Earlier this week, the 5th Avenue Theatre announced that Something Rotten!—a new musical comedy about an arrogant Shakespeare—had dropped out of the coming season and was going directly to Broadway.

This was good news for producer Kevin McCollum—Rent, The Drowsy Chaperone—but not such great news for the 5th, which was looking forward to strong sales and bragging rights for staging this world premiere with high-octane talent, including director Casey Nicholaw, currently best known for his work on The Book of Mormon.

Its New York workshop is said to have been a big success and the St. James on Broadway needed something to fill its house after Side Show, a musical about real-life conjoined twins, proved to be a fast flop.

So where does that leave the 5th Ave, besides scrambling for something to fill its May slot? Did they just get screwed by people with more clout?

The departure seemed to be amicable, at least on the surface—McCollum offered all 5th Ave ticket-holders free tickets to the Broadway version through Sept 7, 2015. And Bridget Summers of the 5th says the negotiations were "very friendly, very mutually supportive... it’s not that a contract was broken—there was a contract in place, they asked to be let out of it, and we let them out."

She said the deal included some money for the 5th to compensate for its production and marketing costs so far, plus funds for whatever marketing campaign the new show will need.

The 5th has a longstanding strong and friendly working relationship with the producer," she said. "They (and we) were very careful not to be adversarial, and we would most definitely like to work together again."

The 5th says it's looking at some musicals in its new-works program to find something that still be a world premiere and still in the same spirit as the (allegedly) goofy Something Rotten!. The theater hopes to announce what will take its place in a week or two.

"In the grand scheme, worse things have happened," Summers said. "You may recall in 2005, The 5th learned six weeks before it was due to open that the national tour of Dr. Doolittle was canceled (and it was our holiday show at that). A production of Sound of Music was quickly mounted and ended up being very successful."