NY Times Article about Commercially Enhancing Off-Broadway Shows

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 3/17/07 at 9:42am

"EVERYONE is doing it these days.

Second Stage Theater did it this season for the third time in its 28-year history. “Spring Awakening” might not be on Broadway if the Atlantic had not done it. Primary Stages is doing it with three of its four shows this season. With “LoveMusik,” the musical that opens at the Biltmore Theater on May 3, the Manhattan Theater Club is doing it to the tune of $2 million.

What they’re doing is making enhancement deals.

An enhancement deal, conventionally, is when a commercial producer pays money to a nonprofit theater to help subsidize a production. If a theater decides to stage a big musical, for example, a commercial producer may throw in a few hundred thousand dollars — or a couple million in some cases — to raise the show’s production values and get a sense of how it would look in a bigger theater...."


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/theater/18robertson.html?_r=1&ref=theater&oref=slogin