RTÉ lost €2.2M on a Toy Show musical staged in a venue not built for theatre

Toy Show the Musical cost RTÉ €2.7M and lost €2.2M over 27 performances, each costing €100,000 with more than €81,400 lost per show, figures the broadcaster gave to Oireachtas committees in 2023. The show went into a venue not built for theatre; 11,044 tickets sold at prices from €25, while the marketing budget ballooned from €156,020 to €339,634 — €30.75 of marketing per ticket. Writing in The Irish Times, Una Mullally called it 'a cynical commercial endeavour' leveraging the one bit of goodwill RTÉ had: the Toy Show brand.

RTÉ's head of strategy Rory Coveney defended the project to the committee as a 'creative and commercial risk', but everyone Mullally spoke to in Irish live events had been aghast. Playwright Phillip McMahon told Morning Ireland the spend was extraordinary for Irish theatre, where large productions cost hundreds of thousands; TG4's Oscar-nominated An Cailín Ciúin cost less than half. Former chairwoman Moya Doherty — a producer of the Broadway flop The Pirate Queen, reported to have lost about $16M — fudged when asked what she had thought of it.

Mullally noted even star Ryan Tubridy wanted no part in it, that the show could never tour internationally because the Toy Show is a parochial cultural meme, and that the failure extended RTÉ's governance crisis from finances into creative projects. Interim director general Adrian Lynch framed the wider scandal as a governance issue, but, she argued, anyone senior who didn't shout stop owed the public a detailed accounting of what was spent and where.

€2.7M spent, €2.2M lost across 27 performances — €100,000 per show, more than €81,400 lost per show — with the set left gathering dust in a warehouse.

An organisation with zero musical-theatre experience produced a large-scale musical and set 'hair-raising' commercial targets for a venue that was never a theatre.

The marketing budget more than doubled mid-run — €30.75 spent selling each €25 ticket — a panic spend visible in the broadcaster's own numbers.

The project was structurally unsellable beyond Dublin: a parochial brand that could not tour or draw tourists, with costs scaled for a franchise.

Licensing a beloved brand into a business you know nothing about buys every lesson the expensive way — the theatre trade saw the failure before opening night.

Coveney has since left RTÉ, the set sits in a warehouse gathering dust, and the broadcaster faced calls to publish a detailed breakdown of the production's costs rather than the broad brushstrokes given to the Oireachtas committees — one more layer in the 2023 scandal that consumed RTÉ's management.