Wallflower at the Orgy
This week, a letter arrived from Reed Smith LLP, acting for the producers of Burlesque the Musical. “You have been engaged in a damaging and vicious campaign of denigrating our client, the production and the producers Adam Paulden and Steven Antin,” it said. “Much of what you have written is untrue or misleading.”
Wow. I want to sit with that for a second, because theatre is a town of middlemen, and I am not a hobby journalist. I just found my way into this story of a crazy musical and wanted to tell it as clearly as possible, with as much understanding as possible: or, as Nora Ephron used to say, as a wallflower at the orgy.
Call it old school: cultivating a network of well-placed, anonymous sources and telling the inside story. That approach means I’ve been sucked into this story myself. And everything I’ve heard (from literally everybody connected to this show, past, present and beyond) paints a portrait of a musical in disarray, with incompetent producers at its centre. This was a company that was, in a real sense, shattered from day one of operation.
Let’s stick to facts. The show has taken £1,287,306 in Glasgow, £1,530,912 and £3,029,501 across two Manchester runs, and £5,451,592.90 at the Savoy — £11.3m across two years. Not one penny has gone back to investors. Zero. A box office advance is not production capital, and it is not profit. It’s money sitting in escrow from people who’ve bought tickets for shows that haven’t happened yet — a liability, not a windfall, until the performance is delivered and the sale matures. Treating it as a win is either a category error or a convenient one.
The company’s own filed accounts record net current liabilities of £9,444,685 as at 31 July 2025, and state plainly that the going-concern basis rests entirely on an unnamed investor’s continued willingness not to call in what’s owed.
Still, a lawyer I know put it to me this way: “It looks like Tough Love Ltd is the new producing entity, on the back of finance from RS24 Investments Limited against a debenture dated 22 July 2026 on the business’s assets. The actual finances of Tough Love are a mystery, since it’s a new company and no accounts have been filed yet. TR Heels is hopelessly insolvent, and I suspect any creditors still owed money, if any, will have to whistle for it.”
Well, quite. It’s almost like a real-life staging of The Producers: concoct the cost, raise the money, engineer a flop, stay rich. I’m not going to speculate on the motives of my sources here, only to say they are very, very good ones, and that everything in this blog is something I’ve concluded is accurate and true.
Anyway: developments. People didn’t want to touch this story. Some felt tainted by it, others too frightened to go near something this toxic. It took a reporter at the Sunday Times 12 months and the spectacular derailment, sorry “postponement” of the UK tour and Marble Arch London run last week to. As of tonight, The Daily Telegraph is investigating reprobate Paulden and Antin’s financial affairs.
Needless to say, if you’re in power, you don’t get to threaten writers and journalists just because they don’t like what’s being said about them. F— that.
This is not producing live theatre on impulse or whim. There is no method to the madness.
So yes, thank you for reading. And thank you to those of you who have reached out with messages of support.
In terms of what happens next, the train will hit the wall.
/https://publicydn4hdgozyjrg.blob.core.windows.net/public/dd/images/John_McGrath_Artistic_Director_and_Chief_Executive_of_Manchester_International_Festival_-_image_credit_Tarnish_Vision.ed25b0d.jpg)
