Posts

, , ,

Burlesque: The Musical – Don’t Shoot The Messenger

Gather round. It’s time to check in on Burlesque the Musical — not to add to the noise, but to make sense of it.

The show, adapted from the Cher and Christina Aguilera film, has never had an easy ride. Its West End run at the Savoy was dogged by workers’ complaints — over hours, conditions and costumes that weren’t ready in time — several of which were flagged to Equity. TR Heels Ltd, the company behind the West End production, posted a £9.4m loss in reserves for the year to July 2025, with roughly £13m owed to creditors.

In the same period, its sole director also arranged loans of over £800,000 to other production companies in which he holds a controlling interest; a detail that raises more questions than the official line, that funding a show upfront is “standard practice,” really answers.

Creatively, the show has now burned through three directors. Todrick Hall, who joined for the West End transfer and wrote original songs, told me and The Stage that his experience had been “quite the rollercoaster,” alleging he was still owed royalties under a contract he refused to sign until songwriting credits were resolved. Producers denied any dispute existed. Racky Plews has since taken over for a version of the show billed, apparently without irony, as “completely new.”

Then came the tour: the ongoing attempt at one. Woking, the planned opening stop, never happened: three postponements, all blamed on “technical issues,” pushed the premiere back more than a fortnight to Sunderland instead. The promised London run at the Arts at Marble Arch was quietly shelved until 2027.

Producers insisted the tour was “fully financed and on a secure footing,” pointing to 90,000 tickets sold and almost £4m in advance box office. The claims didn’t stop the chaos: cast and crew reportedly learned of a Sunderland preview cancellation via WhatsApp with barely a day’s notice, even as producers maintained ATG was “behind us to ensure financially this is stable.”

Once the tour did open, illness took over where technical faults left off. Four performances were scrapped in Sunderland in under a week, including press night, after producers cited a virus among principal cast. Stoke-on-Trent’s opening was pushed back a day for the same reasons the production always reaches for — “technical requirements.” Wales fared worse: the Wales Millennium Centre matinee was halted forty minutes in, and that evening’s show cancelled an hour before curtain, leaving audiences and fans who’d arranged hotels, childcare and dog-sitters with nothing. Glasgow’s King’s Theatre — the tour’s first raked stage — looms next, with insiders reportedly nervous about how the production will fare.

Still, across four tour stops, not one week has gone by unscathed: Woking cancelled outright, Sunderland losing roughly seven in ten performances, Stoke’s opening axed. Meanwhile a new wrinkle emerged with the release of the West End cast recording; Equity reportedly had to step in again after a required union-brokered royalties agreement between producer, distributor and cast hadn’t been secured before release. Sigh.

Money troubles, sick casts and reshuffled schedules are one thing. The bigger story may be who now owns the buildings this show performs in. ATG Entertainment — which runs the Savoy, the Sunderland Empire and dozens of other venues — has agreed to be bought by Ari Emanuel’s Mari Group in a deal reportedly worth around £4.5bn. ATG’s leadership has been quick to reassure producers that “current commitments continue” and relationships remain unchanged. But The Stage’s editor summed up the industry’s unease in a single word: “scary” — a reaction echoed by an earlier government committee report flagging ATG, alongside Live Nation and AEG, as a risk to competition.

Companies House filings show TodayTix, now under the same ownership umbrella, taking security over entitlements owed by a production company linked to Burlesque’s own producer — a reminder of how tightly interwoven this show’s finances already are with its landlord’s.

Unions, for their part, keep sounding the same warning. Equity and BECTU say they’re supporting freelancers hit by cancelled shows, with BECTU’s Philippa Childs noting that permanent crew have generally been paid, but casual venue staff are far likelier to lose out — “the issue will be with the people working in the different theatres.” Both the show and ATG maintain all payments are up to date.

