A comeback for Groundhog Day

The forecast is good for the musical Groundhog Day returning to London for a West end run.

The show, based on the classic movie which starred Bill Murray as a discontented television weatherman forced to relive the same day, over and over again, in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, won Olivier honours for best musical — and a best actor prize for its star Andy Karl — when it opened at the Old Vic last year and played a sold-out run.

And then it moved to Broadway ... where it never found its feet.

Karl injured his knee just before opening night and despite limping on, Groundhog Day played just 176 performances and closed last month — one of the biggest upsets in recent New York theatre history.

But director Matthew Warchus told me recently that he wants to have another go at it and find a West end theatre.

Warchus and other executives connected to the production said they would do more work on the show: adding some new songs from Tim Minchin, and re-writing Danny Rubin’s book.

Peter Darling, the star choreographer, was not able to complete his work on the musical because of ill health and perhaps co-choreographer ellen Kane will start afresh.

One big mistake the people behind Groundhog Day made was not to launch it in the U.S. first — say, in Chicago or Boston.

‘It was probably foolish — and arrogant — of us to start a musical, set in middle America, in South London,’ an investor in the show told me.

‘With hindsight, it’s easy to see now that we would have better understood what we needed to do to improve it if we’d started somewhere out of town, in America.’

There’s no timeline for the show to hit the West end. In addition to the work Minchin and Rubin need to do, there’s the question of theatre availability. I sense there’s a lot of musical (theatre) chairs about to happen.