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Why was BONNIE & CLYDE cancelled?! The truth about why the musical UK Tour has been cut short
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Oh, my God. Hey. So if you follow British musical theatre, you will likely already have seen the sad news today that the current UK tour of Bonnie and Clyde has been cancelled with immediate effect. This is a very heavy introduction. I'm talking as though somebody has died and they haven't. A musical has been cancelled. However, it is an incredibly sad day for the show, for the producers, for the cast, for the cast who are going to be joining the tour, for the crew, for everyone who depended on this in some way for work, everyone who worked as a part of this show, who, as a result of today's announcement, today's decision, have now lost employment. Also for the ticket holders, also for the fans who are finally going to see this show, potentially at a venue near them. It is a sad day. There is a lot to discuss. People have been tagging me all over socials to make a video talking about this, and, you know, it's no fun covering this kind of news. It is important because there are still people involved in this who I think it's important to advocate for. There is still, you know, a level of explanation that I think people deserve and that I think musical theater fans deserve and. And fans of this show. And I know there are a lot of young fans of this show who are very excited to see this tour. And, you know, I don't blame anyone for the ambiguity in marketing. I think that's kind of the thing with PR and marketing in establishing a professional tone. You know, there's only so much they can say in these situations. I'm here to elucidate a little bit and provide a little bit more context by talking about the state of the industry and provide what little additional insight I may have into this specific circumstance. It's a pretty straightforward explanation. I'm not here to spill much salacious tea or any sort of unsubstantiated rumor or gossip, but, you know, in many ways, what happened today and what was announced today surprised me hugely. In other ways, it didn't. We're going to talk about why that is for the next few minutes. I'm attempting to do this unedited, which is very unusual for one of these videos, but it's already unedited after 11pm and I don't want it to be the middle of the night by the time I get this online. I'm trying to turn this around as quickly as possible for you. Does anyone remember the good old days when breaking theatrical news used to drop while I was traveling between countries or on a train back to the uk. I was just at a show tonight. I was at a press night in London. Somehow that was harder. I mean, in fact, the news came out earlier today, but I was in rehearsals for my upcoming show. And anyway, not the point of the video. The point is Bonnie and Clyde, which, you know, and this is another shame as well, Bonnie and Clyde musical, which was a famous, very short lived flop on Broadway where, you know, if something isn't successful with the critics, if something doesn't, you know, manage to find its audience pretty fast because Broadway is so expensive. And I'm not talking about ticket prices, I'm talking about mounting a show, which is why ticket prices become so expensive. And you know, there's a cost to run the thing if you're not successful and fast, if you're not finding an audience, if you're getting obliterated by the reviews, something can close very promptly. And I was just saying yesterday how that kind of a thing happening because we're seeing it happen on Broadway again at the moment with this very cutthroat season with all these shows opening at the same time trying to win Tonys. I was saying how it makes you appreciate the West End and the uk, where that doesn't happen as often. That's not to say that it doesn't happen. Opening night recently closed prematurely in the West End. And now for the first time in however long we've had a tour close early. I'm trying to think about the last time we saw this happening to a touring show. I mean, bring it on. The Musical a few years ago notably had to cancel its entire tour because the ticket sales weren't really there. The Addams Family canceled a couple of its tour dates before it had finished. And there is a common thread here that I will come back to, but Bonnie and Clyde announced today that they would cancel the remainder of their run. Someone was telling me it was, I think, more than 10 venues. I don't believe they were even halfway through this tour. The tour just started right at the end of February, beginning of March. I saw it back at the Wolverhampton grand back in March. I made a review video here on my channel if you want to find out a little bit more about it. It's kind of moot now because sadly the tour has come to an end. And you know, right up front, I do want to say how sorry I feel for all, everyone involved. Like I said, everyone attached to this, for whom it was their job. You know, people are losing their jobs and I know it's show business and we think about that very differently to how we think about other kinds of employment. And you