STAGE : The Road Runners : New productions of Broadway musicals are dancing in and out of cities across the nation, earning quick rewards with limited risk

When “The Secret Garden” opened on Broadway on April 25, 1991, there were plenty of out-of-towners in the audience. Most were obviously there to enjoy the show. But some were also there to figure out if their audiences would also enjoy the show.

They must have liked what they saw. The musical, which later won three Tony Awards, is still filling New York’s St. James Theatre, but a second production has been touring the country since last April. By the time “Garden’s” road company opens at Century City’s Shubert Theatre on Wednesday for five weeks, it will already have played Cleveland, St. Louis, Miami Beach, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Dallas and St. Paul.

It doesn’t hurt that “Garden” was based on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s book and involves such prize-winning artists as author Marsha Norman, composer Lucy Simon and set designer Heidi Landesman. But the show also has producers determined to be as successful--or more so--on the road as in New York.

“One has to look at New York as the beginning of the process, not the end,” says Michael David, one of “Secret Garden’s” producers and a man who once sent “Into the Woods” on a series of 179 one-nighters. “We squeeze every living dollar out and get the most people to see (each show).”

The Great White Way is singing and dancing its way across the heartland. Thirty-nine cities are booked for “Garden” through October, 1993, and David’s associates at ATP/Dodger have already lined up 80 cities for its “Guys and Dolls” tour later this year. Competitors will soon launch last season’s Tony-winning musical, “The Will Rogers Follies,” to 49 cities in 99 weeks, while this season’s Tony-winning musical, “Crazy for You,” will stop in at least 41 cities once it starts touring next year.

During the 1991-92 Broadway season, 7.4 million people saw Broadway shows. The same season, 20 million people saw Broadway shows on tour in Los Angeles and elsewhere. According to the League of American Theatres and Producers in New York, touring Broadway shows grossed $503 million last season, more than double the $223 million they grossed as recently as the 1987-88 season.

A good chunk of that growth is created by such Cameron Mackintosh hits as “The Phantom of the Opera”--”Phantom” and “Les Miserables” alone accounted for nearly $120 million of last season’s total road grosses. But in many cities, “Phantom” and “Les Miserables” have helped sell subscription seasons full of lesser-known traveling musicals.

The arts boom of the last 25 years has produced more and more performing arts centers. Home to symphonies and musicals alike, all those big, new auditoriums have been busily developing audiences.

Now come several good seasons of Broadway musicals. Unlike most plays, musicals generally look--and sound--good in those huge houses, and they can command high ticket prices.

“Playing Broadway is like running the gantlet,” says David. “The road is not found money or a happy circumstance. If you don’t think about it, you’re crazy.”

To produce a musical on Broadway today generally costs more than $5 million and can run as high as “Miss Saigon’s” $10.9 million. The smash revival of “Guys and Dolls” now playing the Martin Beck Theatre cost $5.5 million, considerably more than the original production’s 1950 price tag of $250,000.

But aside from shows like “Phantom of the Opera,” which can sit in a city for years on end, touring shows almost never cost as much as their Broadway counterparts. “Garden,” for instance, cost $1.6 million to produce on the road, compared with $6.1 million to get it off and running on Broadway.

Everybody’s been through it once. “The sets and costumes are already created,” says Scott Zeiger, president of Pace Theatrical Group, a producing and presenting company involved in about 30% of the country’s touring productions. “Direction has been done. Rehearsals and casting should take less time.”

Top ticket prices for musicals are less on the road--$35 to $45 versus $60 to $65 on Broadway--but road houses can be twice as big. The average Broadway theater seats about 1,500, while the average roadhouse has 2,800 seats.

Transportation, advertising and per diem, however, boost road costs considerably above Broadway. Zeiger figures it costs $25,000 to move a show each week, then another $25,000 in weekly per diem costs for cast and crew. Advertising budgets could add another $50,000 each week, he says, because runs are so short-- “You’re in and out and have to generate excitement for that limited window of opportunity.”

Consider paying just one chorus member, suggests general manager Marvin Krauss, now readying “The Will Rogers Follies” for the road. “A chorus person gets $1,460 minimum ($900 salary, $560 per diem) weekly, and that will go up (soon). Then add 17% payroll taxes, 8% Equity pension, 4% vacation and you’re up 30% or $270 more each week. Now add the cost of transporting somebody from place to place.”

