Here's a hint on how to improve those odds. Call your new musical "The Phantom of the Opera."
You can't lose. There have been a half-dozen shows called "The Phantom of the Opera" or just "Phantom" playing around the country recently, and the success rate has been phenomenal.The latest "Phantom" opened early this month at the Drury Lane Theater in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill., the work of David H. Bell (direction, book and lyrics) and Tom Sivak (music). The first 18 weeks are sold out.
That is now to be expected. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical has enjoyed enormous success, playing for years in both London and New York and in numerous other venues (including Los Angeles).
Thanks to that show and to the fact that the Gaston Leroux novel on which all the shows are based is now in the public domain, there's a whole "Phantom" industry.
Ironically, the first musical version of the Leroux novel, written by Ken Hill and produced in London in 1976, was less than a smash. (If you want to look back further, the novel also flopped.) Hill had written a spoof of the book, using music from various operas.
Hill was approached by songwriter-producer Andrew Lloyd Webber to move the show to London's West End. But Hill says that, after the initial discussions, Lloyd Webber changed his mind and decided to write his own musical.
That show, first produced in London in 1986, was an instant hit, one of the most successful productions ever. Once it opened on Broadway in 1988 - with Lloyd Webber's then-wife, Sarah Brightman, as Christine and Michael Crawford as the Phantom - it became the toughest ticket in town. It still is.
But "Ken Hill was really the father of the idea," says Jonathan Reinis, the San Francisco producer who decided to produce the Hill version at his Theater on the Square in 1989. It turned out to be Reinis' most successful show ever.
Another production of Hill's "Phantom" is playing in England, and there are plans to take it to the West End Haymarket Theater, which just happens to be directly across from Her Majesty's Theater, where Lloyd Webber's "Phantom" is playing.
As if these weren't enough, there is the Arthur Kopit-Maury Yeston ("Nine") version of "The Phantom of the Opera," which played Houston to great success earlier this year. As directed by Charles Abbott, it is due to open in Seattle this fall.
There's also the Abe Hirshfeld production of "The Phantom of the Opera," commissioned in 1989 for his Castle Hotel in Miami Beach.
Ohio producer John Kenley, in collaboration with Robert Thomas Noll, also devised a "Phantom" for their summer-stock playhouse near Akron.
Another, subtitled "The Passage of Christine," was tried at the Capital Repertory in Albany, N.Y., in 1986.
Which brings us back to the brand new (for this week) version of the Leroux novel opening in Illinois.
Director-author Bell says, "My `Phantom' differs considerably. It transcends the material itself.
"In our version, both Raoul (Vicomte Raoul de Chagny, the good guy in the book) and the Phantom are sons of the owner of the Paris Opera House who has been murdered. Raoul doesn't know his brother - the Phantom - is in hiding in the basement.
"Christine is a seamstress in our show, and she lives in the Opera House, too, sleeping on a pile of old bustles in the wardrobe room."
It sounds as if this version is a spoof, too.
"Oh no," says Bell. "This is very serious. But we wanted our own version. If we wanted to do the Leroux story, well, Lloyd Webber has already done that very well. Actually, Lloyd Webber was too faithful to the source material."
Bell has written lyrics to new melodies and music borrowed from Tchaikovsky.
Bell, who has worked as artistic director at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., and as resident director of Marriott's Lincolnshire Theater near Chicago, says he has no idea why the Phantom theme has been this successful.
"I'm amazed that there is this kind of mileage in a bad novel that was badly received in its day," he says. "But then there is something exciting in the theme about a man raised away from everyone's eyes. It ignites the imagination of the audience."
Not to mention the imagination of theater producers everywhere, who apparently have found what no one knew existed - a theatrical sure thing.