know, it's inherently less stable and you know, with fewer guarantees. But it's really, it's still devastating nonetheless. And the same reason that people are struggling to afford theater tickets and support and go and see as many shows perhaps or go and see shows at all as they used to. Because we are in this cost of living crisis in the UK because everything just being alive has become more expensive. That same thing that is stopping people getting to the theater is going to hit all of the, the workers in the theater industry who are now losing out on this employment. So my heart really goes out to them as well as, and this is something that hasn't really been talked about as much. There were other cast members who were going to be joining this tour later on for subsequent venues who found out because of social media they weren't notified. And we're going to talk about all of this as well. I'm trying to figure out apologies, how to structure this and what I want to talk about first. Let's go back because context is going to help us understand this. So like I said, Bonnie and Clyde, short lived Broadway flop basically is how it's remembered. Years after that having not been produced professionally in the uk but there was a concert production that was produced a couple of years ago. It was originally going to be with the original Broadway stars Jeremy Jordan and Laura Osnes. And then because of a whole impact to her reputation, because of her stance on vaccination and all that stuff that I'm not going to reopen in this video, let me tell you. It ended up being Jeremy Jordan with rising West End star Frances May McCann in a brilliant production staged by Nick Winston who is becoming a master of the staged concert. Let me tell you, this production was filmed and a pro shot recording of this is set to be released this summer. You can actually pre order it right now. I'll put a link down below and help in the hope that any Bonnie and Clyde fans who are now going to be missing out on the tour get to get to see that instead because it was very similar. Creative team Nick Winston went on to direct what that concert became, a full West End production at the Arts Theater and then at the Garrick Theatre that then subsequently went out on tour. So the pro shot that's coming out is really a very similar version of what the tour ended up being. And it's a really fantastic concert that it was that I was lucky enough to see and Theatre Royal Drury Lane. But it began to rewrite this narrative of Bonnie and Clyde having been a Broadway flop. It became a success in London because you had this sold out concert. They added an extra night. They went to the Arts Theatre, a very small theatre, the first West End, home of the musical six, very intimate space. Currently Choir of Man is playing there. And it. And it, you know, it went well. Frances mainly McCann reprised her performance as Bonnie Jordan. Luke Gage joined the show as Clyde. And thanks in part to the two of them, the show attained a substantial fan base. It became one of the most popular shows, specifically with young audiences in the West End. It was kind of like that and Heather's at the time. And I think, you know, this was always something that they had planned when the concert was happening because it was announced simultaneously on the back of, I believe, the reception to the Arts Theatre run. And, you know, the fans being so excited about it and the reception that it got, they then brought it back to London again. It came back to another West End home, the Garrick Theatre, little bit bigger, slightly more substantial and, you know, it ran there. I don't believe that it sold out. We don't publish the grosses here in the UK like they do on Broadway. So any observation about how well something sold or how it did financially without it being disclosed is purely speculative. It seemed from an outside perspective that it didn't sell as fully at the Garrick as it did at the Arts, which is to be anticipated because it's a bigger venue and the audience for this show is finite. The worry came for me when all of these things came quite quickly after the other. You know, we had the concert and then the Arts Theatre run came quite soon afterwards. And I have a lot of friends who were interested in going to see the concert who were less enamored with the idea of going to see the Arts Theatre run. I don't know if that was because of the Jeremy Jordan of it all or because they had just seen the concert and they didn't need to go and see what was ultimately a very similar production again. Arts Theatre Run closed. Garrick Theatre Run started not that long afterwards. And you know, for the die hard fans, this is great news because they want to go and see the show again and again and again. It's like the fans who are thrilled that Heathers is coming back, you know, there's never been that much time without Heathers, but people are still thrilled that they can go and see it again. And so the Garrick Run happened and then that finished its limited run and then a tour was announced. And that's even bigger still to go from concert. Fine, you can sell a concert, Arts Theatre fine, you can sell the art theater Garrick