REBECCA Producers Have Officially Lost Rights to Bring the Ill-Fated Musical to Broadway

By: Apr. 24, 2017
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The saga continues! The ill-fated musical REBECCA, which cancelled its Broadway run in 2012, is getting its time in court. The trial began today, April 24, 2017.

According to Deadline, it was revealed in an opening argument that, after years of postponements, producers Ben Sprecher and Louise Florenza have indeed lost the rights to the musical.

"By the end of last year, they had lost the rights to Rebecca and will not be bringing it to Broadway," said Erik S. Groothius, who represents the producers.

The Broadway production had been beleaguered with a series of financial setbacks, including the discovery of a mystery investor who turned out to be the fabrication of a scam artist. The show's press agent, Marc Thibodeau, a well-known Broadway press rep, made the decision to send emails to an investor who believed he was investing $2.25 million anonymously. According to the report, he later claimed he did so because "he could not stand by as a potential investor was kept in the dark about the show's financial history."

The musical REBECCA was described as "a spectacular new musical drawn from the classic Daphne Du Maurier novel about love and obsession reaching from beyond the grave. In this romanticthriller, Maxim de Winter brings his new wife ("I") home to his estate of Manderley. There she meets the intimidating housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who had a very special relationship with Maxim's first wife, the beautiful Rebecca, who died a year earlier in a boating accident. The young woman discovers Manderley is a house of devastating secrets, and the mystery of Rebecca may be the greatest of them all as she finds the strength to challenge Mrs. Danvers and save her marriage.

REBECCA had its world premiere in 2006 at Vereinigte Buhnen Wien in Vienna, where it played to sold-out houses for over three years. It continued with successful productions in Budapest, Hungary; Bucharest, Romania; Helsinki, Finland; Stuttgart, Germany; St. Gallen, Switzerland and at the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo.



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