The Theatre's Certainly Not What It Was

Is the theatre dying?

Yes and No. 

Theatre as we've practiced it for thousands of years is not dying. Theatre as its practiced today in the United States (and elsewhere) might be. It looks like big commercial theatre -- in other words, Broadway -- must either die or evolve.

Nationally, theatre attendance is down 20-30% since the pandemic. That's a lot!

My personal bet is that Broadway will become less and less theatre, and more and more theme park. Just look at Back to the Future, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Beetlejuice, Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark, and others. Some of these shows are returning to the Ziegfeld model -- lots of eye candy, just a dollop of content.

And let's remember, theatre has been called The Fabulous Invalid for almost a century. Wikipedia tells us:

The Fabulous Invalid is a 1938 stage play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart following the oscillating fortunes of a fictitious Broadway theater, the Alexandria, in the period between 1900 and 1930. The play's title has since entered the vernacular as a synonym for the theater.

Or as Tom Stoppard puts it in Shakespeare in Love:

Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Fennyman: So what do we do?

Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.

Fennyman: How?

Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.

It's a joke but it's also a terrible truth. It really is a mystery most of the time, and that makes long-term planning -- any planning, really -- very difficult. And the nature of this beast is that those obstacles and that disaster are more or less continuous and seemingly random.

As as example, New Line has had financial trouble now and then over the years, but we've always found our way back to stability. In one of my life's greatest ironies, in March 2020, we had finally managed to get New Line in a really stable place financially. We had no debt, the shows ahead were guaranteed sellers (Head Over Heels and Urinetown), and we were planning a killer 2020-2021 season, opening with Something Rotten! New Line was going to be on solid ground again for a long time to come.

And then the Plague hit and all the theatres got shut down.
Eerily like Shakespeare in Love.

Since New Line returned to the stage in fall 2021, it has been a real struggle. Our audiences are slowly returning to their previous levels, but slowly. Of the first four shows we produced after the pandemic, all four had to cancel some performances because of Covid. We were determined to pay everyone their full amount anyway, even though we lost audience revenue; but that put New Line back into financial struggle.

Meanwhile, every day now there's another item in the news about a regional theatre canceling a show, cancelling a season, or in many cases, shutting down for good. It's terrifying. New Line will soon open its 32nd season; and in June 2025 we'll produce our 100th show. We hope. The possibility that New Line could be forced to shut down -- especially over money -- just seems so depressing.

It feels like we reputedly take two steps forward, and then one step back.

Luckily, the New Line donors have been extremely generous through this whole ordeal, and still now as we struggle to come back.

The other good news is that, as commentators and pundits discuss the current state of the American theatre, two things are true. First, more new musicals are being produced across the country than ever before in history; and there is a young and growing fan base for musicals, like never before. Second, the model that most experts suggest for regional theatres to adopt is pretty much the same model New Line is built on. So it seems we're in better shape than some to weather this storm.

But that doesn't mean it's easy.

And my personal opinion, especially after studying and writing about theatre for so long, is that American theatre will not die; but it will become something else. The 1990s brought us a revolution in the art form, as quirkier, more personal, more artistic musicals finally had a place to find an audience in the New Regional Theatre movement. And New Line was born right in the middle of that movement. Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen writes in her outstanding book Directors and the New Musical Drama:

After the pioneering efforts of theatres such as the Public Theater and Playwrights Horizons in New York, the idea of the serious nonprofit musical spread to theatres across America during the 1990s. While these shows met with varying levels of economic and critical success, the very existence of this alternative home for the art form began to redefine the musical, offering an alternative to both the traditional Broadway musical and the new West End shows. As the economics of the commercial theatre became increasingly forbidding, the nonprofit theatre became vital incubators for musical drama and nurtured a new generation of musical theatre writers.

Maybe the 2020s will be another revolution in American theatre, ignited by the necessities of the pandemic. Maybe we'll return to the basics, as we have periodically in the past. Designer Robert Edmond Jones wrote in his brilliant book, The Dramatic Imagination:

The only theatre worth saving, the only theatre worth having, is a theatre motion pictures cannot touch. When we succeed in eliminating from it every trace of the photographic attitude of mind, when we succeed in making a production that is the exact antithesis of a motion picture, a production that is everything a motion picture is not and nothing a motion picture is, the old lost magic will return once more. The realistic theatre, we may remember, is less than a hundred years old. But the theatre – great theatre, world theatre – is far older than that, so many centuries older that by comparison it makes our little candid-camera theatre seem like something that was thought up only the day before yesterday.