getting a little bigger, going to a full extensive multi venue UK tour and many, many venues playing these massive houses, places like the Wolverhampton grand, that then began to feel a little bit more ambitious. And I think it also, because it didn't have any members of that West End cast who fans had attached themselves to, it divorced itself a little bit. From what I could tell from its fans, you know, there were still people who were thrilled to get to see Bonnie and Clyde at a theater near them. The other thing to consider here is that with it heading out on this UK tour, UK tours and US tours are very different things because the UK is small, right? And for a US tour, you've got these shows visiting States and people who may never be able to get to New York. So it's a big deal that the show is coming to them because New York is a flight away for a lot of these people. Anywhere in the UK is excusing Ireland for UK and Ireland tours is a train journey away. And many of these venues not a long train journey away. As an example, one of the venues that Bonnie and Clyde was going to be visiting is Bromley, which is in London this week. They were meant to be in Southampton. I used to get the train through Southampton to get up to London. I lived an hour and 50 minutes away growing up on the train from London. So I would still go to London like midweek with school the next day. It was a late night, but it was doable. Southampton is even less than that. It's. I mean, that's got to be hour and 20, hour and 25 on the train. So chances are, if you're a Bonnie and Clyde fan and you live in Southampton and you wanted to see Bonnie and Clyde, you've already had the opportunity when it was at the Arts, when it was at the Drury Laning concert, when it was at the Garrick. So I think because those things happened so quickly in succession, Arts Theatre, Garrick Theatre, UK tour, the market for Bonnie and Clyde got a little bit saturated. Also, in a peculiar twist, the show was licensed to amateur groups throughout much of this time. There have been amateur productions of Bonnie and Clyde happening this whole time. And usually especially for bigger shows, when something is being produced professionally, they take the license away so as to not, you know, they don't want someone to say, well, why would I go see this professional tour? I can go see this cheaper production Because A youth theatre near me are doing it or the amateur company near me are doing it, normally they take the rights away and that's also a good indicator of when something is about to be revived. But were, you know, were they to have left more time in between the West End runs and the UK tour? Hindsight's 20 20. It's easy for me to sit here and say that, but potentially, you know, the fans who had seen it in London might have been like, oh, yeah, we liked that last year, a couple of years ago, we'll go see it again. But whether, you know, people who don't go to the theater constantly, like a lot of us do, potentially, they wouldn't have needed to go back and see Bonnie and Clyde again so quickly. Just. That's just one possible explanation. All of this building towards the explanation that's been given, which is the tour has been pulled with immediate effect because ticket sales were too low and it was no longer financially viable for them to continue the tour, which is within their right to do so. You know, it is a tricky thing producing musical theater. It is a tricky thing producing live theater. Post pandemic, we've been hearing this, that hasn't changed. And, you know, there's no guarantees to that either. You hope that something's going to be successful. You know, you spend money on marketing and you try and stack the deck as much as you can. One of the ways that you can do that is with celebrity casting. And we're in this culture right now where celebrity casting really, really speaks to box office sales. The one interesting exception to this of where we're seeing shows do really well but have no name casting is Studio Ghibli Properties on stage. My neighbour Totoro, huge success at the Barbican, came back, huge success again at the Barbican, going to the West End next year. You'll notice a decent amount of time in between these runs. Probably after that first Barbican run, they could have immediately picked up, gone into the West End and still sold very well, but they haven't. There's a decent amount of time, so people who saw it last year will go see it again the following year. Even something that's been award winning and very successful, being a little bit more careful there in their strategy, from what we can tell, that. Or it's just the in availability of West End theaters and they needed a really big one, so that's another component. But Spirited Away, likewise, another Studio Ghibli film on stage, currently at the London Coliseum. Neither of those productions had anything resembling celebrity casting. But for the most part, I mean, what we're seeing in a lot of other shows and in many, but not all UK tours, and I'll get to this, is celebrity casting translating to, you know, great sales. Cara Delevingne is currently in Cabaret. Tom Holland in Romeo and Juliet is like the sellout