Monkey Business

The Broadway show King Kong will will play its final performance on Sunday, August 18. A tour of Shanghai has been announced for 2021 and there will possibly be others. I'm enormously intrigued by the question, "What do you do with a 2000-lb., twenty-foot-tall ape puppet that takes more than a dozen people to operate?"

Where do you store it? If you take it on tour, how long does it take to set it up in one theater and then move it to another? Can it even work in some theaters? And then what do you do with it when the tour is over? I'm thinking you find some tourist center to set it up as a permanent attraction, not necessarily in the musical for which it was built…but maybe it's too expensive to maintain and operate to do that.

I hope there's an American tour and it makes its way to Los Angeles. I wanted to get back to New York to see this show, just in case it's never performed again. It doesn't look like I'm going to get there in time. I heard mixed things about the musical as a musical but even the folks I know who went to see it and didn't care for it said, "You have got to see this puppet in action."

Another Broadway production — The Cher Show — closes the same night, even though it won two Tony Awards. Its main Cher, Stephanie J. Block, got Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role and Bob Mackie won for Best Costume Design of a Musical but those wins apparently failed to boost the box office enough. It wouldn't surprise me if that show toured for a long time…and hey! Maybe the producers of The Cher Show and the producers of King Kong could team up, dress the puppet in huge Bob Mackie gowns and have it sing, "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves." Wouldn't you pay to see that? I know I would.