State of the Stage
the great white way vs. regional theater
To appreciate the power and scope of New York theater, we needn’t look any further than recent history. On the first day of what would be a 19-day strike that hit all but seven commercial houses, angry patrons, stoic house managers, empowered stage hands, and a few bleary-eyed young stars demonstrated Broadway’s place in the Big Apple. In an online statement released by Charlotte St. Martin, executive director for the League of American Theaters & Producers, it was reported that the strike would cost the industry nearly $17 million a day—an impact of show-stopping proportions.
When I went to midtown to get the dish on all the drama, I came across a disappointed trio from Ohio. The three friends had planned to get their fill of show tunes in one jam-packed weekend—squeezing five Broadway shows into their now-foiled itinerary.
“We came here because we’re theater lovers. We’ve been to New York before, we’ve seen the museums, and we’ve gone to Central Park. We’re subscribers to Columbus and Cleveland theaters,” one of the women says. “But we came here to see these shows—to see New York theater.”
While the strike certainly put Broadway’s business front and center, it also illuminated New York City’s place as a national theatrical landmark. The New York theatrical community is punctuated by countless voices and an on-the-go mentality. Across the nation, regional stages are often funded by the government in order to serve their communities, and many even rival New York in artistic renown. But when it comes to diversity of talent and sheer extent of performances, they’ve got nothing on this place.
One way to put New York theater in some sort of context is to understand its past and its present, its partners and its rivals. In the following account, voices from around the nation sound off on the state of the stage and the rather complex relationships between Broadway and Off Broadway, New York commercial theater and regional not-for-profits. By taking a rather contemporary stab at the question, I ask: If theater, then why New York?
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Our curtain opens on something familiar—Broadway, or more formally, New York commercial theater. Wicked and The Little Mermaid, Jersey Boys and Legally Blonde—they may work up an impressive buzz, attracting devoted fan bases with their splashy billboards and MTV specials. But just because commercial theater may be popular, this status doesn’t necessarily undermine its artistic value.
“I think if you consider yourself a semi-serious playwright, and you have grand literary pretensions, then you really owe it to yourself to—at least once in your career—do a show with tap-dancing seagulls and giant confetti canons just to keep things in perspective,” says Tony Award-winning playwright Doug Wright.
Wright lobbied for the job of book writer on Disney’s The Little Mermaid, a story he holds close to his heart. Even though Wright typically pens productions based on historical figures—Quills, I Am My Own Wife, and most recently, Grey Gardens—he is now working on adapting the outdated Showboat, and this after waxing nostalgic about a 16-year-old mermaid and her best friend, Flounder.
“I suppose it would be very easy for me to sneer at commercial theater, and say, ‘Oh, it’s lowest-common-denominator stuff. It exists just to bring to Broadway the tourists coming in to see Mamma Mia or The Lion King,’” says Jerry Manning, casting director at the Seattle repertory theater. “But you know what, I actually loved Mamma Mia and I thought The Lion King was extraordinary stage work. Good theater is good theater.”
“There has to be a balance between the commercial and the artistic,” actress Kristin Huffman says. Huffman made her debut on the Great White Way in John Doyle’s revival of Company nearly a year and a half ago. She describes Company as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—a re-imagining of an inherently artistic Stephen Sondheim production that was able to withstand almost a full nine months of commercial exposure.
But before Company could even be considered a guppy among the Broadway sharks, it premiered in Ohio at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park—a regional theater. Regional theaters began to crop up in cities and suburbs all across America starting in the 1940s. As a direct reaction to for-profit theatrical ventures, these companies are designed with the idea that each citizen, no matter his or her location, should be able to enjoy the arts.
“Regional theater as a movement started in reaction to and to find a different way to produce theater other than commercial theater,” says Jennifer Kiger, Yale Repertory Theatre’s director of new play development.
The movement really took off at the close of World War II. The goal of regional theater programming was to decentralize commercial theater and bring audiences to places that did not boast a Broadway proscenium.
Regional theaters are, by and large, government-enfranchised institutions, meaning that they get money from the government to fund their programming.
“We do what we do because we want to have a real dialogue and a substantive discourse with the community rather than making money,” says Aaron Young, managing director of the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, Pa.
Young says that the house operates with a sort of internal rudder, which ensures the quality of its productions and engages the community in a meaningful way. “We’ve been finding audiences saying, ‘We don’t need to go into New York because you’re right here in our backyard,’” he says.
