A Phantom menace: why West End shows should not fear the Olympics

Instead of closing production

Olympic Games in 2012, Andrew Lloyd Webber and other producers should use their entrepreneurial skills to ensure the show goes to

In a business like the theater of the West End, where trust is all the news earlier this month that Andrew Lloyd Webber plans to close some of its West End shows including Phantom of the Opera during the Olympic week to appear as Mary Poppins to announce the death of childhood. Nobody knows exactly the effect the Olympics will be the scene of the West End, but it is unlikely to be as bad as the bombing - the only sustained period of the closure of the West End Theatre in living memory. Lloyd Webber certainly can not think that some people running around a track in East London are a greater threat to the theater, like Hitler, plague, and the Puritans?

There are reasons to nervousness of the contractor. In 2010, the European Tour Operators Association published research suggesting that previous Olympic Games had a "toxic" effect on the number of foreign visitors. Sydney, Athens and Beijing all wildly exaggerated numbers of visitors to their games, in part because regular visitors or potential visitors who have no interest in sport tend to stay away from Olympic years.

• are regular visitors to the West End theater kept afloat during the summer months. A West End show is the key to the route of many people in London, but many tourists will simply not be in London next summer. Ticket Agencies are preparing for a bad deal. But perhaps they should seek to turn a crisis into an opportunity. Attend a performance is an important part of the experience of London (in a way that was not in Sydney, Athens and Beijing) and Olympic visitors to be attracted by access to theaters and marketing easy initiatives ticket will be strongly encouraged by the Society of London Theatre, which is an active approach. After all, there are only a few hours so you can see the pole vault and synchronized swimming.

If the Olympics have a depressing effect on the number of visitors and the assistance of the West End this year that the London Games will present on television screens in the world could produce a long-term benefit for tourism and theater in the years to come. Hope that Danny Boyle did not take any advice for the opening ceremony of the award ceremony in Beijing, where British culture was represented by Leona Lewis trills off a bus.

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