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[0:03] Blake Ross: On a cloudy day in March 2021, Ben Sprecher sat sobbing in a New York City courtroom. The 66-year-old notorious producer had been humiliated two years prior when a New York Post photographer snapped a photograph of him in a t-shirt and gym shorts, being led out of his Harlem home in handcuffs. It was a different type of press attention than Sprecher had been used to getting. For the decade prior, he had been tied up in one of Broadway's most bizarre crime stories. There were scheming Wall Street types, fake deaths, sabotage from the inside, millions of dollars just vanishing into thin air. There was stuff that probably would have made a great Broadway play had it not been so ridiculously hard to believe. It is the craziest. You would not write this stuff and people would believe it. My mouth fell open and I thought, you can't make this shit up. As each thing unfolded, it seemed like what could be worse? Wow. This is bad.

[1:09] Blake Ross: I'm Blake Ross, and this is Burnt, part one, Rebecca, the musical. And the story of Rebecca is very dramatic. Here's my former colleague from Playbill, Robert Viagas.

[1:22] Robert Viagas: A woman meets a widower, a very romantic, older man, wealthy man, and they fall in love and he wants to take her back to his estate and then live a wonderful life with him. The problem is, when she gets back to this estate, the estate is haunted in a sense by the ghost of his ex-wife who died under mysterious circumstances. Her name, Rebecca.

[1:47] Michael Kunze: My name is Michael Kunze, and I am a German librettist and songwriter. Rebecca is, in essence, that a man who was married and who lost his first wife falls in love with a young woman. And the young woman doesn't feel very welcome in his estate. He has a big manor house outside of London. She feels she's not welcome because the ghost of the late wife of her husband is still in the house and it's represented by the housekeeper.

[2:40] Michael Kunze: The tale of Rebecca started in 1938 as a novel by Daphne du Maurier. It quickly became a sensation that 80 years later is still being told. It opens with that classic line, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Manderley, the grand seaside estate of the dashing widower Max de Winter. The novel became Hitchcock's first American film and his first Oscar winner. It starred Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier.

[3:12] Michael Kunze: How could I ask you to love me when I knew you loved Rebecca still? Whenever you touched me, I knew you were comparing me with Rebecca. The menace of Manderley is Mrs. Danvers, the home's caretaker, who has a great affection for Max's late first wife, the titular Rebecca, and thus has a growing resentment of his new wife. Danvers stalks the novel and Hitchcock's film with a foreboding and creepy presence. Judith Anderson famously portrayed Danvers in the film, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

[3:49] Michael Kunze: Do you think the dead come back and watch the living? I don't believe it. Sometimes. I wonder if she doesn't come back here to Manderley, watch you and Mr. de Winter together. You look tired. Why don't you stay here a while and rest? Listen to the sea.

[4:12] Michael Kunze: No production of Rebecca would be complete without its famous denouement, Manderley burning to the ground. And this housekeeper destroys this estate in an enormous fire, and she's standing on the top of the stairs wearing Rebecca's clothes and burns the place to the ground. It's part of what made Rebecca the Musical so expensive and alluring, its pyrotechnics, everything centered around a grand staircase ablaze.

[4:55] Michael Kunze: Rebecca the Musical started as Rebecca Das Musical, a German show first staged in Vienna in 2006 to great critical and commercial success before moving on to other successful runs across Germany and in Korea, Finland, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Japan. During that period of time, suddenly Vienna became a center of musical theater, largely because of these two guys, the composer, a guy named Sylvester LeVay and the lyricist, librettist Michael Kunze. They had written a series of very successful shows, Elizabeth, Dance of the Vampires, Mozart. They had just one hit after another, and they ran for years. They were gigantic successes.

[5:47] Michael Kunze: While LeVay and Kunze were proven hitmakers abroad, they never took off in the States. Kunze's first and last Broadway show was Dance of the Vampires in 2002. It was a bloody mess. But could things be different for Rebecca? The show started in Vienna and ran there for three years. And then it played in a lot of different European countries. And it became a hit in Japan and is now the best running musical of EMK, one of the biggest production companies in Seoul, in South Korea.

[6:30] Michael Kunze: Well, I think at this point, they came to the attention of New York producers. And the New York producers suddenly said, hey, we should, you know, if this is so successful over there, remember Les Miserables? That's another musical that started in Europe that became enormously successful internationally. We would love to have the next Les Miserables.

