The arrival of these “serious musicals” brings sharp focus to what could be called the Fabulous Paradox of Broadway today. Record grosses pile up while the number of shows decreases, especially the number of straight plays. In the last four seasons 121 shows have opened on Broadway, only 28 of them plays. And most of these plays did not survive. Why has Broadway become a desert for serious drama? To provide some answers, the Broadway establishment has called in a consulting firm, Bain & Co. of Boston, to analyze the problem. Jack Goldstein, the coordinator of the Broadway Initiatives Working Group, says the chief idea to emerge so far is to establish a trust fund that would help finance productions. “Bain is going to give a diagnosis of the legal structure of the trust, what it would do, how it would be governed and how it would be funded,” says Goldstein.
In other words, “Hey kids, let’s have a bureaucracy!” The heart does not leap at diagnoses, legal structures and other terms like “common agenda, innovative thinking, how the creative individual is fitting into life in New York.” It’s not easy to see the unions hanging out with producers and theater owners, furiously thinking up innovations while starry-eyed creative individuals await instructions about how to fit into New York life. Throwing consultancies and agendas at the craziest business in the world is like forming a Crap-Shooters Initiatives Working Group around the common agenda of rolling sevens at Las Vegas.
Why are there so few serious works on Broadway? The question calls for an anthropologist, who would discover that the tribe of Homo Broadwackus (more than half of whom are tourists) doesn’t like serious works, at least not to the extent needed to make them hits. Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” with the greatest reviews of the decade, lost money. What happened was that its natural audience came to see it, but that audience wasn’t big enough to give it the multiyear run at capacity that makes a hit on Broadway.
The real answer is, so what? The place for serious plays is the vast culture of theaters and theater people who inhabit off-Broadway, off-off Broadway and as many offs as you need to get your play done. Yes, there are a few writers like Terrence McNally (“Master Class”) who hit a public nerve and make a score. But the great majority of people who do plays should shake the Broadway fantasy out of their anachronistic minds. Even Neil Simon has forsaken Broadway, which has become a theme park for Godzilla-size musicals. And it’s going to get more so when Disney opens its operation on 42d Street. Those guys are going to send the Broadway theater to cyberia, with the technical know-how that will enable them to rival the coming mutations of computers, television and movies.
Meanwhile a smart fellow like Evan Shapiro, the 28-year-old marketing director for “Bring in ‘Da Noise,” is thinking straight. That show has a “limited run standpoint,” says Shapiro. “Broadway to us is not the ultimate. Our plan is to burn brightly and then take off for another place–Paris, London, Tokyo, other world capitals. We don’t plan on running past New Year’s Eve 1996.” But then he adds, “Of course, if we’re selling out next December, will we extend? I don’t know.” The lure of Broadway dies hard.
