los Angeles critics fretted about an unappealing dark side to its self-absorbed central character and about a sluggish second act, the show appeared to be a crowd pleaser.

“We built a kind of yuppie audience that isn’t used to going to the theater,” Dietz said. “People felt close to it.”

After packing them in at Pasadena last fall and winter, “Mail” moved on to the Kennedy Center in Washington in February.

“(Kennedy Center director) Roger Stevens came in and said, ‘I want the show for Washington and I’ll give you $1 million to go on to Broadway.’ ”

After mixed reviews in Washington, where Colker and Rupert cut 20 minutes out of the second act and added a prologue to make their novelist character more sympathetic, the show moved on to Broadway previews in March.

Dietz and co-producers Stevens, Michael Frazier and Stephen Wells had not expected raves, she said.

“We thought we’d get mixed reviews, and we thought we could fight that.”

But after opening night, with a first-night party in an Eastside post office, they soon realized they were wrong.

The plan now is to bring the show to the Doolittle Theatre in September, said Dietz. “We’re going to try to raise the profile of the show back to the hit status it had before it left here.”

Of course, all of the bright residual possibilities have faded since the New York reviews came out, Dietz added. There had been, for example, interest from other cities and countries in “Mail” productions and an offer to record a cast album. And before the show opened in New York, a publishing house had offered $50,000 for the publishing rights to the show, said Dietz.

“After the opening, that went down to $10,000.”

Colker and Rupert, the Los Angeles-born duo who created “Three Guys Naked From the Waist Down,” which was well received in Pasadena and Off-Broadway, are baffled at the critical response to their new show.

“Audience response was as good in New York as it was in L.A.,” said Colker. “It just adds more fuel to my puzzlement. Never was the schism between audience and critics so great as in this show.”

Sounds like an old story, said Dietz, for whom the New York experience was dismal (while she was away, both her children got chicken pox and her husband broke his arm).

Dietz described it as a kind of haughty assertion of cultural superiority, which can hit a California show in the legs quicker than a takedown by a middle linebacker.

“The idea is that we’re Tinseltown and that we’re superficial, so we don’t understand anything about great art,” she said.

According to the theory, “Mail” now joins a list of Southern California hopefuls that, after enjoying praise from California critics and audiences, got the Bronx cheer from the New York reviewers.

Those shows would include the Mark Taper Forum’s “Zoot Suit,” ’Division Street” and “Roza”; the Back Alley Theater’s “A Woman of Independent Means”; Steven Berkoff’s “Greek” and “Kvetch.”

Of course, there have been exceptions. Dietz shrugged. One thing she knows for sure: She won’t be reaching for the brass ring again soon.

“It would have to be foolproof for me to go back to Broadway,” she said. “Next time it will have to be an Andrew Lloyd Webber show.”

Colker and Rupert seemed a little more resilient. They’re at work on a new show--an extravaganza. Recounted Dietz: “Jerry called me and said, ‘Suze, I’m working on a new musical.’ I said, ‘Jer, I hope you find a really good producer for it.’ ”