RIALTO CHATTER: Panter Plans Dynamic Broadway 'Rescue', Projects Include West End SUNSET BLVD. Transfer

Howard Panter, the dynamic UK co-founder of the Ambassador Theater Group, the producing company and owner of 23 London theatre venues, is setting his sights on Broadway in a VERY big way reports Variety. The trade paper reports that he has created an ambitious list of new projects targeting for Broadway -- including a handful of productions and in very exciting news, a possible new theater space.

Panter explained to Variety that, "I've noticed a flight of investors from the Broadway scene," he's hoping to push forward with his globe-spanning aspirations to expand intercontinental theatre interests beyond the usual locations of Broadway and the West End.

Ambassador has two upcoming Broadway productions for spring, the remounting of "Guys and Dolls" and the acclaimed revival of Eugene Ionesco's "Exit the King," starring Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon.

"The majority of money for 'Guys and Dolls' has come from outside the U.S," he told Variety. "Every other industry has an international, global dynamic, but theater sometimes doesn't. It seems to me a shame."

Here are some of the productions Panter has planned reveals Variety:

A new staging of Frank Loesser's 1956 tuner "The Most Happy Fella," helmed by Casey Nicholaw ("The Drowsy Chaperone").

A New York incarnation of "Elling," Simon Bent's adaptation of a 2001 Swedish pic about a pair of socially stunted roommates. The show, which played in London in 2007, would be directed in Gotham by Doug Hughes ("Doubt").

A Broadway transfer of the stripped-down London revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Sunset Boulevard," in an actors-as-orchestra staging by Craig Revel Horwood.

A potential new New York production of his recent West End mounting of Neil LaBute's "Fat Pig."

All that is in addition to Panter's search for a building he could turn into a two-theater performance complex.

The sped up New York activity for Panter, who runs ATG with his wife, Rosemary Squire, is partly an accident of timing, he says, and partly the result of having opened an Ambassador office in New York during the last year he told Variety.

To read the entire Variety article on Panter click here.

Photo Credit: Tristram Kenton