The Standbys

(Source: Broadway.com)

The Standbys is the title of a new documentary about standbys on Broadway. Standbys cover the lead role in a show in case the actor who usually performs is sick or on vacation. A standby does not perform unless the actor they cover is unable to do so.

The documentary follows the lives of three different Broadway standbys over the course of a few years, revealing their heartbreaks and triumphs. Since standbys only go on when the actor that usually plays the role is out, it can be incredibly discouraging to sit on the sidelines. And because they are covering lead roles, the standbys have essentially been told that they are good enough to be a lead on Broadway, but yet must sit and watch someone else do it 97% of the time. But the phenomenal thing about this documentary is that they are telling the story of people who are just as talented as everyone on the great white way but who are often overlooked. 

It’s hard to feel too bad for these standbys, after all, they do get to say that they are Broadway performers. One of the people featured in the movie is Merwin Ford, who has basically made a career as a standby. However, it is emotional to watch these tremendously talented people spend most of their time on the sidelines, desperate to get on stage. The most heartbreaking story is that of Ben Crawford who is dealt a crushing blow, just when it seems that everything is taking off.

Overall, this is definitely a movie that you are going to want to bring your tissues to, but it is well worth the watch and tells a very inspiration story about people achieving their dreams.  

For more information watch the trailer or visit the website.

The Broadway.com Effect

Whenever I want to find out information about a particular show or performer, my first stop is always Broadway.com. Since it’s beginning in 1999, Broadway.com has established itself as the leading source of Broadway related information. Broadway.com has built its brand on a foundation of putting Broadway starts on a pedestal and elevating the Broadway experience, making it a haven for Broadway enthusiasts as well as those seeking information about theater.

(Broadway.com Logo - Source: Broadway.com)

Since 1999, the site has been creatively helmed by editor-and-chief, Paul Wontorek, who has been largely responsible for making the site into what it is today. In an interview with Stage-Rush.com in 2011, Wontorek said that his goal for the site has always been to help people of all theater backgrounds, or lack-there-of, learn about Broadway and to “treat Broadway stars like stars instead of just actors.” He said, ““I wanted my mom to be able to click on a story and read it without feeling she was excluded.” But Broadway.com has gone far beyond simply writing articles. The site includes a wide variety of unique multi-media features including photos and videos that give the public access to goings-on behind the scenes. Some of the features include video blogs where actors in a show are given a camera for 8 weeks to document their lives, “Ask a Star” interviews where viewers send in questions for their favorite stars, video and photo coverage of rehearsals and opening nights, and much more. For several years, the site has even hosted their own annual awards show, the Broadway.com Audience Choice Awards. Additionally, the site provides basic a basic overview for every show such as schedules, and cast, theater and box office information.

(Daniel Radcliffe and John Larroquette at the Broadway.com Awards - Source: Broadway.com)

Broadway.com is also an enormous draw for consumers in terms of ticket sales, making it a one-stop-shop for everything Broadway related. Broadway.com sells tickets at face value but adds fees to each sale; the better the seat, the higher the fee. The fees fluctuate depending on the show, but a fee for an orchestra seat is in the $70 range. Regarding ticket sales, Wontorek says that Broadway.com has “come up with a very lucrative revenue system.” Often when someone does a Google search to find tickets to a show, Broadway.com comes up before the official ticket vendors.  

I have watched Broadway.com develop for many years as it became more sophisticated and developed more and more features and I have been so impressed by what it has done for the industry. We live in a culture that is fanatical about movies and television, especially their starts, and a great deal of that can be attributed to the fact that it is so mainstream. We have such effortless access to screen media and their starts, through magazines, websites such as TMZ, and television shows and even whole channels that are dedicated to updating the public about industry news. Broadway.com is the best comparison that the theatre industry has to any of that, and it has proven to be unbelievably successful. Though other sites have tried to follow Broadway.com’s lead, no one else has come close to being able to do what they do, as well as they do. Therefore I think that there is a great deal of room in the market for more sites like it to be successful and lucrative if they can operate on the same level.

(Paul Wontorek Interviews Idina Menzel - Source: Broadway.com)

Additionally, if I were a producer, I would go out of my way to make sure that my show was involved in as many Broadway.com features as possible. Not only would doing so generate buzz and familiarity for my show with general consumers, it would also help to create a large fan base. According to the Broadway League, the group of devoted fans who attended 15 or more performances a year comprised only 5% of the audience, but accounted for 31% of all tickets, or 3.6 million admissions. Since almost a third of ticket buyers are made up of the most passionate fans, the type who visit Broadway.com regularly, as a producer it would be smart to use their features to get fans involved in your show.

A Gentleman's Guide to Producing on Broadway

                                                                          (Source: Playbill.com)

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. Bit of a marathon for the mouth to get out, right? For some reason the title of this Broadway musical kept me away from the show for several months, even though I had heard such great things about it from other people. Set in the beginning of the 19^th century, the show focuses on an impoverished young man by the name of Monty Navaro, who, in the wake of his mother’s death, discovers that he is eighth in line to be the Lord of one of the most distinguished families of the day, the D’Ysquiths. Monty then goes on a crusade to eliminate the eight family members between him and the title of Lord in order to win over the girl he loves.

A cute bachelor, eight murders, wealth and love – sounds like a pretty good show to me. Yet, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but something about the show just didn’t appeal to me. But after taking home four Tony Awards (the theater’s Oscar) in June, including Best Musical, I started coming around to the idea that I should see the show.