In 1973, producer-director Joseph Papp wrote about The New York Shakespeare Festival in the New York Times:

Our artistic style is defined in every production on our stages: forthrightness, vigor, and the direct search for the meaning of man in his family and in society are the common characteristics. It is the social conscience of this theatre which distinguishes it from other theatres. We constantly reflect, and react to, the shifting societal scene and attempt to articulate this shift in terms of theatre workers, plays, and audiences. Our long-range artistic plans, therefore, evolve from a recognition of the need for humanity, intelligence, and feeling in a fast changing world. We will address ourselves to these needs in the year ahead and welcome the thrill of that challenge.

He easily could have been writing about New Line in the 21st century. Even further back in 1962, Broadway composer Jerry Bock (Fiddler on the Roof, Fiorello!, She Loves Me) predicted something which is only now finally happening:

Shortly it will happen. The American musical will shed its present polished state and become an untidy, adventurous something else. Shortly it will exchange its current neatness and professional grooming for a less manicured appearance, for a more peculiar profile. It will swell beyond or shrink from the finesse that regulates it now. It will poke around. It will hunt for. It will wander and wonder. It will try and trip. But at least it will be moving again, off the treadmill, out of the safety zone, crossing not at the green, but in between...

Bock went on:

The new musical may not take place between 41st and 54th street east or west of Broadway. That is, not at first. It may start in San Francisco or Chicago or Minneapolis. Or Lincoln Center. It may come from London or Paris or Rome or Johannesburg. Or the Village. It will probably be viewed and noted with greater interest. We will be less provincial about protecting the American-Broadway-musical-image. We will eliminate the high tariff against vigorous ideas not coming from The Street. We will join the common market of the theatrical world. Our eyes will stray, our ears will sharpen. And what we see and hear from everywhere will prepare us, will help us make our own new statement. Broadway may become one of many alternatives. It may, along with the musical, change its spots. And we may desert it now and then in search of something else. It won’t mesmerize as much. Nor will it strangle. Its monopoly days are numbered. Nothing more exciting in the theatre will happen than this new musical.

That's nothing to be afraid of, as long as we remember that commercial theatre is an historical anomaly. Storytelling is an essential basic need of humans. Commercializing it -- monetizing it -- is literally a perversion of nature. Humans are evolved to communicate nearly everything through storytelling, so to make access to storytelling dependent on disposable wealth is arguably an abomination.

The reason theatres like New Line are legally "nonprofit" and exempt from taxation, is because we as a society believe that storytelling is as vital to a community's well-being as education and healthcare. The reason people send us donations is because they believe that what we do is essential and they are investing in their community. If our ticket prices covered the actual expenses of our shows, they'd cost $70-80 each. The structure of our nonprofit status allows for donations and grants to subsidize that ticket price so that we can charge a lot less.

Otherwise, our audience would be priced out, or we'd have to pay our artists nothing. And we don't pay anyone particularly well even in flush times!

Even more good news. Most of the theatres that are shutting down (though not all!) are huge organizations with huge staffs, huge overhead, huge production costs, dozens of union contracts, and often, a physical theatre to maintain and operate. New Line is largely free from all that, in part thanks to the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, who built us an artistic home in the Marcelle.

Thankfully, in the grand scheme of things, New Line is pretty small. While some theatres have multi-million dollar budgets, our annual budget in normal times is about $120.000, even less these days. And during our last "normal" season, about 80% of our budget went directly to producing shows. Our minimal overhead costs are part of what lets us survive through all this.

After all, it ain't over till the big-boned lady sings.

Or to paraphrase The Unsinkable Molly Brown, we ain't down yet!

On the other hand, we ain't exactly up either. The Gods of the Theatre have smiled on us; though I wish they'd smile a bit bigger...

As we have for thirty years, we depend on you. New Line belongs to you. To subscribe to our awesome coming season, click here. To make a generous donation, click here. And meanwhile, help us spread the word!

Thank you, St. Louis. We've made it this far. We ain't down yet. You need us and we need you!

Long Live the Musical! And the Theatre!
Scott

P. S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, including my latest, He Never Did Anything Twice: Deconstructing Stephen Sondheim; and Rescuing Cats: The Musical That's Better Than You Think, click here.