For the last three weeks the Freakonomics radio podcast has run a three part series on the economics of live theater, Broadway shows in particular.
They are using the example of the effort to develop the show, 3 Summers of Lincoln, for Broadway as a backdrop for the discussion of all the forces that come into play when trying to make a show succeed.
My favorite, probably unsurprisingly, is the second episode that primarily focuses on the business side of things, including the role the owners of the Broadway house play.
For those who aren’t aware, 33 of the 41 Broadway theaters are owned by one of three companies – the Shubert Organization, the Nederlander Organization, and A.T.G. Entertainment. So they have a lot of influence over what shows appear where and how large a share of the revenue they will take. As one Broadway producer says, “ It’s a fantastic business. It’s heads I win, tails you lose.” No matter whether the show does well or not, the house always wins because they get paid first.
Of course, they also talk about the labor costs of putting on a show when 13 different unions are involved. One of the producers admits that some of the more arcane rules in the union contracts are likely the result of someone trying to cut corners at some point and creating an unsafe or exploitative environment.
But all these things are predictable. Even after 100+ years of Broadway, the producers interviewed for the episode all pretty much admit that no one really has any idea why shows do well or not. Show that were smash hits in the past get big budget revivals and fail. Meanwhile, smaller budget off-Broadway shows become unexpected runaway hits.
Even as producer Hal Luftig talks about why people may decide not to see Broadway production of Legally Blonde, there is a clear sense that while his hypothesis has merit, he simply doesn’t really know.
Shows don’t work on Broadway for a whole host of reasons. it doesn’t have to be that the show is awful. You come to Broadway, let’s just say you have 30 other choices. What people choose can be a byproduct of where they are at that moment. We learned this on
Legally Blonde. If you are coming into the city and you have two kids, a boy and a girl, invariably, the boy said, “Oh, I don’t want to see that. That’s a girl story.” So they choose another show that everyone’s happy with.
There are people who feel like I don’t need to see that on Broadway, I saw the movie — not really comprehending that a good adaptation has its own vocabulary. It’s not just the movie on stage. If a movie is associated with a star, as was Legally Blonde with Reese Witherspoon — “Well, is Reese in it? No? I’ll go see something else.”
A core reason I liked this episode is that it did look at all levels of the life cycle of Broadway shows. Not only the original productions and revivals, but the economics of taking the show on the road for a tour and then licensing it to high schools to produce. Sometimes a show that failed economically on Broadway ends up doing pretty well on tour and/or generating a good revenue stream in high school productions.
One of the cases they mention is the Broadway adaptation of the movie Newsies! which was only intended to have a token run on Broadway for a few weeks to placate fans. It did well on Broadway because the production costs were kept low. It did well on tour because the Broadway set was designed to be taken on tour. And it has had a great career as a high school show because the cast requirements are flexible and scalable to the needs of schools.