Ed Sobel, director of new play development at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, finds the Windy City to be both a “fortifying” and “inspiring” place to work in theater. He describes a supportive and committed mentality that makes up the fabric of the city.
“I think in Chicago there is a real interest in trying to do good work,” Sobel says. “It’s less about whether doing this job is going to get you your next job.”
There continues to be a simmering competition between theater in Chicago and theater in New York. For a moment, let’s digress to examine some raw figures. Looking at the listings for shows in New York versus other cities, the gap is astounding. For April 1, 2008, Theater Mania had listed 843 shows in New York. The next leading contender was the center for film and television, Los Angeles. With a relatively measly 232 shows, it outranked Chicago’s 198. The difference between winner and runner-up here is over 600 shows.
But while Chicago may not have its own commercial equivalent of Broadway, what it does have is numerous, highly reputable non-profits, including the Steppenwolf, the Goodman Theatre, and the Chicago Shakes Theater.
“In Chicago, they’ve always been known for being a renegade that way,” Huffman says. “Sometimes they can be even more creative and more artistic because they don’t have to worry about pleasing so many producers and PR people.”
Still, Christopher Burney, Barnard theater professor and assistant artistic director at Second Stage Theatre in New York, is often hard-pressed to find regional audiences as diverse as those in New York City. Second Stage Theatre is a not-for-profit, Off Broadway venue with a mainstage situated just steps away from Times Square. For nearly 30 years, it has offered viable alternatives for Broadway-hungry theatergoers that find themselves without tickets and in the area. But with a mix of plays and musicals that have garnered considerable critical acclaim, Second Stage also draws a sizeable subscription audience.
Burney is consistently amazed by how much New York audiences are able to bring to the table—he welcomes their penchant for offering fascinating and intelligent feedback to the shows that Second Stage produces.
“New York is very unique, and it is a truly global city. I think unlike some of the other cities in this country, everything is so compressed that everything sort of lives, literally, quite on top of each other,” Burney says. “As a result, it forces us into this sort of incredibly intimate proximity with our neighbors and with our global neighbors—I think it fosters a different kind of dialogue.”
“I don’t think that center of power—that kind of center of global attention—would ever leave New York simply because it’s such a neat place,” Burney concludes. “It’s become such a cultural myth all unto itself.”
A Great Big Casting Couch IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
“Whether we say, ‘I just want to be a working actor’—meaning ‘I’ll take anything’—we all want to be on Broadway,” Huffman says. “So why wouldn’t you go to New York if what you want to be is on Broadway?”
Prior to moving to New York, Huffman lived in Columbus, Ohio and took numerous gigs with the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera. While she comfortably enjoyed doing three to four shows a year at regional theaters, “My agent said, ‘If you really want to do Broadway, you have to be closer to New York.’”
“There will be casts who are dying to do it [a show] in New York because of the exposure that that will give an actor,” Burney says of Second Stage premieres. “But they’re not willing to give six, seven, eight, nine months of their lives outside of New York” in a co-production.
Manning doesn’t find this sort of Broadway-centric mentality to be a universal sentiment, however. “I just think that for most working actors, their goal is simply to work,” he says. “I think there is a very rich life for an actor outside of New York and outside of L.A., and I think that most actors know that.”
Before assuming his position at the Seattle Repertory Theater, Manning was a member of the artistic staff at the New York Theater Workshop, which provided him with a working knowledge of the talent in both cities.
“The prevailing thought is that people in Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, Atlanta, and D.C. are getting their resumés together so that they can go to the big time, and I just think that’s a lot of hooey,” Manning says.
Seconding this notion, Steppenwolf’s Sobel says, “There is absolutely a core of people who have chosen to make their life here in Chicago and to stay here for 20, 30, 40 years, their whole careers really. They are not concerned with making it anywhere else except Chicago.”
And Huffman agrees. “Quite honestly the quality at those regional theaters is humongous,” she says, readily admitting that she’s seen shows outside of the city that match or surpass big-name Broadway productions in artistic quality and entertainment value. But, she qualifies, “That’s because they’re coming into New York, and they’re auditioning here.”
At the Fulton, Young estimates that approximately only 25 percent of their actors typically hail from central Pennsylvania or Philadelphia. The remaining 75 percent, he estimates, are based in New York. By living in New York, Huffman explains, “You can get yourself in front of the right people time after time after time.”