[6:51] Michael Kunze: Part two, get those phantom coins. Looking for their first Broadway mega hit were the producing team of Ben Sprecher and Louise Forlenza. Forlenza was a CPA by day and a theater investor by night. She mostly took the backseat to her showier, more public partner, Ben Sprecher. Ben Sprecher, who seemed to be a nice guy, he never really had a hit. He had a series of shows that he did, some of them fairly prestigious. But his biggest success was a revival of The Odd Couple. And it had Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. And it didn't get such great reviews, but they had a big name at that time. And so it ran about eight months. That's the longest running show that he had. Most of his shows closed in a matter of weeks, if not days.

[7:39] Michael Kunze: So in 2006, when Sprecher and Forlenza came upon Rebecca in Vienna, they both were convinced that this was their ticket to the Broadway big leagues. In Sprecher's pitch to potential investors, he teased over and over again that Rebecca could be the next Phantom of the Opera. He claimed that, quote, the show is built to run and run and run, bringing superior profits to investors. Phantom's very notable and very rich creator, Andrew Lloyd Webber, was also mentioned in Sprecher's pitch documents, even claiming that he was very interested in Rebecca and was rumored to have been in competition for who got the license first.

[8:30] Michael Kunze: With a budget of $14 million, Sprecher and Forlenza were on the hook to raise four times what they had ever raised before. But what was a few million for a show that was going to be the next Phantom, a show that has grossed over $6 billion worldwide? Following its Euro hit, an English version of the show staged a reading in London with its site set on London's West End. The show's esteemed director.

[8:57] Francesca Zambello: Hello, my name is Francesca Zambello. We did a reading in London, which was in part to audition to get a theater. I think it went very well in London. We had a great cast.

[9:14] Sierra Boggess: I'm Sierra Boggess and I'm an actress. I was over there to do the early stages of a show called Love Never Dies. And Francesca and I had just worked together on Little Mermaid. And she contacted me and said that they're doing a first reading of this musical of Rebecca, which I always loved that movie and that story. And so I was like, great. And we did the reading at Jerwood Studios.

[9:47] Sierra Boggess: Andrew Lloyd Webber came because we were working on our own stuff. And so then he came to see it too, what I was doing. So it was very, like, high stakes, it felt like. There were a couple of theater options. And then I think the funding didn't work out. Looking back, the show's first strikeout in London feels like an obvious premonition of bad luck to come.

[10:10] Christopher Hampton: Hello, I'm Christopher Hampton. I'm a playwright. And I wrote the book of lyrics for the musical version of Rebecca. The show was going on at the Shaftesbury Theater in London. And then there was some sort of, it was a flood. And it was also problems to do with the set, because the house that took center stage caught fire and so on. I think they had to kind of dig too deep into the foundations to be able to sustain that set. So they were having trouble with how the set was going to work. And then there was this flood. And then everybody suddenly, as far as I was concerned, because I was busy with other things, as far as I remember, all of a sudden it was decided to do the play in New York instead.

[11:00] Christopher Hampton: We all had a lot of pause and questions about the viability of the producing team. I think that they were willing to go along with these producers, even though it seemed a little bit sketchy. I mean, there was always doubt in all of our minds as to if this group could pull it off and where they were going to be getting the funding. Here again is Sierra Boggess.

[11:29] Sierra Boggess: It wasn't a warm environment. It felt like everybody was a bit on edge or something. All of a sudden, the producer, who was Benj Brekker, he fired people during the reading. And that's why it felt really bizarre to me, because everybody was so good. The problem was absolutely not the people that had been hired. He got really, really angry about stuff and that all of a sudden people were just fired the next day. And they flew in these other actors from Germany and it was very last minute. So that's why it felt hostile and it didn't feel very safe.

[12:17] Sierra Boggess: What I, as I reflect back on it, he must have just been so nervous about this whole thing. I don't know what was going on. So my agent called me and was like, it's not happening now because of this. The next thing is, okay, it is happening in New York and the readings and you'll do those readings. And then they just kept recasting basically everyone around me.

