How Much Is Too Much?

What on earth has happened to Broadway ticket prices!? I have to admit that as a student in New York City, I have not bought a full price ticket in a very long time. And because I have access to student tickets and I know how to work the incredibly convoluted discount ticket process, neither has my family. But recently when we went to get tickets from the Beautiful box office, we were offered either balcony seats for $75 a ticket or regular priced orchestra seats for $165 each. As a business student, I can’t help but put this into perspective with a little statistics. When I was in 8th grade (7 years ago), a regular priced orchestra seat to Wicked (then one of the most highly demanded shows) was $110. That is a 150% increase in price over a 7-year period. Dividing that increase over 7 years, ticket prices rose 21.4% per year. Considering that the average inflation over the same time period was 2.7%, this is a massive problem for Broadway.

So what is going on here? Why are Broadway’s ticket prices increasing at this insane rate? I don’t know the exact answer since I am no expert, but I have some hunches. First of all, the cost of producing on Broadway has increased greatly. In 2003, Wicked was the most expensive musical to ever be produced on Broadway at $14 million. A little over 10 years later, that’s pretty much the going rate. With big shows like Spiderman and Wicked to compete with visually, producers are feeling the pressure to make their shows as spectacular. With the stakes and failure rates so high – one in five shows never make their investment back – producers are having to increase ticket prices to have any chance of making their money back in this century, if at all.

                                                                                                               (Source: NYTimes.com)

But the problem is that shows don’t usually procure the ticket price they are asking for. Broadway priced itself out of the reach of many middle class families long ago, but now it is even starting to become difficult for even a well-to-do family to attend a show. For a family of four to go see Beautiful, the cost would be $660. And this doesn’t include dinner, parking, or even a hotel. At that cost, it is easy to see why some families are electing other forms of entertainment on their New York City vacations. And when the tickets are not selling, shows start to offer discounts through discount websites and TKTS. In 2013, the average Broadway ticket was sold for $87.57! For a show like Beautiful, that’s a 50% discount!

My point here is that if this is the price that the market is demanding tickets at, wouldn’t it make sense to sell tickets closer to this price? I’m not saying that all tickets for shows be sold for $87.50, but if this is what the average consumer is willing to pay and producers are charging $165 for a ticket, that is a big discrepancy! While it may seem counter intuitive price your tickets lower, it may capture a wider group of people paying that “full price” rather than having them immediately look for discount tickets. The more your seats are filled, the more word of mouth will spread about your show. Even if the show does not earn its entire investment back, having more people see your show means that it may be able to earn more money in national tours and regional licensing after its Broadway life.

No matter what happens, the extraordinary price of Broadway tickets and the existence of so many discount tickets indicates to me that something is wrong with the financial model of the industry.

Beautiful, Indeed

                                                            Jessie Mueller as Carole King (Source: Broadway.com)

This weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing Beautiful: The Carole King Musical at the equally, if not ironically, “beautiful,” Stephen Sondheim Theater. The show itself was pretty spectacular, much of which had to do the actual source story that the book draws from. The story centers on King’s life from age sixteen, her tumultuous marriage to her lyricist Gerry Goffin, friendship with another hit-writing team, Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, through the release of Tapestry in her late twenties. I have been a fan of Carole King for quite some time, since my dad always played her music around the house when I was growing up, but I had no idea about the fascinating life that she has led and all hit songs that she has written outside of Tapestry. Given her enthralling life, her story lends itself perfectly to being told on the Broadway stage.

Technically speaking, the set was spectacular, especially the massive Brill Building where King wrote so many of her early hit songs. Also fascinating to watch was the use of a moving piano, which tracked automatically around the stage, almost becoming another character in and of itself. And I need not even mention that the music is top notch, since it includes many hits from King’s best-selling album, Tapestry. The show also included many songs that King and Goffin as well as their friendly rivals, Weil and Mann, wrote for other artists such as “One Fine Day” and “On Broadway.”

One of the few flaws in the show (though it is a pretty key one) is the book. Though book writer, Douglas McGrath does a fine job at picking out each of the major events of King’s early adulthood, some of the story telling could have used a bit more creativity. For instance, the first act stalls a bit when the story falls into a trap of showing the two songwriting teams (King/Goffin and Mann/Weil) writing a song, followed by a performance from the group that ended up recording the song. Additionally, two of the story’s characters, Gerry Goffin and music producer Donnie Kirshner could have used a bit more fleshing out. Kirshner’s lines often felt too forced with supportive kindness for someone who was trying to get the absolute best out of his songwriters. For Goffin, I wish we were able to see more of the struggle that his character was going through. In Carole King’s memoir, she details Goffin’s drug use that caused severe depression and bipolar symptoms that led to the demise of their marriage. Perhaps to protect Goffin’s image with audiences, these shortcomings were only hinted at by having the character stutter some of his lines and constantly declare that he “needs some air.”

While the cast is top notch, the real spectacle of the show comes directly from King’s embodiment, Jessie Mueller. From the second the light shines upon Muller at the piano in the opening number, she has the audience in her hand. From her sound to her inflections, and even the way she plays piano, Mueller sounds and looks like a dead ringer for King, even adding a wonderfully soft tone of her own. Seeing the show it is clear to understand why she won a Tony Award for the role.

A Critique of a Theater Critic

“Bully ‘Matilda’ director ‘threatens’ child actors”

That is the title of an article written by Michael Riedel, the gossip swirling, seedy theater columnist for the Post. Certainly an attention grabbing headline, but like many of Riedel’s columns, this one makes you feel as though you have surely violated someone’s privacy after reading it. Riedel’s story is based off of a private letter in which a member of Matilda's Broadway management team, Alissa Zulvergold, wrote producers to express her concern about the way the children in the show were being treated by one of the associate directors, Thomas Caruso. Riedel was able to snag a copy via one of his many “sources.”

                                                            Michael Reidel (Source: www.vulture.com)

Zulvergold details a few incidents where Caruso yelled at some of the kids in the cast during rehearsals. No matter what has transpired between Caruso and the Matilda kids, stories like these make me question Mr. Riedel’s integrity as a theater journalist. There is no doubt that the role of a theater journalist is to challenge the art in an attempt to make it better. But that’s just it – the role is to challenge the art, not to expose the private affairs of a show in a fluffed up, barely newsworthy, gossip column that has almost nothing to do with the art that takes place on stage. Rather than writing columns that critique what takes place on stage in the hopes of lifting the art form, Mr. Riedel consistently tries to destroy it (for reference, see all of his “reporting” on the Spiderman saga). In a more recent column, Riedel reveals information from yet another “source” that Harvey Weinstein, the producer of Finding Neverland, now having it’s out-of-town tryout in Boston, is unhappy with the show’s male lead, Jeremy Jordan, and would like him replaced before the show moves to Broadway. My guess would be that Mr. Jordan was not too excited to hear that his livelihood was in jeopardy from a newspaper article. The worst part about Mr. Riedel’s column is that not only does he expose the private, personal matters of people like Caruso and Jordan, he seems to take a great deal of pleasure in doing it.

And Riedel’s “sources” that he quotes in his articles as being his eyes and ears feeding him information are equally as guilty in this as he is in hurting the art of theater. It is time to start supporting theater, rather than tearing it apart.