Playwright and director Phillip McMahon has said there was “an enormous amount of hubris” around the staging of Toy Show The Musical.
The expectation was extraordinary that in a space like the Convention Centre in Dublin that 4,000 children a day would attend the production, he told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland.
The Christmas market for entertainment in Dublin is already crowded, with long-established pantomimes and children’s shows, he added.
“The idea that a juggernaut can come in with €2.7 million 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.”
He added: “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 €2.7 million, a budget that most theatre artists, in fact probably all, will never see that kind of budget for a show is extraordinary.”
Budget
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.
“We're talking about craft here. We're talking about people who really spend a long time honing their craft and building their audience.
“With musicals and musical theatre is not something Ireland traditionally does very well. However, 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,” he added.
Theatre was full of rigour, he said. “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.”
Competition
Meanwhile, iIndependent producer and panto star Alan Hughes said the launch of Toy Show The Musical was a “major blow” to his production of Snow White at the National Stadium last Christmas.
Mr Hughes told RTÉ radio’s Today with Claire Byrne show that he questioned “what planet” RTÉ's Rory Coveney lived on when he told the Oireachtas Media Committee on Wednesday that the Toy Show musical was not competing with other shows on in Dublin at that time.
“It was a major blow to us,” Mr Hughes said.
He also questioned the timing of the decision by RTÉ to stage the show: “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.
“Last year was our first year to actually try and get back something onto a scale that we could 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.
“When you have the might of RTÉ and the power of advertising and free advertising that they have. 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 have an 80 per cent 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 per cent return.
Mr Hughes said he also put in a request to then director general of RTÉ, Dee Forbes, questioning the timing and placement of Toy Show musical adverts in the same slot as the adverts he had paid for his pantomime. The Toy Show musical adverts were running on radio and television for months, for free, while he had to spend “thousands,” he added.
“I didn't think that was fair, competitive-wise, and I was told it was not a commercial advert and they were allowed to run it in the same time slot, totally decimating the money that I was paying in the ads.
“So my ad was on and then the Toy Show musical came on for free. How is that fair and how is that fair to anybody who was competing in that saturated market?”
Mr Hughes also queried the cost of renting the Convention Centre. “That’s an expensive venue to hire,” he said, adding that most producers would not pay that high a cost.
The €2.7 million budget for Toy Show The Musical was “four or five times” what it would take to put on a pantomime in the National Stadium, he said.
“It wouldn't be feasible for most productions to do that, but then if it's not your own money, you just go, 'oh yeah, let's do it'.
“People sit down and for anyone to think that you are going to get an 80 percent return on your first year was in cloud cuckoo land,” Mr Hughes said.