[12:43] Michael Kunze: Part three, Big Show in the Big Apple. So while Brekker and Forlenza couldn't raise the pounds to get it to London, they felt confident that they had the connections and chutzpah to raise the dollars needed to get to Broadway instead. So Brekker came home. In March of 2011, splashy stateside readings were held in New York to entice investors, again, starring Boggess. Boggess was fresh off her role as Little Mermaid on Broadway and then leading the Phantom sequel, Love Never Dies, as Christine Daae. Boggess was a big get for Rebecca.

[13:24] Sierra Boggess: There might've even been two readings that day. There was a lot of people at that as well, a full audience. That was when I did it with Carolee Carmelo was playing Mrs. Danvers and Hugh Panera was playing Max opposite me. And so once again, it was just really incredible actors and stuff. Yeah. And that was our Broadway backers audition, I guess. By November 16th, 2011, the show seemed to finally have its ducks in a row. The production's first official tweet proclaimed, mark the date. We open April 22nd, 2012 at the Broadhurst Theater.

[14:04] Blake Ross: In the weeks and months that followed, the cast and creative team got ready to go to Broadway. Scripts were being memorized, sets were being built, costumes fitted. And then in January 2012, just two weeks.

[14:19] Ben Sprecher: Prior to starting rehearsals, Sprecher announced that the show would be postponed.

[14:49] Sierra Boggess: And I believe that was in the press. It was like, real life engaged stars gonna play this, whatever, on Broadway. So Tam and I were cast together. And Tam is from London. So we were in London in his apartment. We were packing up his stuff that weekend. And he was going to move to New York with me. And I got the call from my agent while I was literally putting stuff in boxes at Tam's. I sat there, not shocked for myself, but I felt devastated for Tam, because at this point, he'd never been on Broadway. And I knew it was going to affect him more than me. That was tricky that night, because that's a whole life that now this person is literally moving from another country to come and do this show. And now in just a few days, they've canceled it. I'd never heard of anything like that before. And it was devastating.

[15:49] Kevin Stites: Well, of course, it was a disappointment. But one is sort of inured to disappointments in this business. In other words, it's the kind of thing that happens. I mean, on top of what happened in London, it seemed like a sort of ominous development. But I guess it was somewhere around that time that I decided I was thinking, you know, I wonder if this is ever going to actually happen. My name is Kevin Stites. I'm a music director, music supervisor, conductor. All of a sudden, it was like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. We don't quite have the money. We're going to do this about six weeks later. Sprecher said at the time, we are very close to meeting our financial goal, but we just ran short of time to complete capitalization with rehearsals slated to begin in two weeks. As it turned out, the show was not really close. It was stuck at $6 million, less than half their need of $14 million.

[16:49] Tripp Phillips: My name is Trip Phillips. I'm a Broadway production stage manager. I've been working in New York for about 26 years. About 10 days before the first rehearsal was scheduled to begin, I got a call from Marshall Purdy, who was the general manager and sort of Ben's right hand man on the show, saying that because of financing difficulties, the show was being delayed until the fall. That telephone call from him for the first abortion, or whatever we want to call it, the first postponement, which, of course, eventually became a cancellation, was to me out of the blue. I didn't really have any advance notice that there were issues. We had been doing our work, had completed quite a bit of the pre-production work that we do on shows before there was any indication of a problem.

[17:41] Kevin Stites: In March of that same year, good news came. Sprecher told the press, quote, We have identified the final missing piece of investment, and the Schuberts, to whom I shall forever be indebted, have graciously allowed us to resume production to open at the Broadhurst in fall of 2012. By that time, Rebecca's two engaged stars

[18:10] ⚠ About 4 minutes of audio could not be automatically transcribed.

[21:45] Blake Ross: Sprecher's ticket to redemption. Rumsdorf would put two and a quarter million dollars into the show despite never investing in the theater before or ever even meeting Ben Sprecher before. His only requirement? That he remain anonymous. Between Rumsdorf and a bridge loan from Sprecher and his associates, the show would be saved. On September 22nd, the production excitedly sent out another notice to press saying they had finally secured the money. Rebecca was ready to roll. Here's Michael Riedel from the New York Post.