theater event of the summer because Tom Holland is doing Shakespeare in the West End and that's a huge deal. Bonnie and Clyde didn't really indulge in. Like they had West End names that musical theatre fans and specifically young musical theatre fans would have been very excited about, like Jordan Lugage and Francis, Maya McCann and when Jodi Steele joined for the Garrick run and many other people in their cast as well. But not what you would consider to be a name recognition star for the general public. Now in the West End, I think that's one thing. It seems to be even more necessary for a lot of shows on tour because the touring climate and the West End climate, two very different things. Now, Bonnie and Clyde did caught a little bit of name recognition casting on tour and they had a couple of different people playing the roles at different venues, which is not unheard of. Everyone acted a little bit brand new when this was announced and they're like, this is so confusing. And you're doing this venue and you're doing this venue. That's, that's. This was not the first time that was happening. So they had sort of some UK television people playing the roles, but who'd had stage and theatrical experience playing the roles at different venues. One of the things, another of the things that hurt the tour is that they lost the actor playing Clyde, Danny Hatchard I believe was his name. I'm going to factor check myself here because not a theatre actor historically, so not someone immediately known to me, only really became known to me when the announcement happened that he was doing Bonnie and Clyde. Is he the one? I'm going to have to do a Google here. Danny Hatchard, Bonnie and Clyde. You're probably screaming at your screens now. Yes. So when you Google that, you get articles about the fact that he withdrew from the tour, which. And I said I wasn't going to engage in rumor and speculation here. It's not quite what I heard because prior to it getting announced and strictly speaking, it was a quiet announcement, which I think was actually a very good PR move, but I had heard prior to this that he was asked to step away from the tour, which is a euphemism for fired. And it may or may not have been because rehearsals had become uncomfortable. That's what I had heard. That is a suggestion, you know, that is all speculative and that's just what I had heard from one other person. I wasn't there. I don't know. Obviously that's just, like I said, speculative. Nothing confirmed there. In any case, casting had to be reshuffled and I don't know how substantial a draw he would have been. And how many people were saying, oh, we must book tickets to go and see Bonnie and Clyde at our local theater because Danny Hatchard is in it. At the same time, I have witnessed a lot of conversations in public and like on trains and things of when people talk about a show and say, oh, did you see that? That's coming to this theatre next year. And the follow up question, even if, and the example I remember people were talking about the wizard of Oz and they were saying, did you see that the wizard of Oz is coming next year? Do you want to go see the wizard of Oz? And you think even then they know what the wizard of Oz is. You either want to go see the wizard of Oz or you don't want to go see the wizard of Oz. But the follow up question is still, oh, who's in it? And I don't even think it's a case of like, oh, we must go see lovely Jason Manford. Brilliantly talented Jason Manford. It's just for a lot of people, I think, a way of distinguishing quality. And there's this sort of false assumption. There seems to be this false assumption that if there isn't someone whose name they recognize in it, then there's no way of guaranteeing that it'll be any good or not, which I think is a terrible shame. But possibly how that mindset works. And like I said, I don't want to, you know, punish the people who didn't buy tickets to this show because these are financially trying times for many people in the country. Theatre is expensive. Theater just about everywhere is more expensive than it was five years ago, 10 years ago. And like everything else, it's become harder to justify in a financially trying climate. Post pandemic for the producers, for the people making these shows, touring these shows, everything else has also gotten more expensive. There are so many factors and so many prices that not only post pandemic but also post Brexit, significantly more expensive. So to lay out where we are so far, because I've been talking about a bunch of things. The tour, the cast, I will say brilliantly talented. The tour lost an aspect of its celebrity casting. It had just recently been in the West End, not too long before it was visiting a lot of venues. And chances are, and you know, other tours do well for this because there is enough appetite for them. It's a very difficult thing to gauge, sort of until you go out on tour, especially for a musical touring for the first time, you don't know what the reception is going to be. But there are some venues, for example, do you go to Birmingham and Wolverhampton and Leicester that are all quite close together? Are there enough audiences there to