British tourists taking advantage of the weak dollar to do their Christmas shopping in New York are finding Broadway theatres dark, as a strike by stagehands stretches into the lucrative holiday season.

Barbara Dow, a civil servant from Beckenham, Kent, and her daughter Joanna Lock, an ambulancewoman from Bethnal Green, East London, turned up to buy tickets on the Great White Way yesterday only to find most shows cancelled.

“We wanted to spend one evening at the theatre. We are quite disappointed,” Ms Dow said. “It’s the first visit to New York for both of us. We had heard there was a strike but we were not sure it was still on.”

Her daughter added: “It’s a shame really. A lot of people come from England to do their Christmas shopping at this time of year. People show up and it’s all shut.”

The longest Broadway strike since 1975 – when musicians downed instruments for 25 days – has been costing the city up to $17 million (£8 million) a day since it began on November 10.

A total of 27 shows – including such hits as Monty Python’s Spamalot and Phantom of the Opera – have been cancelled as the holiday season approached.

Stagehands, represented by Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, object to the looser work rules being demanded by the League of American Theatres and Producers.

One sticking point is the requirement that stagehands get paid for the entire duration of the load-in – the job of setting up the stage for a show – even if they are not needed the whole time. Pickets outside the theatres brandish signs opposing changing working practices. Despite hopes of a settlement after a top mediator from Disney intervened, talks collapsed on Sunday, leaving theatres closed for at least another week.

That means that most of Broadway will remain dark through tomorrow’s Thanksgiving holiday and the traditionally festive weekend – a holiday week that brought in more than $23 million in ticket sales last year.

Eight productions that have separate contracts with the stagehands’ union - including Mary Poppins and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee – are continuing to perform.

But the theatre owners thwarted a bid by the producers of the musical Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! to cut a side deal with the union to stay open. The Jujamcyn theatre chain said that the St James Theatre, where Grinchis playing, would remain closed until all theatres had reached a settlement. The strike threatens the scheduled opening of five plays on Broadway, including Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, which is due to debut on December 13.

American visitors voiced their unhappiness yesterday outside the cut-price tickets booth in Times Square. Tonya Cleveland, a teacher from Stanton, Virginia, travelled to New York with her husband and two children to watch the annual Thanksgiving Parade and see a couple of Broadway shows.

“My family was going to see Dr Zeuss’ Grinch. we planned our trip mainly for the shows. We chose New York over Can-cún,” she said. But Brian Goodspeed, a policeman from White Bear Lake, Minnesota, making his first trip to the city with four of his six children, said that he would survive. “We are in New York. You cannot be disappointed in New York.”

Great White Way

— The first known British actor to play on Broadway was George Frederick Cook in 1796. His remains are rumoured to have later appeared on stage as Yorick, the jester whose skull is exhumed, in a later production of Hamlet

— So dissatisfied were audiences with the Park Theatre’s 1825 production of Richard III that they eventually rioted during a performance, entirely destroying the interior of the theatre

— The first matinee performances on Broadway came in 1839 when the National Theatre altered its regular evening performance times to accommodate Cordelia Howard, the star of its hit adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Evening performances were deemed too late for the five-year-old

— The Church of the Transformation on Fifth Avenue has been a Broadway institution since 1870 when it hosted the funeral of George Holland after another church refused to bury a member of the acting profession. “The Little Church Around the Corner", it has stained glass windows portraying actors

Source: www.talkinbroadway.com

Times Recommends

• No cause for celebration in crushed Sarajevo
• Jazz funeral for the final victims of Katrina
• French fined for 'insulting' civil servants