[22:17] Michael Riedel: He's long considered the guy who knows all of Broadway's dirty secrets. Oftentimes, he spills them. I was on vacation with some good friends of mine in Europe and I was like, I'm done with Broadway for two weeks so I'm going to be in Spain. I remember getting back and thinking, so there's some reporting in the New York Times about this, some weird stuff going on with Ben Sprecher and Rebecca and people not being paid. So I thought, oh, I gotta roll up my sleeves and jump in. So I started making some calls and then I heard, wow, this is bad.

[23:06] Blake Ross: While Sprecher and his team hurried to get ready for their first day of rehearsals, something just didn't sit right. The bizarre rationale behind the delay of a Broadway musical whose marquee was already hanging on West 44th Street, who had already started selling tickets to the public, was enough to get Patrick Healy, then a New York Times theater reporter, digging. Healy uncovered that the big investor whose own death caused the death of this musical was a man named Paul Abrams. No obituaries, no death notices, nothing was to be found on who was supposed to be a very rich and important businessman. When Healy tried to reach out to a representative for the Abrams estate, he found a character who only identified himself as Wexler and who refused to talk on the phone.

What Healy was able to find out was that Wexler's email had only been created in the past month. On September 25th, New York woke up to a story on the front page of the New York Times titled, "Rebecca Sees Investor Fate as If Dreamt."

[24:17] Michael Riedel: These people did not exist, that these were made up characters, that there was no money, there were no investors. These had been completely made up. Ben Sprecher says that there's this, some investor, he lives in Australia. My source said, I googled where Ben said he was in Australia and it's just, it's a, it's a park bench. It's a bench in a park. He said, I don't know what's going on here, but I'm worried.

[24:48] Blake Ross: On September 26th, two FBI agents showed up at Sprecher's office. It seemed like things couldn't get worse, but you'd be wrong. Musical director Kevin Steitz.

[25:03] Kevin Steitz: The night before rehearsal number one, about three in the afternoon, I was at my granddaughter's birthday party and I started getting a flood of texts. So I left the party and it was like, oh man, I'm sorry about your show. What are you talking about? You know, they just kept coming in. So finally I got a phone call that there had been a dramatic change of events and that we were not going to be able to have rehearsal, even though it was the day before I was literally getting on a plane to come back to New York from my granddaughter's birthday. And all of us started talking. I reached out to my music staff and we all decided we would go to the first day of rehearsal anyway, because it was not clear what was happening. I believe by the time, by the end of that Sunday, word had gotten out that in fact, one of the investors was a ghost.

[25:55] Blake Ross: Here's stage manager Tripp Phillips.

[25:58] Tripp Phillips: And I remember I was back home cause it was after six o'clock on that Friday. And somebody, one of the assistants was here helping me with some little bits and pieces of things when Marshall Purdy again called and said that it was off. And I just was in a state of shock and complete astonishment that at this point, literally 72 hours, whatever it was, even less than that before the first rehearsal, they were once again, pulling the plug and disrupting everyone's lives and professional schedules and livelihood. It was really unbelievable. And I foolishly had turned down Christmas Story for Broadway that fall. We had done it the year before on the road. I had turned it down because that was a limited run.

Rebecca was supposed to be a commercial open-ended run with the possibility for a longer period of employment. So I turned that down. So I personally ended up turning down two Broadway shows that year for the two times that Rebecca did not go. And that was very difficult for me to get past.

[26:59] Blake Ross: Here's director Francesca Zambello.

[27:02] Francesca Zambello: I know we all felt completely ripped off and cheated by them. And, you know, as each thing unfolded, it seemed like could, what could be worse? So who was this ghost haunting every person who went near Rebecca the musical? That's next time on Burnt.

[27:23] Blake Ross: It's amazing that he could, in my view, look himself in the mirror, get up out of bed every day, knowing what he's been doing to these people. He almost sounds like a bit of a sadist. You think of, oh my God, how awful, how bizarre.

[27:43] Blake Ross: Burnt is a production of Broadway Podcast Network and me, Blake Ross. Reported and written by Blake Ross. Edited by Alan Seales. Supervising Producers are Brittany Bigelow and Dori Berinstein. Special thanks to Philip Boroff. For sources and more information on the Rebecca scandal, visit bpn.fm/burnt.

[28:13] Blake Ross: The views and opinions expressed by the people appearing in the podcast are their own, and their appearance in the podcast does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Broadway Podcast Network and its officers, directors, owners, employees, and agents.