sustain all three of those dates? Are you going to Bradford? Are you going to Bradford and also going to Manchester? Because a lot of people are going live in. One could travel to the other to go see. I know people who live in those places who do those things. And then, you know, for the ones in London, they just saw it in London, they can go see a lot of other shows in the West End. Are they going to go to this touring theatre to go and see Bonnie and Clyde that was just in the West End? Do they perceive it to be less than because it's a touring production? I don't know all of these questions. Another factor in all of this is the kind of shows that are selling well on tour and the kind of shows that aren't. Now, this is very interesting because if you remember the ones I highlighted as having cancelled their tours or closed early, Bring it on and the Addams Family, they're not the only ones that have struggled. But what we're seeing a lot of is, even though classic shows struggling in the West End, there is one I'm worried about this year. I don't want to. I kind of regret even having said that, because I don't like speculating about a show's success, especially before it's begun. But a few years ago, something like My Fair lady at the London Coliseum that in years past you would have thought would be a huge success, struggled to find an audience in the West End. Now, we were still quite freshly post pandemic at this point, and. And realistically, the market for a classic show like My Fair lady is an older demographic who understandably would have been more reluctant to get on a coach trip, get on a train, get in a car and head down to the West End as we're emerging from this pandemic, and so harder to produce that kind of theatre in the West End. But then when My Fair lady toured, it was much more successful. The inverse might be true for some other shows, something like Bonnie and Clyde. I'M seeing more and more young musical theatre fans making their way to the West End to go and see shows. And as a reminder, in the uk, you know, it's still, it's still expensive. Trains are very expensive and for a lot of people it still takes a long time on the train, but it's not like a lot of. A lot of places. You can still do it in a day or you can do it in a weekend and you could do it in an overnight. It's still not the big deal that getting to New York from certain parts of the US is, but more young people going to see their favourite shows in London and then when those shows tour around, if you're relying on a market of younger theatre goers, you may struggle regionally because they're going to go and see their favourite shows in the West End. So there's less support in Manchester, there's less support in Norwich, there's less support in Southampton, wherever it may be. And I'm not, I didn't pick those specifically. I haven't looked at the ticket sales for this tour. It's moot now because they've been taken off sale as of this morning. But you also. It's not enough to have the young people. The young people are not, sadly, a demographic that is going to be able to sustain an entire tour. You need a much broader demographic. And it's tricky with Bonnie and Clyde because there's this romantic angle, but at the same time it's not the most obvious romance show. I think there's always been an attempt to begin to market it that way, but it's also a little bit challenging because they were real life murderous criminals. So not the easiest thing to just pitch as a cute date night. It's an interesting, like subversive, slightly dangerous date night show. I think there's an element of that to it, but it doesn't, it doesn't all the way work as a marketing pitch, which also will have been to the show's disadvantage. But what I'm trying to say out of all of this is the shows with younger audiences I think may struggle more on tour, but do better in the West End and the opposite way around for classic shows. The other shows we're seeing do well on tour. Doing these extended touring dates and sitting down being really successful are shows like Hamilton Wicked and Come From Away, huge musicals. Hamilton touring the UK for the first time and sitting down in these massive venues for months at a time. It was in Manchester for ages and I'd heard specifically, I Saw a comment today that said someone loved Bonnie and Clyde in Manchester, but the theatre was half full. And you've got to imagine that the people who may have gone to Bonnie and Clyde just recently went to see Hamilton and probably spent a lot of money because Hamilton's torture. Touring ticket prices are expensive. And so they had a great night out at Hamilton. They're not going to be rushing back to the theatre. Maybe they will. Maybe, you know, they're so excited by seeing this musical, they're like, oh, what can we see next month? You know, I'm generalizing, but for a lot of people, it will have been a big investment. Specifically for families. You're thinking about that ticket price multiple times over. And unfortunately, children don't pay for themselves, so that becomes a factor. And then maybe they don't go back to the other shows and that potentially makes it harder for the smaller shows on the