Ever since Huffman began acting professionally, she’s been aware of the increasing power that casting directors have assumed in the industry. These individuals are often employed by for-profit talent agencies—Berney Telsey Casting, Tara Rubin Casting, and Jay Binder Casting are among the largest—and they are in charge of casting all the commercial shows in addition to many of the regional theatrical productions. There are similar casting branches in Chicago and Los Angeles, but New York is certainly the hub with regards to the stage.
“The truth of the matter is, they’re a tremendous resource for any producing organization, be it commercial, non-profit, resident theater, or film,” Manning says. “It’s an enormous asset for any producer who’s looking to hire actors out of New York.”
But on the West Coast, Manning gives anywhere from 65 to 70 percent of his Actors Equity Association contracts to Seattle-based performing artists. And while he consults with other resident casting directors around the nation when looking for talent outside of the Puget Sound area, rarely will he turn to casting powerhouses like Telsey.
Similarly, Erica Daniels, the Steppenwolf’s in-house casting director, attends different shows in the community about twice a week in order to strengthen her working knowledge of the area’s talent. “She takes it upon herself to make that kind of commitment to really be seeing people who she may not know,” Sobel says. “There’s a kind of openness to discovering new talent, to really try to widen one’s pool—I think a high priority is placed on that in Chicago.”
Commercial casting agencies on the other hand “are casting, yes, project by project, but they’re focusing on roles,” Manning says. And often this hyper-detail-oriented approach results in type-casting.
Sometimes it’s as superficial as a costuming issue. For instance, when Beauty and the Beast was running on Broadway, the Beast’s costume cost upwards of $40,000. Such an exorbitant figure required the male lead to be consistently of the same height and build. Because agency casting directors are now first in the chain of command, one must fit all the necessary criteria in order to land the role.
Conversely, Manning, while certainly having a say, does not have the last word at the Seattle repertory theater. The actual act of making a casting selection is reserved for the director. “It’s not so much naming the actor but having named an actor, having the discussion with the director about why this person is right for the role or not,” Manning says. “Every conversation I have refines and expands my understanding of the character.”
“In Seattle—if I auditioned there—it’d be much more relaxed. They’d take much more time with me, and there’d be less people. I’d probably have a better shot at getting a part that I’m not exactly right for looks-wise, or something might be a little off, but they really like the job that I did when I came in and auditioned,” Huffman says. “In New York because I’m going against so many people, I have to make my impression really fast. I have to be dead-on with what they’re looking for because they have just so many to choose from.”
The Times, They Are A-Changin’ IIIIIIIII
Singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik used the words “leap of faith” to characterize Spring Awakening’s move to the Great White Way. The show was quickly set on a Broadway trajectory upon completion of its Off Broadway run at the Atlantic Theater. Similarly, August: Osage County opened on Broadway after its Chicago debut, and Sobel describes this transfer using the same expression.
“We did not know—we had no idea, in fact, it was probably the furthest thing from our minds—that the play would end up transferring to New York,” Sobel says. “It defies all logic and common sense in the current climate that any commercial producer would be interested in a 13-character, three-and-a-half-hour family drama.” A couple years back, the Steppenwolf commissioned ensemble member Tracy Letts to write a large-scale family drama. Now the New York Times hails his work as “the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years.”
But what happens when the critics aren’t so adoring? “If a play starts in New York, and say, gets a bad review in the New York Times, then that can kill the play’s future forever,” Kiger says.
Local critics are less of a threat, especially given the dwindling sales of print publication. And while writers from Variety and the Associated Press, as well as other major national critics, can certainly also impact the fate of a show outside of New York, the Big Apple’s reviewers do tend to wield a powerful bite.
“New York critics are aware of this, though I’m not sure that they would ever publicly acknowledge it,” Burney says. “A really good review in New York does have the ability to make your show run longer, have your show be done by hundreds of theaters across the country, and if you’re a writer, it could possibly even get you a TV or film deal—it can carry a lot of power for one person’s opinion of what he’s seeing.”
With so much at stake in premiering a show, and especially a show in New York, the latest trends on the theatrical front are working to alleviate this pressure and minimize the costs.
“The difference now is that more and more regional theaters are putting resources and time into creating new work on their own,” Kiger says. “New plays are actually starting in the regions and having several productions all over the country before they go into New York.”
It used to be that new work was primarily developed on the New York stage. Only after a show received the stamp of approval from the city’s critics and was bolstered by favorable ticket sales, did it migrate out into regional theaters. This was made possible, in part, because there was commercial Off Broadway theater.