And so last week I went…and I LOVED it. The show was fantastic from start to finish, from an engaging, exciting, and humorous story, to beautiful melodies and creative lyrics. The set, which subtly employed the use of a video screen in the background, was simple but yet always interesting to look at. The cast inredible in the show, especially Jefferson Mays, who brilliantly played all eight members of the D”Ysquith family.

                                                                       (Jefferson Mays - Source: Broadway.com)

During the show, not only did I realize why I loved it, I also realized why I hadn’t wanted to see it – and to my surprise, it was the same reason: A Gentleman’s Guide was a throwback musical. Let me explain my use of the term throwback here. In the past, most musicals drew their inspiration from books, poems, comics, or even original stories invented by the writers. Nowadays, since musicals have become so expensive to produce (the average is around $15 million and only one in five ever recoup that investment), producers are not willing to put their money into original stories that are untested with audiences. What stories have been best tested with the most people? Movies. These days, producers are very often only willing to put their money into shows that derive their titles and stories from successful movies that are likely to draw families and tourists with their brand recognition. In my opinion, and in the opinion of many other musical theater purists, this trend has been tainting (or ruining, depending on how passionate you are) the art form of musical theater.

                                                                                 (The Cast of A Gentleman's Guide - Source: Broadway.com)

A Gentleman’s Guide on the other hand, draws from a book published in 1907 that almost no one has ever heard of called Israel Rank: the Autobiography of a Criminal, and features a classic musical theater score, unlike a pop or rock score that is found in so many modern musicals. The show is a throwback to the golden era of musical theater. But I think for this reason, many people, including myself, have shied away from the show purely because we don’t know what to do with it. Though we crave an original musical, we are unsure of what to do when the show does not have a familiar title such as Legally Blonde, Spiderman, or Rocky to name a few. We have become so used to movie-musicals, that it is a shock to the system when an original musical comes along. But the beauty of seeing A Gentleman’s Guide was that I didn’t know who the characters were or what was going to happen next. And I wasn’t disappointed when my favorite scene from the movie was cut from the stage adaptation. I got to experience musical theater in its purist form: watching an unfamiliar story unfold live in front of my eyes.  

Despite facing several movie musicals as competition, it was A Gentleman’s Guide that won the Tony for Best Musical this year, which leads me to believe that appreciation for a classic, throwback musical is not lost. Now it’s up to producers to figure out how to make them profitable. But that’s another post entirely.

Reworking Art

If you watched the Oscar’s this year, you might have heard about a woman named Adel Dazeem, or rather, Idina Menzel. Since just after the broadcast, Menzel has been starring in a new musical on Broadway called, If/Then, a show about the different paths that we take in life and how the choices we make now will affect us in the future. Shortly after the show opened in March, I was reading audience reviews of the show, and I found a similar theme among all of them. Many people said that the show had issues when it had its out-of-town tryout (a test production of the show before it goes to Broadway) a few months prior, and those issues were not addressed to the extent that they needed to be before coming to New York.

                                                                                          (Idina Menzel in If/Then - Source: Broadway.com)

                                               

Similarly, when I was home in Boston over the summer, I saw a show called Finding Neverland, which is currently having its out-of-town tryout there. I walked away from the show, which is based on the movie of the same name, thinking that it was a great concept, but a poor execution that will need a lot of work if it ever hopes to have success on the Great White Way. I worry that if the show does not undergo some major changes before its planned Broadway opening, it will suffer reviews very similar to If/Then.

 (Finding Neverland in Boston, MA - Source: Broadway.com) 

What I’m trying to get at here in discussing both of these shows is: how do the people most closely involved with a show - that is producers, composers, designers, etc – rework and improve it?

I know that when I write papers for school, at first I am able to make some large revisions that are fairly obvious. But as time goes once bigger changes have been made, I start to believe that my paper is damn near perfect to the point where my professor should give me an A without even reading it. But the more I make big changes and the more I think my paper is great based on those changes, I start to miss the little things that might still need tweaking. Speaking of that, I’m sure there is probably at least one grammatical error in this post that I missed that someone else will see.

My point is that one or two little weaknesses might not be a big deal, but a lot of little issues can collectively create large issues. I think the same phenomenon happens in creating theater. The creative team and producers get so involved and passionate about what they are doing, that they can’t see some necessary changes that need to be made. I am not at all blaming them for this, because this phenomenon is what I fear most in becoming a producer. I mean heck, if I do it when writing a three-page paper, I will most certainly do it when producing a full scale Broadway musical. So how do creative teams and producers avoid this trap, or at least try and overcome it?

                                                     (The creative team makes changes to Beautiful during rehearsal - Source: Broadwayworld.com)

Most importantly, the creative team needs to constantly bring in fresh eyes throughout the process of putting a show together. No more than students are urged to have a variety of people proofread their paper, creative teams should always have people who aren’t as invested on a day-to-day basis as they are, see the show and provide feedback. Feedback leads me to my next point, which is that the creative team needs to be open to feedback and accept criticism. Artists in particular have the most trouble with this because they feel so passionately about their ideas, which are often deeply personal. But if people don’t understand a scene, or certain jokes aren’t getting laughs, the creative team needs to appreciate the merit behind these criticisms and in some cases, act on them. I explore this, not only in the hope that people will listen but more so that one day when I am in their shoes, I will remember these principles myself.

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.