circuit. When you have this incredible touring year for theatre, when you have Hamilton going around, when you have come from away going around, when you have Wicked going around, it can make it harder to be one of the smaller shows where people know that they know what Bonnie and Clyde means, but they don't know it as a musical. Like, the general public do not know Bonnie and Clyde as a musical. They don't know the songs. If they also don't know enough of the people involved, then you're really going to struggle to get them to the venue. And so all of that, I think, explains why the show was struggling to sell on tour. And so what happened is they pulled the rest of the touring schedule. They just didn't have enough money. These are also newer producers to the. I believe this is their first tour and it's fair to say that as a company, they've been a little bit fraught. They've lost previous producing partners, one who recently stepped away, citing a challenging mental health environment on another production, because they are also simultaneously producing Burlesque, the musical. And prior to all of this, another of their key producers was removed from the company pending what I believe was a criminal investigation. Not to do with anything financial, really separate to the world of theater, but a little bit cursed, basically. And, you know, I think they were doing exciting work. Is there the possibility that, you know, they were seeing this fan reaction, they were seeing this response and they were so thrilled by it and so spurred on by it that, like, did the tour go out a little bit hastily, perhaps? Would it have made a difference if the tour had gone out six months later, a year later? I don't know, I can't say. And certainly scheduling these things in is in such a busy touring schedule, it's not. It's not the easiest thing to do. I'm for the first time producing a very small live cabaret this coming weekend. And just the challenges involved in that and everything that comes into it. That process has opened my eyes to how difficult it is to produce live events. And certainly that is nothing like a tour of a huge musical. Like they are worlds apart. And so I. I do have respect to these producers. I think obviously a mistake was made here. There is a certain amount that you can't foresee. There are other things that could be anticipated. The other thing I have an issue with, and we have to talk about this. History repeated itself a little bit again with what happened with Cinderella, the West End. Not bad. Cinderella, the same show, but when it was in the West End, it was just called Cinderella. When that show announced its closing, the incoming cast, the cast members who were set to replace, found out via social media. Now, as it happens today, I was hearing rumours that Bonnie and Clyde was about to be pulled and that the cast hadn't yet been told and that they were going to be told at 1pm so nothing broke about it before 1pm But I think this may have happened because local venues had been told, because they needed to announce it. You know, there was going to be a performance tonight and so they needed to circulate that to ticket holders and they needed to start the process of refunds and all of the logistics of this. And I think that's possibly how the news began to get out there. From what I understand, the cast would then, I guess, have been told in person. But just like with Cinderella, there were new cast members who were going to join the show, at least some of whom found out from social media when this was eventually picked up and run by theatre news outlets. And that is just devastating. I cannot imagine being a theatre performer, which is already hard enough, and having trained for years and having, you know, stayed in this fraught, challenging, devastating, impossible industry purely for the love of. Of doing the thing and being on the precipice of making your professional debut in a beloved fan favorite show and then finding out that that job that you've waited for for years, I feel awful even thinking about it. It's a really horrible position for anyone to be in and to be finding that out via socials, it just sucks. It just sucks. There has to be a better way of taking care of everyone you have hired and are currently paying. But Also that you have contracted and who is going to be affected by this. You can circulate that news more effectively. I'm sure today was carnage. I am sure there are so many moving parts. There are enough people involved in these productions, there are enough producers here, there are enough company managers that we can, you know, we can actually be operating on the duty of care that they have. Here's a statement from the producers that were shared today in what's on stage. They said Bonnie and Clyde the Musical will conclude its UK and Ireland tour with immediate effect. The Watson Stage award winning musical began its tour at Leicester Curve in February and has received a range of 5 star reviews and standing ovations at venues across the. Unfortunately, it has been concluded that due to disappointing ticket sales, it is no longer financially viable to continue with the tour. We would like to thank