A decade ago, Louis Benjamin, then the head of Stoll Moss,
London’s largest theatre owners, showed me the graphs for West
End ticket sales and pointed out the clutched straws with which
each dip in receipts was rationalized: “Libyan crisis,” “Royal
wedding,” “Weather v. bad,” “Weather v. good.”
“We’ve got an awful lot of excuses,” he said.

But it’s all
rubbish. It’s like the old excuse when takings were down at the
Finsbury Empire [a raucous music hall]: “Polo at Hurlingham.” I
took 300,000 pounds at the Palladium last week. D’you think I
care what the bloody weather was like?

This was 1991, Gulf War time, when Saddam Hussein, despite being
preoccupied with brutalizing Kuwait and fending off the Great
Satan, had apparently found time to close two West End musicals,
Children of Eden and Matador. I’m all for blaming Saddam as
much as possible, but, in fairness to the old mass murderer, most
of Children of Eden’s and Matador’s wounds were self-inflicted.
On balance, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was probably marginally
good for business, if only because the potential theatergoing
population was significantly increased by the vast number of
al-Sabah princes who fled to London for the duration.

But ten years later Osama bin Laden seems to be doing a pretty
thorough job on the Grim White Way (as it’s now called). By some
estimates, 75 percent of New York theater business is from tourists, and
tourists are in short supply right