Isaac Butler NYT piece: "American Theater Is Imploding Before Our Eyes" and needs a government bail-out — Page 2

joevitus said: "So you get the same bloated, bland adaptations of hit movies and jukebox musicals and whatnot. It's sort of financially disastrous to attempt something new or interesting."

I see lots that is new and interesting. If you don't, that's too bad. Of course there is garbage, but why focus on that?

Fraud and embezzlement is common in the non profit sector, so it is not a stretch to say it is effecting non profit theater, this is most likely the real cause, more so than attendance or programming being too woke or not woke enough, people are crooks, covid proved this, when billions of $$ of covid relief money were pocketed .

The dumbing down has and will continue. At the end of the day it is a business. So whatever is going to get a profit. If that's more Film to Musicals, then that is what we will get. And those can be great (Hairspray) or awful (Pretty Woman) and hopefully a bunch of new musicals which can great (Kimberly Akimbo, Fun Home) or awful (Memphis). The goal should be to get butts in seats.

Maybe some of these regionals should do more things that appeal to a younger generation as opposed to doing Chekov for the 100th time.

I think people are blaming the content of theatre a bit too much.

The main issue is that the cost of attending the theatre has skyrocketed within the last two decades while wages and purchasing power for the average American have stagnated since the 1970s. This isn't just a problem for theatre. The movie industry is also suffering due to streaming and the cost of movie tickets making it far less appealing for moviegoers to spend their money on anything but the highest level of spectacle or guaranteed value; small budget comedies have essentially disappeared from theatres in recent years and gone straight to streaming, which is having its own problems with sustainability. People have also written similar articles about the music industry. Retail is collapsing in the age of Amazon. The cost of food is going up at the highest rate in decades. The cost of rent and homes has ballooned, and everyone from Gen Z to Boomers are having trouble keeping a roof over their heads.

If people had the disposable income to spend on theatre/movie/concert tickets, they would do so. But we're reaching a point where the cost of producing the arts is outpacing the public's ability to support them.

Updated On: 7/21/23 at 01:28 PM

RippedMan said: "The dumbing down has and will continue. At the end of the day it is a business. So whatever is going to get a profit."

Um, the conversation is about non-profits. So it isn't actually about "whatever is going to get a profit."

Why should Broadway be bailed out when every other dying business in America has to suck it up by itself and either solve the problem or close. Broadway is no different. If the public can’t support it, the public obviously isn’t interested. Scale Broadway show down to live within their means. Quit crying for a frigging handout. Be adults… if you can’t pay your bills, go get another type of job. Lazy people want government handouts, working people make it work!

WhoCouldBeBlue said: "Why should Broadway be bailed out when every other dying business in America has to suck it up by itself and either solve the problem or close. Broadway is no different. If the public can’t support it, the public obviously isn’t interested. Scale Broadway show down to live within their means. Quit crying for a frigging handout. Be adults… if you can’t pay your bills, go get another type of job. Lazy people want government handouts, working people make it work!"

Europe has a healthier and more robust infrastructure for the arts than the U.S. because they fund the arts at a much higher level, so it's not as if this is some out-there idea that government should invest more in the arts. German, for instance, spends 20 times more than the U.S. on arts funding. Furthermore, if wealth is not circulating in a given economy (as it's not doing here in the U.S., becoming increasingly more concentrated at the top), it is not lazy or unreasonable to ask the government to recirculate some of that wealth to go to better and more urgent use than languishing in a hoarder's trove in Switzerland.

That said, I think a government bailout of theatre in the absence of other reforms would be a temporary solution, merely kicking the can down the road in terms of the future viability of the arts. I'd rather see it go directly to working and middle class households, who can then decide what to with their money. This would support not just a single industry, but other languishing ones as well.

Contrary to your assertion that "if the public can’t support it, the public obviously isn’t interested", I think you would be surprised how much the public would support theatre if they had the money to do so, and the emotional bandwidth left over to think about anything more than how to make ends meet. I think the feeble appetite for anything more challenging or substantive than jukebox musicals is more a sign of people's economic stress and political burnout than an indication that people simply don't like challenging art.

Updated On: 7/21/23 at 04:28 PM

MikeInTheDistrict said: "I think people are blaming the content of theatre a bit too much.

The main issue is that the cost of attending the theatre has skyrocketed within the last two decades while wages and purchasing power for the average American have stagnated since the 1970s. This isn't just a problem for theatre. The movie industry is also suffering due to streaming and the cost of movie tickets making it far less appealing for moviegoers to spend their money on anything but the highest level of spectacle or guaranteed value; small budget comedies have essentially disappeared from theatres in recent years and gone straight to streaming, which is having its own problems with sustainability. People have also written similar articles about the music industry. Retail is collapsing in the age of Amazon. The cost of food is going up at the highest rate in decades. The cost of rent and homes has ballooned, and everyone from Gen Z to Boomers are having trouble keeping a roof over their heads.

If people had the disposable income to spend on theatre/movie/concert tickets, they would do so. But we're reaching a point where the cost of producing the arts is outpacing the public's ability to support them."

Absolutely agree. The content discussion is a silly distraction IMO. Good theater can succeed if it's frothy and fun or important and earnest. The other factors you mentioned are so much more at play than shows being "too educational" or "too dumbed down"

I think perhaps there may be a few more things to consider than he does in his limited article space and the great points above about the economy:

Not all theater seems to be dead.

