Japan Lassos Broadway’s ‘Will’ for TV

Will Rogers would have loved the idea. After all, the cowboy humorist, dead these many years, had never met a showman (or showwoman) he didn’t like.

Here was an oversize mailer, designed as a striking period piece: A re-created Saturday Evening Post cover . . . a pencil and wash drawing of a smiling, perplexed Rogers, lasso in one hand . . . inside, sketches of anatomically extended chorus girls, early Esquire style . . . then the bold announcement proclaiming a world-premiere musical at New York’s Palace Theater.

“The Will Rogers Follies.”

Check the calendar. Is it 1991?

Then the credits: starring Keith Carradine . . . directed and choreographed by Tommy Tune . . . music by Cy Coleman . . . lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green . . . book by Peter Stone . . . produced by Pierre Cossette . . . in association with Japan Satellite Broadcasting Inc. . . .

Will Rogers and Japan Satellite Broadcasting Inc.?

No doubt about it. It is 1991.

And Will Rogers would have loved the idea.

The musical with all of its big Broadway and Hollywood names is a new one. Based on the theatrical life of the “cowboy philosopher,” it opens Wednesday in New York after several weeks of previews and hype. If it’s successful, it may prove what its backers believe: that a partnership linking a new Japanese satellite pay-television system as a limited partner with traditional Broadway talent could provide the investment money that American theaters, especially musical theaters, find increasingly difficult to find.

The future of television, and possibly of theater, is being formed in just such global connections.

The project, of course, is not without its concerns. That predictably happens when foreign interests get involved in American show business, whether it’s the buying of a Hollywood heavyweight like MCA or the purchase of a music monster like CBS Records.

Who will control the show? Who will control content? Who will have the final say over the artistic side of the show-business ledger?

The arrangement worked out by veteran Hollywood television producer Pierre Cossette (making his Broadway debut) and his creative and financial partners, keeps the $7 million raised for the musical in the front-office vaults and the artistic decisions separately on the stage with Tommy Tune and company. And that seems to please everyone involved. The money people invest and wait. The creative people create.

With its $2 million, the Japanese satellite company became the largest single investor in the show. It’s a new company, a sort of HBO of Asia, which went on the air April 1 providing 24 hours of movies, sports, specials and home retailing. All for 2,000 yen or $13 a month. It claims to have attracted 225,000 interested viewers.

The service has the gimmicky Western name of “Wowow,” as in Wow! Wow! The word is not just an exaggerated boast. It’s an acronym of sorts for a World’s Worth of Wonder. And that’s exactly what Wowow hopes to do: provide worlds of watching, a heavy dose of English-language imports, American movies and now American musical productions.

To recoup its $2 million and make some money on this deal, Wowow’s Executive Director Tamamatsu Kuwata worked with consultant Mitchie Takeuchi of Arc Media in New York to get the rights to tape “Will Rogers” and eventually broadcast a subtitled version over its satellite system in Japan during the run of the Broadway production, sell home-video versions of the musical in Japan and Southeast Asia and tour any live versions of the play in Japan. That arrangement makes Wowow’s involvement different from that of other foreign companies that have invested in recent Broadway productions. It gets the rights to future broadcasts and sales to home audiences.

But Wowow is not without a few ouches.

Will Rogers and his career as a Broadway musical star are unfamiliar to most Japanese. But Tommy Tune and Keith Carradine supposedly have a following there and the Japanese television company hopes to sell the show on the basis of those two names. And on one intangible.

Wowow is looking for a hit. A failed show won’t travel west of the Hudson and certainly not east of Hong Kong. So Wowow is taking a gamble that all those creative giants associated with “Will Rogers” can produce the sort of hit that leaps oceans. Three live-audience tapings of the show will take place some time after the opening weeks: one matinee, two evening performances. For that, Wowow will pay Cossette another $1.5 million. If “Will Rogers” bombs, Wowow will own a piece of a million-dollar memory.

If it succeeds, Wowow has additional plans for involvement with other Broadway productions. Musicals only. Dramas don’t make the ocean crossing well. It has a long pipeline to fill in supplying 24 hours of wonder. Through an arrangement with the pay-per-view television company Reiss Media in New York, it earlier taped the musical “Black and Blue” after its closing and is talking to several other producers, including some in London, on deals that range from licensing to partnerships similar to that worked out with the Cossette group.

Cossette, like all producers, sees his musical succeeding even in the 1,722-seat Palace Theater. With a weekly nut of $360,000 the show has to run 43 weeks of almost full houses before breaking even.

It’s taken him six years to get to this point, so he can wait a little longer. He first thought of a musical based on Will Rogers after seeing the James Whitmore one-man show on the humorist. He lined up rights to a book by Rogers’ widow and arranged for John Denver to be his star. Now two scripts, two stars, and $7 million later, all he has to do is wonder. Wonder if New York audiences will take to a play about a cowboy actor who died 56 years ago in an airplane crash. At the same time, he’s wondering the same thing about an audience half a world away.

Will Rogers would have loved it.