Why go to all that trouble? “The Will Rogers Follies” will probably make more money on the road than it did on Broadway, predicts producer and general partner Pierre Cossette. Yet, cautions David, “what is important about the road is not so much that it’s a potential bonanza, but that the risk is significantly lower. It’s about embarking on an ancillary track without the fear that accompanied the original trip.”

Some shows go out on the road prior to recoupment on Broadway, in fact, because producers today have far less risk on the road than they used to have. Zeiger estimates that 90% of road shows go out with heavy investments from local presenters, and those presenters are generally relying on subscribers.

“Garden,” for instance, is being offered not just to Shubert subscribers, but also to subscribers from both the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera and the Center Theatre Group. “Will Rogers” and “Aspects of Love” are both offered through the Civic Light Opera subscription series. And Pace Theatrical’s chain of participating theaters includes Costa Mesa’s Orange County Performing Arts Center, with its highly subscribed Broadway Series.

“Our Broadway Series has been able to more than pay its own way,” says Thomas Kendrick, OCPAC’s president and executive director. “We do as much in one week as many theaters our size do in two weeks. Less than 90% average paid attendance and $800,000 gross is slightly disappointing to us now on a one-week run.”

“New York had some good years back to back so you can expect the road to be good now,” explains Shubert Organization President Bernard Jacobs. “Some, like ‘Bye Bye Birdie,’ are done just for the road, but most of the time, the road reflects New York with a time lag of a year or two.”

Timing is everything. “Crazy for You” will start traveling next spring, says General Manager Tyler Gatchell, about 14 months after its Broadway opening. “You wouldn’t go much earlier than that,” Gatchell says. “While it doesn’t take much time for a hip city like Los Angeles to know what’s going on, we’re also anxious to permeate other cities. But you don’t want to go out too late (and) be old news.”

There are so many shows readying tours right now, in fact, that George C. Wolfe’s “Jelly’s Last Jam” is sort of biding its time. The show, which opened at the Mark Taper Forum last year, then was revamped for Broadway earlier this year, won’t start touring until at least the fall of 1993, says producer Pamela Koslow Hines. And it probably won’t get back to Los Angeles until 1994, she figures. “For the first time in a long while, there’s a consideration of who is in which city.”

The actual routing shows take, however, isn’t always so logical. “Will Rogers” for instance, will play 24 cities between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and “Secret Garden” comes here from St. Paul, not Phoenix or San Diego. Plans may be made a year ahead, say bookers, but symphony and opera presenters may well have snagged the best spot in town two years before that.

Presenters can also underestimate a show’s draw. When “Secret Garden’s” tour started at Cleveland’s Playhouse Square Center, says President Art Falco, they were confident they could sell one week but didn’t want to risk a second. They sold more than 95% of their 2,700-seat hall’s seats and, says Falco, “I had people calling me at home. The City Council president called me at 11 p.m. on Saturday night when the show was closing Sunday, looking for tickets.” (They found him a pair.)

Booking can continue well into the tour--Cleveland is now hoping for a second week at the end of the current lineup--but once initial cities are set, producers start lining up creative teams. Today’s sophisticated audiences, accustomed to seeing professional theater on TV as well as through travels, demand Broadway standards. But Broadway casts aren’t usually available, and designers must create sets and costumes able to endure a couple of years of packing and unpacking.

“You have to be able to close on Sunday night, then open on Tuesday night somewhere else,” says designer Robin Wagner, now recreating his “Crazy for You” sets for the road. “If you take longer than 18 hours, you lose a performance, and when you’re only playing a week, that one performance can mean the difference between a profit and no profit. Since most of the critics attend the first performance, it also has to be as right as it’s going to get.”

Wagner analogizes the road show to a circus without the animals. “We travel with everything--costumes, scenery, lighting and special effects,” says general manager Gatchell. “Basically, we go into an empty theater, put everything up and then take everything down.”

This is no small feat. George MacPherson, general manager and executive producer of ATP/Dodger, says “Secret Garden” alone probably has 25 tons of scenery. It needs six 48-foot tractor trailers, “each jammed to the roof. All that furniture (on Broadway) is real antique furniture, and 80% on the road is antique so it has to have good padding.”

The show’s set cost $449,222 on the road, he says, a little more than half the $800,000 it cost on Broadway. Its mechanical systems are simpler, says designer Landesman, while materials are generally more lightweight, flexible and durable so they can load in and out of a truck easily. Instead of Lexan plastic, for instance, the road production uses reinforced vinyl, which, the designer explains, “communicates exactly the same look but you can roll it up.”

