'Enormous amount of hubris' around staging of Toy Show musical

As reported in the  Irish Examiner on Wednesday, the musical lost €2.2m for RTÉ after just a month’s worth of performances.

The ill-fated venture, which ran last December but was beset with problems including cancellations due to illness and low ticket sales, had been projected to bring in revenue of roughly €4.1m.

A sell-out was assumed for its entire run of 54 shows, with a total audience of 107,000 at Dublin’s Convention Centre.

In the end, just 27 live shows were held, with ticket sales of 20,262. Only 11,044 of those tickets were actually sold, the rest being complimentary tickets or competition/giveaway prizes.

Revenue of just €496,000 was recorded, €2.7m less than had been projected, according to the documents seen by the Irish Examiner.

Speaking on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland, Mr McMahon — who was a co-writer on the Panti Bliss documentary Queen of Ireland and is a co-founder of theatre production company This Is Pop Baby — said the expectation was extraordinary that in a space like the Convention Centre that 4,000 children a day would attend the production. 

The Christmas market for entertainment in Dublin was already crowded with long-established pantomimes and children’s shows, he said.

“The idea that a juggernaut can come in with €2.7m of public funds and say we're going to land a spaceship in that space, is kind of extraordinary. And there seems to be an enormous amount of hubris involved here.” 

Speaking on Today with Claire Byrne, Mr Hughes questioned “what planet” RTÉ's Rory Coveney lived on when he told the Oireachtas Media Committee that the Toy Show musical was not competing with other shows in Dublin at that time.

“We had just come out of two years of covid. The entertainment industry was decimated over those two years. We couldn't put anything on." 

Mr Hughes said 2022 was the first year they could put something on that would "get audiences back in to just try and fill theatres again, and then RTÉ comes up with this brainwave of putting on their Toy Show The Musical in complete competition".

How can he actually sit at a committee yesterday and say they were not competing with the shows? It makes my blood boil.

Mr Hughes also questioned who had advised RTÉ that the Toy Show musical would make an 80% return, especially with a new show with no track record. He said he would have been “over the moon” if his pantomime, which was celebrating 25 years, achieved an 80% return.

Mr McMahon said there was a great deal of frustration about how public money was spent on the arts. He said: “People in the arts are constantly expected to show up in front of the public, in front of Government and campaign for the arts.

“But we have really rigorous, stringent avenues to receive public funds. If you want to put on a play, if you are an established theatre artist or a new theatre artist we have the Arts Council, we have Culture Ireland and we have the local authorities. People have to go through years to prove their craft and they go through months of application processes for measly amounts of money.

“But it's public (money) so there's a huge responsibility there. And often people are not successful in these applications. So the idea that the producers at RTÉ could take a first-time punt on a show with a budget of €2.7m, a budget that most theatre artists, in fact probably all, will never see that kind of budget for a show, is extraordinary.” 

Mr McMahon explained that an established company might spend somewhere between €80,000 to €150,000 on a large-scale production. A theatre like the Abbey might spend €300,000 to €500,000 on a production, while he estimated that the budget for the average pantomime could be around €250,000.

Mr Hughes added that the €2.7m budget for Toy Show The Musical was “four or five times” what it would take to put on a pantomime in the National Stadium in Dublin.

Mr McMahon said that musicals and musical theatre is not something Ireland "traditionally does very well" but in the last few years, "we've got much better at it". 

But you would expect a musical to be in development for four years, seven years, and you would also in that time develop your audiences and how are you going to access them.

Mr McMahon said he had huge solidarity and sympathy with the artists involved because he knew many of them and they had worked hard to “make something” of the show. There was a question about the headline costs as the artists were saying they had not been paid “astronomical figures.” 

Theatre was full of rigour, he added. 

“Every piece of public funding we get from the Arts Council and beyond has to be accounted for, audited and explained at every stage. And that doesn't seem to be in place here.” 

The question remained why RTÉ did not engage an existing production company to mount the production of Toy Show The Musical, he said. 

To do so in a partnership would really support the arts and could have “built something from the ground up, start in a smaller venue and let the idea grow over a few years and then arrive in a bigger venue with a show that people really love".

“I think that going in heavy at the start was ultimately its downfall.”