• My 8-year old niece is staying with my parents this summer in a remote part of a red state that typically would align with the attitudes of many of the commenters on the article (and I'm sure some may be some of the commentors. Though people who hate read the NYTimes are such an oddity to me.) This summer she has been able to see a non-union community theater+ production of Annie, a camp production of Shrek, and one other show that escapes me. They've tried for years to show her the Annie movie and after seeing it live (in a probably not optimal production) she couldn't get enough of it in the movies after. All of them.

• In the same little town (of under 40,000 people) they have a community theater that does four major licensed musicals, a Disney Jr, and a crowd-pleaser play. Tickets range from under twenty bucks to thirty-nine bucks for "VIP". It's theater of people whose kids my parents know or church friends or neighbors of theirs and they love it.

• They live within two hours of four tour cities: two a tour markets, one b market, and we'll call the fourth an e market. One of the a markets has 11 tours on its Broadway season, the other nine. The b market has four and special. The e market still has three in their season. I only counted the traditional book musical tours produced by the majors not even the theaters that produce the song cycles and tribute shows for even four to six week runs (which they will see three or four of a year) or the theater-adjacent things that fill out some "Broadway series" like Choir of Man, Mannheim Steamroller. We had season tickets to one of the a's, filled in with some of the b's and the c and e didn't really exist then. But, I bet my parents see half of the shows on tour that they used to, but still see a solid 4 or 5 of the "BROADWAY SERIES" tours out. They have a major regional theater in driving distance where Broadway aimed shows with a list creatives have tried out, but they've never been. Growing up my parents went to NY for work twice a year and always came home with great stories of seeing at least two Broadway shows / trip. They've traded trips to New York to visit me and my family, my brother and my niece, my sister, and my grandparents because we all live in separate places that require flying. When they're here for a few days seeing theater isn't on our radar as we only seem to get together once or twice a year. If they travel recreationally, it's to the Smokey Mountain tourism places (Asheville/Gatlinburg) because it's drivable for them. They're not opposed to flying, they just have to do it to see their kids. So, everything else tends to be drivable.

It's hard to look at all the theater that's available to them and say theater is dead. They see four or five major Equity tours a year, a couple of the major non-union tours, three or four community shows, and three more kids shows... and they've made a third generation of theater lover.

What they don't see is the New York-packaged LORT theater that's in their region. But not for any ideological reason. It's just as close as the two farthest tour series, but it's never been on their radar and I bet if I asked them, they'd never even heard of it. And those theaters seem to be the ones most affected by what is going on with our culture. As I consider their life --- and the LORT-sized theater available to me-- they're easy to overlook. Not for any particular reason, other than after being targeted by the major tour subscription marketers (and the ballet and symphonies that perform in the same buildings), their local community+ theater, and the kids stuff, they're saturated with being marketed to. Not that the LORT theater in their region would know HOW to reach / market them to pitch them the shows they're programming but that's a whole different issue.

To dig into the content part of that: what can that LORT theater produce and present that competes with all that in marketing attention. Hairspray? It was on their subscription last year. Annie? Their community theater did it AND it's touring to them next season. So you bob away from the shows touring and you're left filling in around them with the classics whose rights aren't tied up in a recent or upcoming revival and new works? Clue was a massive hit for the regions in the last few years, but that's one of the most famous brands on the planet. Their LORT-B regional theater so they're high quality (arguably more so than some of tours), but not someone's kid or neighbor or cousin. So the interaction with the community is minimal and limited to the theater's small administration staff. Would better coverage by the local media alleviate the awareness part? Sure. But it's not the magic bullet to breaking a new work in severely crowded markets.

The other problem I see is how spread out all these metropolitan areas have become. The bar to drive home and then back for the theater has gone up because all these cities are traffic choked and the boomers have all moved to burbs that don't seem to have even existed twenty and thirty years ago. You can make that turnaround a few times a month. Not a few times a week.

If we're bemoaning the state of New York-packaged, LORT-size regional theater and what it would take to save, what are we trying to save? Sure, we can chase donors and beg them to step up their philanthropy. But to what audience? You can subsidize the ticket price down to what motivates "the new generation with no disposable income" in the hopes of being a motivator, but what price actually becomes that motivator? It doesn't seem to be $30 or even $20 because all the major LORT theaters have initiatives trying to pull in different communities with pricing that low and it's still not motivating them into a reliable subscription base. Sure it adds up for a couple of two to buy tickets, pay the fees, taxes, and parking, but is a $10 ticket really a motivator if $20 or $30 isn't. Even for a couple. And they're paying that for their local community+ theater/kids theater.

To solve a problem you have to be specific about it and it seems like we're trying to jump up and down and say CARE ABOUT THEATER to people who actually have an abundance of theater options of ALL sorts, donors who ARE funding all of these, and a government who built the buildings that almost ALL the theater I listed are in. Perhaps, when we strip all of this away and dig in we can fix this for the theaters we're rooting for.

The reason I went to such great lengths to not specifically name the area is because as I dig around this I see how many of the metropolitan areas of the country share these exact same conditions.

Updated On: 7/21/23 at 06:33 PM

I'm in Chicago and I see plenty of theater and don't pay $150. Most of the shows advertise how to get the cheaper tickets, etc. So, the options are there. I haven't paid over $40 for anything here.

WhoCouldBeBlue said: "Why should Broadway be bailed out when every other dying business in America has to suck it up by itself and either solve the problem or close. Broadway is no different. If the public can’t support it, the public obviously isn’t interested. Scale Broadway show down to live within their means. Quit crying for a frigging handout. Be adults… if you can’t pay your bills, go get another type of job. Lazy people want government handouts, working people make it work!"

Oooh! Dated, out of touch bootstraps ideology! I knew it would show up at some point! Everyone take a shot!