This year, the Jewish Days of Awe followed hard on the heels of the terrible events of September 11, and in New York, the prayers for the dead that make up much of Yom Kippurs morning service rang out from local synagogues with a force unmatched in recent memory. I belong to the worlds largest congregation of lesbian and gay Jews and their friends and families, Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST), here in New York. Each year, CBST holds High Holiday services in mid-town Manhattan where, without fail, thousands of progressive Jews from the greater New York area come and join us in worship. It is a justly famous event in the New York season, and this year the attendance numbers were higher than theyve ever been.
Of course some people that day came, as they always do, for reasons more cultural than spiritual. Indeed, more than a few non-Jews came along with their Jewish friends and partners. What we all needed, at least in part, was a sense of reconnection to community; a sense of belonging to that great liberal democratic polis that is New York not so much an American city as, in the words of Spalding Gray a small island off the coast of America. Although New Yorks inimitable fabulousness is the product of many, many different communities, there can be no contesting the historical importance of three in particular: Gays, Jews, and African Americans.
The Spirit Of The Theatre
Think about Broadway for a minute. The melting pot metaphor that accompanies so much discussion of the American experience may be over-used and misleading, but the molten gold that was generated by gays, blacks and Jews in the heyday of the American musical is undeniable. To paraphrase Mel Brooks in his To Be or Not to Be remake, everybody in New York knows that without Jews, blacks and fags there wouldnt be any theatre.
So it should come as no surprise that in her sermon on Kol Nidre, the holiest evening in the Jewish year, among something like five thousand New Yorkers, our fiery, four-foot eleven lesbian Chief Rabbi, Sharon Kleinbaum, told us that after visiting ground zero shortly after the World Trade Center collapse, she had immediately decided to go to a Broadway show in order to regain her equilibrium in order to restore to herself her sense of New York. That same afternoon she went to the Martin Beck Theater on West 45th Street and saw what was supposed to be the very last performance of Kiss Me, Kate, now closing earlier than expected given what had just happened.
At the theatre, however, something extraordinary took place. Just before curtain up one of the shows producers, Roger Berlind, appeared before the audience and announced that he was holding the shows closing notice in his hands. But the show wasnt going to close, he said. Today, at the eleventh hour, the company agreed to do something wonderful. Shortly after the attacks, the unions had agreed to temporary pay cuts at 25% in order to keep the show open (after all, Broadway was in trouble). But this hadnt turned out to be enough to keep the lights on. Now, cast and crew had agreed to a pay cut of an additional 25%. It was the house carpenter at the Martin Beck, Joe Maher, who had come up with the flawlessly appropriate sweetener for this otherwise unpalatable deal. The cast wouldnt take a cut, exactly. Instead, they would voluntarily release another quarter of their salaries and use that money to buy tickets to Kate for the citys rescue workers.
So then, my rabbi continued, Berlind, standing centre stage, ripped up the closing notice, and watched the pieces fall to the floor. Then he walked off, and the show started. Kate begins with the appearance of a single stagehand with a broom whos readying the theatre for the arrival of a troupe of actors. When Berlind exited, the stagehand walked over to the shredded closing notice, swept it off stage, and paused. Then, leaning on his broom and looking out to the house, he began the first number: Another Opnin Another Show. Slowly, he was joined by the rest of his company, each entering with their suitcases from the loading dock upstage, then coming downstage and peering into the house with a cautious but unmistakable optimism. Its curtain time and away we go, they all sang, embracing as they greeted one another, A-nother opnin of a-nother show! It was, my rabbi reported to the assembled multitude of High Holiday worshippers, a religious experience.
The challenge of McTheatre
As a group, Broadway Babies are a salutary mixture of this particular kind of religiosity and sheer, unadulterated toughness. After all, its always been a tough business. And over the last two decades, people have lost so many friends and lovers to AIDS, for some its like theyve already been watching the towers of Manhattan burn for years. September 11 is the kind of crisis that Broadway was made for, and its been heartening to see how beautifully box offices have been bouncing back. But Broadway is facing another, longer-term crisis that may prove harder to overcome.
As anybody whose taken a walk though the newly sanitized Times Square can tell you, media transnationals have arrived on Broadway. Big time. And the commercial theatre, at home and abroad, has been quite transformed by their entrance. Disney has three shows on BroadwayDisneys Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Aida. Viacom has lately had its hands in several more, as has Universal (Vivendi); NewsCorporation owns the rights to the new stage version of The Full Monty via its Fox Searchlight subsidiary; and we can all look forward to AOL-Time Warners Broadway debut in Batman soon. Despite the fact that Broadway theatre has always been about business, the arrival of these players signals a sea change in the way that commercial theatre gets produced not only on Broadway, but across the planet.
In fact, we are witnessing what I call the global-industrialization of live-theatrical production. People in the business have a simpler name for it: McTheatre. Both names suggest a number of core dynamics now operating inside mainstream commercial theatre: the players are transnational corporations; their stage is the global stage, from Buenos Aires to Budapest, from Stuttgart to Singapore; their theatrical product is as standardized as a Big Mac; and their methods of production often mimic the Fordist assembly-line or fast-food restaurant. So, too, do rising levels of worker alienation in the industry. Indeed the new practices and protocols of McTheatre have radically diminished the daily satisfactions of working life inside the business.
