John Adams said: "I hate the way nominated plays get short-shrift every year.
Years ago, the telecasts used to include representations of the plays as equally as they do the nominated musicals. This year, especially, I REALLY wanted to see snippets fromNetwork,To Kill a Mockingbird, and all of the nominated plays. They could have been recorded in their theaters, and shown during the telecast (like they did for King Kong).
This season, the plays were so, SOmuch more interesting than the musicals. Their exclusion from the telecast points up how the Tonys telecast has become less about honoring the award worthy shows, and more about being one big TV commercial to promote the shows that can generate revenue.
What dummy made the decision that musicals are the ONLY shows worth seeing on Broadway (and consequently the only shows that get TV exposure)?"
I agree with you completely, but Broadway needs to have the Tony awards nationally televised on a major network, and its ratings are marginal at best. Televising snippets of plays would do nothing but further hurt the ratings.
The person who said that Broadway is making huge profits has been mislead by the references to record numbers of Broadway theatergoers. Still only one out of five Broadway musicals recovers its investment. Making an "investment" in a Broadway musical is really making a donation and receiving a lottery ticket in return that you might have backed a Wicked or Book of Mormon and will genuinely make a ton of money.
Investing in Broadway productions is considered so risky that under the federal securities law most individuals before they can purchase an interest in a musical must qualify as "accredited investors." Here is the definition of one:
- a natural person who has individual net worth, or joint net worth with the person’s spouse, that exceeds $1 million at the time of the purchase, excluding the value of the primary residence of such person;
Believe it or not, straight plays used to be broadcast in prime time on the major networks. For example, in 1967 Arthur Miller's The Crucible starring George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst aired on CBS in glorious black and white.
With the dumbing down of our culture, this of course doesn't happen any more. Instead we get crass reality television like The Apprentice which starred Trump instead of Scott and Dewhurst and made our President a national figure.
