The biggest commercial theater presenters in San Francisco are trying to block productions of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “Dear Evan Hansen” from opening at a competing venue.
Nederlander of San Francisco, which operates that city’s Orpheum and Golden Gate theaters, this week asked a judge to prevent an ally-turned-rival, the producer Carole Shorenstein Hays, from staging the shows at the nearby Curran Theater, which she owns and has lavishly restored and ambitiously programmed.
The shows at stake are two of the hottest in contemporary theater — critically acclaimed, commercially lucrative and attractive to adolescents and young adults who rarely attend theater.
“Cursed Child,” a sequel to the Potter novels, won this year’s Tony Award for best new play and has been a big hit in London and New York, while “Dear Evan Hansen” won last year’s Tony Award for best new musical and has a substantial social-media-fueled fan base. Ms. Hays persuaded producers of both shows, while they continue to run in New York, to bring additional productions of them to her theater — “Dear Evan Hansen” for a few weeks as part of a national tour, and then “Cursed Child” indefinitely as an open-ended run.
The lawsuit is an outgrowth of an acrimonious split between the Nederlander Organization, which is one of the biggest theater owners in the country, and Ms. Hays, who has parlayed a huge real estate fortune into a successful theater career. The Nederlander and Shorenstein families had jointly run the three big San Francisco theaters for decades — their joint venture was called SHN, for Shorenstein Hays Nederlander — but separated in 2014, and have been in litigation since.
The latest complaint was filed in the Court of Chancery in Delaware, which often handles corporate disputes.
This summer, that same court issued a detailed ruling in a case in which Nederlander accused Ms. Hays of breaking a promise to continue renting the Curran to SHN. In the ruling, the court said “there was no enforceable promise” to that effect, but was also critical of Ms. Hays, saying that she and her husband had breached their fiduciary duties to SHN, and that she “willfully partook in bad faith litigation tactics” during a head-spinning deposition. (Asked how many times she had met with her lawyer to prepare, she said, “Well, see, I think of time as a continuum. So I think I met with them from the beginning to the end.” She also said she couldn’t recall where she went to college or whether she had ever been arrested.)
In its new legal filing, Nederlander of San Francisco asked the court to revisit the dispute, arguing that allowing the Curran to present “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Cursed Child” would cause the Nederlander theaters “irreparable harm” in breach of an agreement between the families restricting competition. “Both ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ and ‘Harry Potter’ are multiple-Tony-Award-winning, smash-hit Broadway shows that will draw huge crowds of theatergoers to the Curran,” the complaint says. “There is only one opportunity for a theater owner or operator to be the first to stage these sought-after productions in San Francisco.”
The Nederlander filing said that productions of the shows at the Curran could endanger subscriptions to the Nederlander company’s business, saying “a subscription is only attractive to theatergoers, and thereby successful, if SHN can offer the must-see productions in that area. Otherwise, theatergoers will abandon their subscriptions.”
The filing asks the court to “preliminarily and permanently enjoin” the Curran from staging the two shows, or, as an alternative, to award Nederlander “damages resulting from lost profits.”
Nederlander of San Francisco declined to comment. The Curran’s law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, was dismissive, saying in a statement, “The claims alleged by Nederlander of San Francisco were litigated and lost after a full trial in the same court last year. Sour grapes aside, litigation is not a game where the loser may refuse to accept the result and refile the same claims. We are confident that the court will once again reject these claims, and we look forward to presenting ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ at the Curran in December, and welcoming ‘Harry Potter’ to San Francisco next year.”
A spokesman for “Dear Evan Hansen” declined to comment. A spokesman for “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” did not respond to a request for comment.
