Broadway con was...exceedingly strange
On the positive side, I experienced none of the problems others here have described about getting into rooms, etc. Perhaps that's because I was there on Blizzard night, when there were fewer people in attendance (although there easily looked to be several thousand people there.) Regardless, access to the rooms was not a problem.
But boy, what a weird event. Totally not what I was expecting.
If the average age of attendees was over 14, I'd be surprised. There were SO MANY teeny-bopper types, and, other than their parents, virtually no adults. As a 30-something (and avid theater goer) I usually am one of the younger people in the room when I go to Broadway. Here, though, I felt like an old man crashing a kids' slumber party. Totally not what I expected.
This is of course, a good thing -- the passion for theater, and the ubiquitous knowledge of all things Broadway (so many kids singing along to every word of every song that was played) is a fantastic sign. There's always the fear that Broadway audiences are too old, and that the price of a ticket is too high to get the next generation actively involved. But any such concerns would be dispelled by a night at the Hilton, where thousands upon thousands of tweens, teens, and twenty-somethings belted out one showtune after another in unison.
But it's just not what I expected. The website doesn't make it seem as if the event were marketed to kids. The word "Broadway" doesn't connote images of screaming teens the way that the word "Bieber" does. So how in the world did they find all of these kids (and how did they afford the $95 - $600 it cost to attend the event??)
Perhaps I was just projecting, but it certainly seemed to me that I wasn't the only adult who felt uncomfortable there. There was a good number of grown-ups -- including several many decades older than I -- who seemed to be baffled as to why the crowd differed so markedly from what you'd see at a Wednesday matinee at MTC.
But clearly, the organizers knew who was coming, as their events were geared to young fanboys/girls. The Saturday night, 8:00 PM event on the mainstage featured some theater stalwarts (Anthony Rapp, Michael Riedel, others) sitting on couches on stage, sipping wine, and making phone calls -- yes, phone calls -- on their cells to various Broadway luminaries (Audra, Idina, Harvey Fierstein, Betty Buckley, Norm Lewis, etc.) When the celebrity would answer the phone, the onstage personalities stuck a microphone to the speaker of their cell, and engaged in 3 or 4 minutes of idle chitchat about nothing. (Host: "Hi! Where are you now! How's the snow! I'm here with 3,000 people!" Celeb: "Hi guys!! Love you all! Thanks for coming to Broadwaycon!!"
A big screen would display a stock headshot of whoever it was the host was talking to. As soon as the face was shown, the audience would erupt into boisterous cheers. It was really...bizarre, boring, banal, idol-worship...the sort of thing that people who watch TMZ and obsess over photos of celebrities getting into their cars would love, but completely boring for everyone else. I lasted about 30 or 40 minutes, waiting for something more interesting to happen, and when I realized it wouldn't, I got out of there. It was really odd stuff.
Another room featured a TV playing the film version of Mamma Mia, with commentators doing tongue-in-cheek, Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentary (that's the way he described it) of the film, interspersed with trivia. Mmm, ok. Not many blue-haired ladies there, either.
And yet another couple of events had kids (patrons at the Con, not professional actors) jumping on stage and singing along to Broadway soundtracks, or dancing along to clips from old Tony performances. The sort of thing that might make a parent proud, but just makes everyone else squirm.
The last event of the night on the mainstage was a concert by Krysta Rodriguez, who really impressed me (Her performances in Spring Awakening and First Date were nothing to write home about, in my opinion, but she was electric and excellent and completely wowed the crowd last night.) A concert by a Broadway star is the sort of thing you'd expect at a Broadway convention, so kudos to the planners for that. But the theme of the performance was songs from Smash, a TV show I (and, I imagine, the vast majority of Broadway patrons) have never seen, and don't particularly care about. Hearing Rodriguez sing and seeing her perform was great; listening to exposition in the intervals about why this or that song was or was not included in Smash, and why, was, again...weird. We are here to celebrate Broadway, not a TV show that ran for 17 episodes four years ago.
So, again...a strange experience through and through. I am all for any kind of event that expands the reach of Broadway and makes it more accessible to kids. But that's not the way the event was marketed, and the pricing certainly didn't suggest that it would be a kiddie-fest, either. There is so much that can be done at a fan festival for theater -- workshops, performances, lectures, Q&A's with people behind the creative process (writers, directors, actors, etc.), and on and on -- and there should have been more of that, particularly on a day when, as it turned out, the theaters were all closed and casts who might otherwise have been busy could have been booked last minute. Sing-alongs and snarky commentary on bad movies have their place, I suppose, but I didn't feel that this was the place for it.