“No one can really seem to make that work anymore, the way in which it used to work back in the ’80s and even early ’90s,” Burney says. “Now you have the not-for-profit, Off Broadway theaters having this huge pressure to deliver what seem like commercial hits while staying true to their missions.”
In the past decade or so, regional theaters have stepped in and shouldered some of this responsibility. Kiger credits this surge in resident, new-play programming to an increase in funding from private organizations, individual donors, and even the government’s National Endowment for the Arts. Co-producing via institutional partnering between theaters is also a common developmental approach that diffuses the cost between two or more theaters investing in a new work.
Regional premieres are chiefly important because they let the cast and creative team grow together. Under this government-funded expenditure, artists are free to explore the process of transforming a new piece of work from page to stage.
“I want to do my damnedest to get a resident production first so that I can work the kinks out over time,” Wright says. In 2004, Wright won a Tony Award for I Am My Own Wife—a show about a notorious transvestite, in which one actor plays more than 40 parts.
Charting his path on the road to Broadway—which included stops at the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab in Park City, Utah, La Jolla Playhouse in Los Angeles, the About Face Theater in Chicago, and finally the Off Broadway Playwrights Horizons theater in New York—Wright feels strongly about the process, going as far as to describe his journey as an ideal one. “By the time we got to New York it was a more sure-footed production and truly finished draft of the play,” he says.
“There’s another model that’s existing now in regionals—that is, these kinds of mini tours,” Burney says. As Wright’s experience has demonstrated, a play will often be developed at one theater, and then it will tour to two or three other regional venues. “It’s a way for all the theaters to keep their expenses in check,” Burney explains.
Wright—whose credits include movies, musicals, and plays—hasn’t always been able to follow this model, however. Often discouraged by a sort of addendum in this regional developmental trend, he finds that companies will quickly nab new musicals but may be less inclined to produce new plays before they have secured their reputation in New York.
“I had an amusing experience with straight plays,” he says. “You find then that you’re premiering a brand new play at a very well-regarded but cash-strapped theater downtown. You have a $10,000 set budget, and the actors are all making about $300 a week. You’re really doing the play under guerilla conditions, and at the same time the work is going to be judged for all time.”
Wright finds the whole process to be a catch-22. “You know, it’s funny,” he says. “Sometimes with new plays, you have to premiere them in New York under the least favorable conditions to then get them produced in the resident theaters, which are actually the theaters that can afford to do them in a fitting way.”
But Americans have a penchant for musical theater, and as such, musicals are often able to draw more of a crowd than straight plays will. Because regional venues rely on this commercial appeal to attract theatergoers, Young says that their seasons at the Fulton include more musicals than non-musicals. He refers to it as “Populist Theater.”
“In a non-profit setting we’re under tremendous pressure to produce at the box office,” Manning says, speaking on behalf of the Seattle Repertory Theater. “In any season around the country, you’ll find major resident theaters doing Christmas Carol, not because the artistic director is dying to do Christmas Carol again as rich, fulfilling artistic endeavor for the entire company. They do it because they know they can sell those tickets and thereby underwrite more challenging work.”
“We’re probably going to be able to do one or two plays per year that appeal to a more ... intellectual audience,” Young says. “The majority of our plays are going to have to really appeal to a very mass audience. It certainly affects the choices that we do.”
While many acknowledge a discrepancy between programming and producing, the regional theater’s stake in developing new work defines today’s theatrical offerings. Kiger feels that writers truly benefit by being able to see their work performed at multiple regional runs. “Sometimes it’s only then that they have ideas about how they really wanted to tell the story,” she says.
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While regional theater is surely an invaluable institution that has succeeded in providing a creative outlet to performers around the country, getting audiences back into their seats, and bringing quality entertainment to communities outside of the tristate area, the draw of the New York stage is unshakable and unstoppable. Perhaps New York theater’s success is, in fact, due to its unique harmony between the commercial and the non-profit, the Broadway and the Off Broadway—a union that produces an astronomical number of theatrical offerings.
So, while each city may take pride in the work ethic of its actors or the quality of its entertainment, each city alone can only provide a mere taste of American theatrics in comparison to New York. And while New York may offer a range in performance quality, it’s much like the city itself in that you can find anything here. Whether you’re an audience member or an actress, a playwright or a director, the opportunities the Big Apple provides in the way of theatrical arts are vast and wide in breadth. In an age of choice, who could ask for anything more? \\\