Following Yesterday's Court Ruling, Is REBECCA Moving Towards Broadway Run?

Deadline reports that yesterday, the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division affirmed last May's Supreme Court rulings in the case involving the one time Broadway-bound production of REBECCA. In dispute was whether the show's press agent, Marc Thibodeau, should be held accountable for sending emails in 2012 which "scared off" a potential investor just as rehearsals for the musical were set to begin.

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. 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."

Yesterday's Appellate Court ruling stated: "It is difficult to imagine a plainer case of a party to a contract utterly defeating the purpose for which the other party had entered into that contract, or a more blatant example of an agent's disloyalty to his principal. [A] first material breach of the parties' agreement by RBLP, if there was one, would not have justified Thibodeau's remaining in RBLP's employ while using confidential information entrusted to him to sabotage the production."

Yesterday's ruling now clears the way for the law suit to proceed to trial and may possibly re-invigorate the production's journey to Broadway. A post on the musical's official Facebook page today reads as follows:

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.