I did not have a clear idea of how Broadway worked before living in New York. I understand better now but still it is something more complicated than I expected.
Broadway refers to the live theatre culture in New York City. It is also the name of a street running diagonally south/north across the grid of Manhattan. Around 42nd Street and Broadway is Times Square, and all major theatres are there. When I first moved to New York I lived on Broadway at the north of Manhattan, so not all of Broadway the street is expensive. The Broadway part of the Theatre district is perhaps the most crowded place in New York. There are Broadway theatres and Off-Broadway. These designations refer to seating capacity; Broadway theatres can accommodate more than 500 and off-Broadway 100-499. I have read that there are 40 Broadway theatres, and most or all of these are in the Theatre District. I am looking at the Sunday edition of The New York Times. I count 55 shows running live right now, plus one big show soon to be released. I recognize the names of perhaps 40 of these and could give a description of 30 of them, so perhaps I have some familiarity with the theatre here but I would not say that I care too much. In addition to these shows I expect that smaller venues must be presenting another 30-40 shows only in Manhattan.
I am from Seattle. In Seattle, I think there are two theatres of a size equivalent to a Broadway theatre (the 5th Avenue Theatre and the Paramount, with the latter being a general performing arts space and not just for theatre), and I expect that at any time in Seattle, perhaps 3-4 shows would be performing in these and some smaller theatres which seat at least 100. I could be wrong about my numbers but this is my guess. Seattle has about 4 million people in its metropolitan area, as compared to New York City’s 20 million. New York is much bigger, but still, there is proportionately a lot more interest and infrastructure for this kind of culture in NYC than Seattle.
I am surprised about the amount of theatre here. It must mean that a lot of people are going to these shows because they operate on a commercial model, and these buildings are in Manhattan’s best real estate and it takes a lot of professional crew to maintain them. Something else surprising to me is how many bad shows there are. It takes months to prepare a show, and if a show has 10 actors, 10 singers, 10 dancers, 10 musicians, and 10 crew people – I cannot guess at how many people a musical would take, but somewhere around this number I expect – and then if at the end that show is found to be bad and does not sell tickets, then what kind of financial risks are there in starting new shows? Most shows are mediocre at best and typically bad. In the rest of the United States the biggest theatres often have traveling shows which formerly were on Broadway, but typically, only a good show would travel. Many shows die in New York.
I went to see Big Fish last week. It was a big musical, and tickets typically sold for $90 each, but I unexpectedly got 2 free tickets for buying a $100 membership in a club which allows people to buy tickets to poorly attended shows for $5. Big Fish was poorly attended and is about to close after about 100 shows. If there were were 5 shows a week, then I expect that means the show ran for 5-6 months, and no doubt to write a play, compose music, assign choreography, build a set, design costumes, rehearse, and everything else, it must have taken at least 6 months. The show was okay. I would not recommend it. There were plenty of empty seats in the big theatre. Did someone lose their investment on this? Did the script look as mediocre on paper as the play did when performed? Who funds these things? This is the usual fate of most Broadway shows, I think.
Many off-Broadway shows are not musicals and have small casts. It seems like New York hosts enough performers to staff every show, then many more performers who cannot get work or who are willing to perform for whatever compensation at off-off-Broadway shows. Some time ago I had gone to a piano bar in which anyone could play a piano there and anyone could sing along. It seemed like plenty of guys could play the piano and all of them could sing because they all had worked on Broadway. In Seattle I was often to find that everyone in a coffeehouse would be a science person. I am sure now that coffeehouses like this are not in Manhattan, but there certainly are places here in which everyone singing karaoke covers is more technically proficient than the original artists who performed the songs.
Lisa and Victoria were here at the end of October. On 30 October Lisa and I went to see Waiting for Godot with the famous actors Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart as Vladimir and Estragon. I got discounted tickets presumably because the show was not so popular. I would expect that most people know this show because it is highly referenced in western culture, and also these are two actors currently at a sustained height in their Hollywood careers. Still, the theatre was not full. This play is intended to be a limited run because it is an old script and the actors are just doing this for fun.
Some other shows, like Phantom of the Opera, Book of Mormon, and Lion King have been running for years and will continue to run, playing I think 8 times a week. It surprises me that someone could want to be a performer, then they get to the height of their career and get a part in a Broadway show. Success for them would then be doing the same performance every night for many years, whether playing the same songs as a musician, acting the same roles, or whatever else. I would have expected that the best performers would want the most variety in their roles, but either they do not want this or the work structure has not way to permit this. Or maybe it does permit this.
Yesterday I was on the subway going downtown and these two Broadway boys were standing next to me talking about work. I listened in on their conversation without participating, and one was telling the other how to audition. From their conversation I gathered that both were early in their careers, both had studied music and dance for perhaps 10 years, both had done some Broadway shows but had never performed in whatever their ideal role was, and while both were optimistic about their prospects of getting a job, I was struck by how workers with so many years of training would need to continually circulate to find jobs. Apparently they both regularly got invitations to audition, but still, for the professional investment each of them had made I was struck by – what seemed to me and I could be completely misunderstanding the culture or their situation – their seeming to not be assured of employment.
I think I go see about a show a month. I would like to go more, perhaps, if I had time. Evidently archiving my thoughts on this blog seems more interesting to me than going to shows.