the extremely hard working and endlessly talented cast and company and they really are fantastic. They have entertained thousands of audience members across the country with this production. The show had two successful seasons in London's West End at the Arts Theatre and the Garrick Theatre. Bonnie and Clyde, the musical narrates the tale of two small town individual. Oh, this is just the Watson stage piece. That's fine, that's fine. The statement finished tells us everything that that we'd already spoken about there really. It's difficult not to be concerned about their upcoming production of Burlesque and I'm sure they don't want me to be saying that I don't wish to cast aspersions on anything. There is nothing to say because this was ticket sales. Burlesque has already, I believe, sold out its first run in Manchester. Of course there is huge demand and appetite for Burlesque the movie on stage. Audiences love films they like on stage. That's why Studio Ghibli is doing so well in London. So fingers crossed. With any luck, that is a very different story. But it's not reassuring the way that this was financially produced. Again, we have very little clarity and transparency around the financial realities of western shows and UK tours because so much is withheld and kept private. The other thing I want to say is, and though I know it's only a small consolation, thank goodness that we do have that pro shot coming. For those of you who maybe had tickets who were looking forward to seeing Bonnie and Clyde at a theater near you, I really, I'm sure that it's a lovely pro shot recording because I was at that concert. The cast were fantastic. Frances was brilliant, Jeremy was brilliant. It really was a very Similar staging by Nick Winston to the one that ended up being the West End production and the touring production. So you will still get to see Bonnie and Clyde in. In some iteration, basically. Yay that we have the pro shot and hopefully that goes some of the way towards the enduring legacy of Bonnie and Clyde being a more positive one. And this not being, you know, the chapter, because they were on such a great path for it to be one of those shows that struggled in New York but then was redeemed in the West End and became a London success. And it was, and that happened. But just this last little step too far has turned it back into a flop. And I think that's such a shame and I think we should all reject that narrative and enjoy the pro shot when it comes out. And, you know, all of the brilliant work that it will have captured and hopefully that gives the fans of this musical something else to look forward to and something else to enjoy and something else to celebrate. Needless to say, it's still really important to go and support your favorite shows, to go and support live theatre if you have the means to, if you have the ability to go and see those shows, go and support touring shows as well as stuff that's in the West End. Regional theatre really needs audience support. That's true in the US as well as in the uk. I say this to you, wherever you are in the world, go and support regional theatre and go and support smaller shows and take a chance on things that you're not as sure about that aren't as obvious, that don't have celebrities starring in them. You know, it's not necessarily like how well known something is. The name recognition of a show, whether it's based on a film, whether there's a celebrity in it from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There's not a correlation necessarily between that and the quality of a thing. And obviously I make video reviews of a lot of these shows here on YouTube and I hope never to steer you wrong, but those have been my thoughts. I think that's everything I really need to say about this tour ending early. Obviously, it's incredibly sad. Again, my heart goes out to the cast, the company, the crew, the creatives, everyone who is now lost their employment for the next few months as a result of this announcement. It will have impacted the theaters that will have been visiting as well. I do also feel for the ticket holders, for the fans of the show who are going to get to see it at their local venues. I do also feel for these producers. I'm sure that this was an impossibly difficult decision to make and evidently has been a trying time. All we can do is continue to support theatre and that's what I'm going to try and do here, and I know that you all will as well. If anyone has any more questions, if there's anything I skipped over, I won't have edited this. So if there's anything I skipped over, if there's anything I kind of talked myself out of and went down a different path, let me know in the comment section down below and I will do my best to bring you answers. For those of you who want to know a little bit more about why this had happened or wanted me to talk about it, I hope that that has helped. I hope that you've enjoyed as much as you can enjoy sad videos such as these are. But that's been the news. Lots more videos to come this week, including some happier stories. So that is. That's hopefully very exciting. In the meantime, I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day.