Reviews, where the show has actually made it to stage, by local blogs have been largely positive. Not one credible outlet among them, though. Certainly, ticket sales, by contrast, are reportedly collapsing as word of the delays spreads. Whatever comes next — Glasgow’s rake, the next illness, the next “technical” excuse — the pattern by now writes itself. If you’re holding tickets, request a refund. And if you’re watching from the industry, the real story isn’t a haunted curse. It’s what happens when investment, welfare and basic contingency planning are treated as optional until the whole thing falls over in public.

God help us all.

/0 Comments/by
, , , , , , , , ,

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.

/by
,

Burlesque The Musical: naked capitalism and fraud *allegedly

“There is a fear of being run down, fired, or aggressively pursued,” someone said down the phone, in an unscheduled call, about the shitshow that is Burlesque The Musical 3.0.

Totally normal. If you missed this, Burlesque the Musical has ‘postponed’ its London opening – and cancelled its run at the new Arts at Marble Arch venue, hours after also delaying the start of its UK tour. The stage adaptation of the 2010 film, executive produced by Christina Aguilera, had been due to preview in London from 12 September, following a sold-out 2025 season at the Savoy.

Anyway, I guess we can avoid a recap no longer. Amazingly, hapless producers Steven Antin and Adam Paulden told cast and crew by email that the show’s momentum “has never been stronger,” without having to worry about boring little things like employment law or public opinion. Everything they do – and everything they neglected to do – now constitutes some sort of fuck-up extended universe.

Uselessness abounds. Inevitably, the UK tour, originally set to open at Woking Theatre tonight, has been pushed to Sunderland in August, with Woking dates shunted to November. Photos from the Woking venue showed cast rehearsing on a bare stage, no set, no lighting department, no sound. Crew have been introduced to a fourth production manager in a matter of weeks, a churn rate that speaks for itself.

I would say life comes at you fast, but of course it doesn’t.

Mmm. Certainly, BECTU union head Philippa Childs did not mince words. “We are extremely disappointed by the situation on the London opening of Burlesque the Musical,” she said. “The ‘postponement’ to 2027 will mean that freelancers will miss out on months of expected income, leaving them in financial difficulty.” She added that producers had indicated they would “endeavour to provide alternative work where possible,” but that the union was “seeking more detail on this,” a polite way of saying nobody’s holding their breath.

Then again, that’s the pattern here: reassuring statements followed by a lack of specifics, while the people actually delivering the show carry the risk. Producers insist the tour is “fully financed and on a secure footing” and that “the future of Burlesque has never been brighter.” So everything’s fine!

The Company filings admit the whole operation depends on the goodwill of one unnamed backer, with loans already secured against box office takings that haven’t happened yet. A recent bid to raise a further £3.2m, partly earmarked for a venue registered to the producers rather than the production company, reportedly found no takers.

At time of writing, industry estimates on Sunderland’s box office put sales in the low to mid twenties as a percentage of capacity, well short of covering running costs with barely a fortnight until opening. Closing that gap would mean more than doubling current sales in days, something several in the industry describe as fantasy.

Anyway: none of this is new for a show whose 18 months have included three directors, a public falling out with former creative lead Todrick Hall over royalties and credit, and repeated warnings from Equity over conditions during its West End run. What’s consistent is the gap between the language in the press releases, “strategic,” “razzle-dazzle,” “brighter than ever,” and the language from the people actually owed money and answers. 

Furthermore – and perhaps even more importantly – unions are left chasing payments. Crew are left high and dry or reshuffled. And the producers, so far, are left issuing statements with typos that promise everything and confirm nothing. Again. 

Are there any bright spots? It’s foolish to count too many chickens, but we do have to take our smiles where we can. And the peasants – the audiences – just have to suck it up. The majority self-employed creative teams shafted. The owners of the new Marble Arch Theatre left with a hole in their programming. Casual staff – on minimum wage – left without shifts.

As is the fashion of the era, we must now ask ourselves: what did we learn? There was a standout lesson, and I’m afraid it is the same one we’ve taken in this blog before: Do not get into bed with theatrical chancers. 

This week, I have been in conversation with industry figures, Unions, tabloid journalists, Arts editors and more. The currents of social media proved themselves far greater and deadlier than any of the industry’s motley crew of enforcers, traditional crisis PRs and NDA experts, and ultimately impossible to control. 