Hoping to anticipate problems, most shows bring along their own technical specialists and, often, a core orchestra. More than a dozen technical people and six musicians accompany “The Secret Garden” tour, and both groups will be supplemented at the Shubert as elsewhere with local people.

Cleveland’s Falco saw “Secret Garden” in New York and swears it was better in Cleveland. And maybe it was. “For the set designer, it’s always a great pleasure to do a tour because you can go back and correct your mistakes,” Landesman says. “You have the second chance to go back and refine things you may have been unhappy with the first time out.”

While scenic adjustments are rarely incorporated back on Broadway--they’re usually too expensive--writing or directing changes often do find their way back. “You run out of time on Broadway,” explains Landesman, also one of the show’s producers. “You benefit from the hindsight of watching the show for a year and seeing where it bogs down and what needs to be addressed. I think no one ever feels a show is finished. We all want to keep making it better.”

Do they? The set got its own “ovation” in St. Louis, reported that city’s Post-Dispatch. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s theater critic thought the stage seemed more cramped than in New York and the sound volume too high on opening night, but called the voices “splendid” and music “breathtaking”; the touring production, she wrote, “re-creates the Broadway original. Or most of it.”

If the Broadway production “is the tap root,” says producer David, “the tour is one of the major branches of the tree that grows. We believe the tour is a critical part of the picture and we think about it at the beginning.”

Dodger Productions is also a producer of “Guys and Dolls,” a revival whose tour was planned right alongside its Broadway production. The musical’s proven popularity made it a more likely winner than most new shows, and the early planning meant a second production could start touring within six months of its Broadway opening, which is fairly rare.

The early tour also profited from decisions to package the initial Big Apple glamour fast for the masses. On opening night, “Guys and Dolls’ ” producers sent a national video press release to 350 TV stations around the country. And once the show started setting Broadway box-office records, the video press release went out again-- this time with added footage of box-office lines, opening-night partying and the recording session.

Marketing is very important on the road. In Cleveland, “The Secret Garden” was tied in to a local garden show. The musical hasn’t even opened in Los Angeles yet, but already one department store ran a special Mother’s Day promotion, an elementary school has set up a roof garden and several cast members are booked to read from the original children’s story at a local bookstore next week.

Such lesser-known fare as “Once on This Island,” a small Broadway musical set in the Caribbean, needs even more promotion. The show arrives here July 22 and a few weeks ago, press and potential group-ticket buyers were invited to the Wilshire Theatre for CDs, fruit and previews. Author Rosa Guy praised the stage adaptation of her novel, and excerpts from the show played on a huge video screen. Says Mary Simpson, church secretary at Crenshaw United Methodist Church: “When I went back to the church, I had something to tell people.”

It helps, of course, if a show is packed with celebrities, but few major stars are eager to hit 30 cities a year. Ask Gary Beach, an actor who has traveled with such shows as “Annie,” “Legends!” and “Les Miserables.” “When you’re in New York,” says Beach, “you go and do the show. It’s over at 10:15, and you’re out of the theater at 10:30. By 11, you’re sitting in your apartment watching ‘The Tonight Show.’ ”

Life on the road is a little less comfortable. “You’re in a different hotel every other week, and you get very tired of restaurant food very quickly,” says Cathy Rigby, who played 60 cities in two years as “Peter Pan” and this week begins a national tour in “Annie Get Your Gun.” “I enjoy it, but it’s not for everybody.”

Besides the sheer ordeal of it all, says presenter Zeiger, many stars and their agents just don’t want to risk eight months or a year away from Los Angeles or New York with their TV and movie markets. Keith Carradine will re-create his Broadway role as “Will Rogers” on the road, but such performances are relatively rare.

While the prestige of Broadway and a possible Tony Award are attractive, says Zeiger, “the real money is made in the touring houses. It is rare for a major star to make more than $25,000 for an eight-performance week on Broadway, but on the road, where many stars’ salaries are linked to gross ticket sales, a major star can earn double that.”

But nothing is foolproof. San Francisco-based producer Charles Duggan’s Broadway-bound production of Noel Coward’s “Private Lives,” starring Joan Collins, never paid back its $1.1-million cost, and lost $250,000 in Los Angeles alone, says Duggan.

“If Joan Collins in a comedy doesn’t sell tickets, the question is what will, and the obvious answer is a musical. Maybe next time she should do a musical.”