Simon Pulls the Plug on ‘Jake’s Women’

Neil Simon’s “Jake’s Women” has been derailed en route to Broadway. After it closes at the Old Globe Theatre April 15, it won’t move anywhere else--”at least not this year,” said Simon.

About $1 million had been invested in the show, “and we’ll lose about $600,000. Most of that is mine,” reported Simon. Asked if the Old Globe would suffer a financial loss, Simon said he wasn’t sure. But the Old Globe “made a lot of money” from his earlier play, “Rumors,” he said, “so maybe they’ll break even.” (Representatives of the Old Globe were not available for comment.)

Simon decided that “Jake’s Women” “was not strong enough for Broadway. We would have maybe five great performances, and then three that didn’t work,” he said, referring to the Old Globe performances. “I couldn’t put my finger on why it was so erratic.”

“We really didn’t have a director,” he continued. Jack O’Brien replaced Ron Link as the director a week before the opening but was only able to work on weekends, because of his commitments to a KCET-TV production of “An Enemy of the People” in Los Angeles and the re-mounting of “The Cocktail Hour” at the Doolittle Theatre in Los Angeles.

“It wasn’t his fault. But a play needs to be directed every day.”

Asked why O’Brien was chosen rather than a full-time director, Simon said the only other directors he trusted, Gene Saks and Mike Nichols, were working on other projects far from California.

In O’Brien’s weekday absence, “I became literally exhausted, doing day and night work,” said Simon. “I must have written 55 or 60 new pages” since the opening.

All that work improved the play, he noted--”We were about 25% (of the play’s artistic potential) on opening night, and we raised it to 75%. But it’s not enough, in terms of what people expect of me. We just thought it was prudent to stop.”

Advance sales for the Broadway production, scheduled to open April 30, had already sold out the house for two months, said Simon. “But I didn’t trust the play enough to get by on that. I was too ambivalent about it. I feel badly about the cast. All of them worked so hard.”

He noted that it is his first play, out of 24, “that I’ve ever closed out of town.”