| Despite decent runs, they all lost money. In fact, according to some sources, The Happy Time was the first Broadway musical to lose more than $1 million. If that's true, it would be several years before there was another. When it closed, Variety reported that it had lost $375,000 on an investment of $500,000, but Variety may have been wrong. If Variety was wrong, it's a bit surprising that it would be wrong by so much. It's likely that there were cost overruns during the tryout. Variety usually knew about those, but perhaps in this case, Merrick and Champion managed to keep the cost overruns secret. |