But so many silences remain deafening. I am asking you dear reader very specifically what the industry should do to focus on how it could help in more active ways than thoughts and prayers.

Update 27/7/2026

Producers of Burlesque the Musical have instructed solicitors to send me (and others) a letter over my reporting on the show’s finances and the postponed tour.
I don’t accept their complaint and won’t be apologising for anything.

My reply below.
A joyous heart always,
Carl W x

/by
, , ,

The Trouble With Burlesque

This week, I had to laugh stumbling on Cher’s ambivalence about the movie musical Burlesque: “I drove all of them crazy,” she told the Irish Independent in 2010, admitting the character she played “wasn’t exactly who she turned out to be on screen.”

Writer-director Steven Antin, hearing she was wavering, tracked her down at Sony’s offices — “stalking Cher for an hour and a half,” as he put it.

“Terrible director! Really terrible director. And really terrible script.”Not my words, readers (although, having said that …), but the words of Cher in 2013. 

The Hollywood Reporter published a report that director Antin and Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper, a longtime couple, had collaborated on the film were said to have “jaw-dropping” clashes on set. 

During one incident, someone reportedly poured an iced tea over Antin’s head, forcing Antin to recoil backwards into a rack of clothes. 

Righto. It should be said, right from the start, that more than a decade on, the stage version is once again proving its own kind of nuts. 

The UK tour opens in Woking later this month, but word from the rehearsal room is of a chaotic working environment, a frustration echoed by more than one member of the creative team who’ve spoken to me directly about what’s going on behind the scenes: “Cast members come in every day complaining about how they’re not being taught the show.”

Oh God. Meanwhile, at Marble Arch, owners of the new London theatre are said to be hedging their bets — holding talks with three or four alternative productions in case the current production never makes it to the venue.

Steven Antin
Steven Antin

Then there’s the money. Todrick Hall, who contributed a lot of original music to the show, has described a “rollercoaster” experience working on it, and is reported to be owed royalties in the region of £100,000. Lawyers for Antin have, of course, rejected that claim. 

Either way, sources point to a dispute over royalty splits on several songs — including “Pretty Girls,” “Dirty Martini” and “Fabulous” — with suggestions Antin is seeking a cut despite no credited songwriting input, though this has not been confirmed.

Whatever the truth of this latest dispute, the pattern emerging is a stage adaptation of a film even its own star now publicly disowns, trailed by unresolved money questions and more off-stage drama. 

Frankly, you could draw your own conclusions by reading the company accounts for Burlesque The Musical and TR Heels Limited — suspicious circular loans, an operation that could be filed under T.W.I: trading while insolvent. (Listen, I just type this stuff.) 

As it goes, questions abound from various sides of the fence. Around twenty people have declined to comment on the record — some bound by shadowy legal tools, others simply too rattled by their time in Antin’s orbit to revisit it. “It took every ounce of my strength and resilience, along with the help of my agent and union to survive it,” one told me. 

Another: “I don’t want my name tied to the show. I’ve been reminded there are ways to ruin my career, and I don’t want to push any boundary that might invite a targeted attack.”

And: “It’s a line on the CV people will be scrubbing.” 

That’s showbiz – try not to choke on it.

Anyhoo: back to Antin The Terrible. I imagine he ends each day plotting the next one; hunched over his homemade shoebox auditorium, moving marionettes of his cast and crew to game out scenarios in which he always has the last word.

Put candidly… That, in the end, is the cautionary sadness of the form: the daylight only ever falls on the parts we let it. Antin’s track record is merely a reminder of how uncomfortable that daylight can be. 

And of a widely regarded thug who seems rather more practised at taking credit for work he never did.

Still, it feels inevitable that another tiresomely chaotic narrative should be cranking up around this diabolical show. It is an apocalyptic playlist on perpetual shuffle. As I hit publish on this blog, I have received word that the sound team and trucking company have not been paid and have downed tools.

As is the fashion of the era, Musical Theatre is a game played for the highest stakes.

/by