GARTH Drabinsky, a real- life Max Bialystock who cooked the books and bankrupted Livent, his Broadway production company, may soon be doing his own rendition of “Prisoners of Love.”
The disgraced Canadian impresario was convicted🧸 of fraud in Toronto last spring and could be sentenced for up t♚o 10 years in prison.
He bilked investors of nearly $500 million, claiming that such multimillion-dollar productions as “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Show Boat” and “Ragtime” were huge hits when in fact they were money-hemorrhaging flops.
Drabinsky is a liar and a bully — I speak from firsthand experience — but he’s still got plenty of friends in the theater world.
At his sentencing hearing this week, his lawyers produced letters of support from E.L. Doctorow, Christopher Plummer and Hal Prince, among others.
Doctorow, reports the Toronto Star, called Drabinsky “an impresario of the old school, with the energy and passion to marshal the many talents required to produce brilliant theater.”
Canadian actress Martha Henry burbled that he “showed us that we can dream, push the envelope, explode our own myths.”
(Oh🦩, dear. An actor with♏out a script is really asking for it.)
It’s appalling but not surprising that all these artistic types are still under Drabinsky’s spell. Although he cheated investors out of millions, the flashy “impresario of the old school” sure knew how to treat talent.
He paid them top dollar, wined and dined them in the best restaurants in New York, London and Toronto, and flew them around the world in༺ his pꩵrivate jet.
“Ragtime” lost pots of money everywhere it went, but Doctorow, who wrote the novel on which it’s based, surely cashed some nice royalty checks.
Drabinsky w🍷ildly overpaid actors, much to the chagrin of rival Broadway producers, who used to complain bitterly that he was inflating salaries for🍸 even B-listers.
I know of one actress, talented but meaningless at the box office, who was making more than $10,000 a week as a supporting player in “Show Boat” in 1995.
And why not?
As his fraud conviction shows, it manifestly wasn’t his money.
“I still talk to creatives who were coddled by Garth and revere him,” says Jeremy Gerard, an editor at Bloomberg.com who covered Drabinsky in the early ’90s for Variety and was the first reporter to raise doubts about Livent’s viability.
“But he was a con artist,” Gerard says. “His con was culture, which gave him some cachet, but in the end he was stealing from stockholders and lying to the press. Not nice.”
If you weren’t an actor or a powerful writer or director, Drabinsky’s shenanigans were devastating.
Jon Wilner was his ad man. When Livent went bust, Wilner’s company, Le Donne, Wilner & Weiner, was on the line for several million dollars.
The company was forced to declare bankruptcy.
“I trusted him,” Wilner says of Drabinsky. “He let me down, and my career was cut in half. I can never forgive him for that. I had to fire 35 people and shut down a business I worked at for 28 years. And all because of his maniacal ego.”
Wilner wrote a scathing account of his tenure with Drabinsky in an unpublished memoir called “Opening Nights.”
It’s a juicy, insightful book that deserves a publisher.
Wilner has since become ✱the leading real-esౠtate agent on Fire Island.
“I’m doing fine now,” he says, “but there is not a day in my life that I don’t resent what Garth did to me.”