Get a New Rubber Band

This piece in the New York Times today gives a good recounting of the bumpy ride that Broadway has been experiencing for the last few months.

First, there was Black Tuesday wherein a bunch of aged shows that really needed to close in order to make way for something new actually did close. Instead of being seen in this light, it was used as an opportunity to whine about economic conditions by people whose understanding of economics is limited to being able to repeat the jingle from those “$5 Footlong” commercials.

Then there was the day that 40 new shows opened.  This didn’t fit the narrative.  Wasn’t the world ending?  After all, you could get any regular sub at Subway for just $5 and “Hairspray” was closing.  How will we capture the zeitgeist of our time if not through “Hairspray” and the short-lived musical based on the 1974 movie “Young Frankenstein”?

No, it seemed that plays were taking the place of these timeless classics.

Plays?  What’s next, cannibalism instead of dropping by Bond 45 after the show for a late dinner?

As it turns out, the “burst of plays” as the New York Times describes it brought the total number of Broadway productions to 45, which is the most since Reagan was President and Knight Rider was on TV and being watched without irony.

Plays are cheaper to produce and can therefore be sold more cheaply, and with the European tourists staying home with economic and currency-exchange problems of their own, there are fewer unsuspecting victims to foist a musical based on a movie that wasn’t that popular 25 years ago but which now costs $110 a ticket.

Plays?  Sounds like a pretty rational response to me.  In fact, it’s how the economy works.  If something doesn’t make economic sense because of changing conditions, that thing stops appearing or changes or diminishes in number, while something else rises.

The plays haven’t been knockout successes in many cases, but with a more modest cost structure, they don’t have to be.

Broadway, like an individual theatre, is about full usage.  There is no point in letting a house sit idle, and for that matter, letting a seat in a house sit idle.

But here’s the trick.  During good times and $5 footlong times, the industry and everyone in it must not forget to build audience, preferably among the people who live in your backyard.  If you do that, you get this:

“I think we’ve finally hit a wall and realized that the audience for Broadway plays is only so big,” said Jeffrey Seller, a musical theater producer whose credits include “Rent,” “Avenue Q,” “In the Heights” and the current revival of “West Side Story.” “I think the play producers finally stretched the rubber band too far, and it snapped.”

Everything has a limit, but Broadway’s is artifically small.  Because by neglecting the local audience in both marketing and content, Broadway has leveraged itself into the danger zone: creatively dubious shows designed to appeal to someone from out of town (perhaps with only a passing knowledge of English) making a split second decision based on a billboard and marketing that, if it speaks to New Yorkers at all, talks only about price.

Broadway should have been and should be working to grow that rubber band.  Cultivating an audience is hard, painstaking work; it’s a heck of a lot easier, when times are good anyway, to surf the wave of tourist-based spending.  In fact, you can do both, but the tourist-based spending has to be the ‘kicker.’  The thing that makes your successful show obscenely successful, not its core business model.

In the short run, I think Jeffrey Seller is right: there may be too many shows for demand, and that’s ok.  These shows can and should be able to live on less.  But in the long run, Broadway has the chance to grow its audience so that the day to day base of activity is higher and booms simply put it over the top.

I keep saying this, but perhaps not enough:  the world is now being remade.  Those of us who were born before the 90′s (yes, even you, 20 year olds) must begin to assume that just about anything that we have come to feel is permanent and immovable is neither of those things.  The ultimately bad practices of Broadway for the last decade or so are not just things that can change, but which should.