Over the past six years, I have talked to over a hundred industry professionals here in New York, in Londons West End and in Toronto, the English-speaking worlds third largest theatrical economy. Many actors and musicians have complained that when they work in franchised megamusicals like Les Misérables or Phantom of the Opera, they feel like machines, cogs, or clones. Just as many confessed to feeling real shock upon taking up a megamusical contract for the first time. After all, they chose a life on the stage so as to avoid the indignities of alienation that so many of their Hollywood colleagues have nearly always suffered. Who knew that actors in the legitimate theatre would someday be called upon to reproduce a role in Melbourne, Minneapolis, or Montreal exactly like the original in London or New York? With stage directions like these, who needs celluloid?
Synergy versus creativity
Thankfully, not every big musical is run like this. And not every big musical, therefore, qualifies in my terms as a megamusical. But the likes of Disney and Universal-Vivendi dont enter a market without some fairly well researched understanding of its potential. Once Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh demonstrated, with Cats, Miss Saigon and others, how reliably and how profitably shows could be produced like hamburgers, a second wave of megamusicals became inevitable.
This time, however, the producers arent merely aspiring to transnational corporate status like Lloyd Webbers Really Useful Group once did. Theyre the real thing. Lloyd Webber has, in fact, conceded the field. In 1998 he told Variety: The megamusical doesnt belong to me. It belongs to Disney. They are amortizing the cost of their shows across other areas, but Im not I cant compete with people who use musical theatre as a loss leader to sell merchandise. None of Disneys shows are running as loss leaders on Broadway, anyhow. There, all are making very healthy profits.
But Lloyd Webbers analysis is still pretty sound, for he flags a crucial new development in the history of theatrical financing. The increasing centrality of synergy strategies, so cherished among transnational media corporations, means that theatrical recoupment is no longer a serious concern, because each producer aims to exploit theatrical properties across other media and merchandise. Also in 1998, former Disney Studios head Joe Roth told Variety that it doesnt really matter whether the enormously expensive Lion King ever recoups on Broadway.
Just as it is in film, salvation lies in foreign rights, and in the ancillary streams of video, merchandising and soundtracks. Indeed, Disneys Lion King strategy does not require the Broadway production to turn a profit. Rather, as a second executive told Variety, if you break even on Broadway, youre feeling OK. You set up Broadway as the marketing point for the rest of the world, both for ancillary products, and for future theatrical productions. Needless to say, this is not how the Broadway of David Merrick and George Abbott made its money. The shrinking number of non-corporate producers are either running scared or, by forming local and global alliances, they have resolved to run with the times as best they can.
What does all this mean for the quality and experience of the musical theatre itself? Imagine a universe in which the logics of mass production demand and achieve a radical diminution of artistic autonomy previously unheard of in mainstream, Western theatrical practice. Imagine what happens to performances when actors, musicians, and even conductors all over the world are monitored continuously by a central management in either London or New York, so that the look and sound of each branch-plant reproduction mimics, in bizarrely meticulous detail, the first run on Broadway or in the West End.
Imagine a mainstream theatre, then, where a new and unprecedented aesthetics of performer interchangeability is ascendant: where fetishistic deployments of spectacular technologies (helicopters, chandeliers etc.) turn performers into props and props into actors; and where the concentrated use of radio microphones amplifies, reprocesses and redirects the sound of the singing body to such an extent that you might as well be listening to a CD. Media theorists so inclined can talk about active audiences, resistant readings and polysemy all they like: this just isnt pretty.
What we are talking about here, really, is the consummate commodification of the working stage actor, who now possesses considerably less signifying power than the souvenir mug you just bought at intermission.
A global theatre market?
And theres a bleed-effect, too. For every successful megamusical there are five more megamusical wannabes adopting the same aesthetic strategies. Once upon a time, the overmiking people heard at Cats was an aberration; now you cant get away from it. Once upon a time, megamusicals were the only place where scenery was dependably more important than book, plot and performance; now theres a handful of lousy 3-D Imax rides like Jane Eyre every season. All this is taking place because, as the commercial theatre gets incorporated more deeply inside the transnational media nexus, it is inevitably falling victim to the same industrial-aesthetic logics that guide most of global media capitalism. If producers of shows like Mama Mia or Batman want to pull off a global franchise, they must maximize their intellectual propertys potential by guaranteeing new levels of quality control from site to international site and, crucially, from stage format to digital format (CDs and CD ROMs, DVDs, talking toys, what have you). Inside the new digitally structured global theatre market, it just doesnt pay to have things look or sound too different. Success no longer depends so much on sass or savvy as it does on similitude.
Kiss today goodbye, sang the beloved gypsies of A Chorus Line not so long ago. And point me toward tomorrow. But after the heroism, what does tomorrow look like for Broadway, exactly? In mid-October, Robert Hofler observed in Variety that although advances for the Fall 2001 season are looking better than might be expected given the circumstances, a mere five shows this week look to bring in 40% of all receipts for 21 productions. Three of these five new power shows in 2001 Aida, Lion King and Mama Mia! are not only the work of big media money; reproductions of each continue to sprout across the planet like so many mushrooms. The last time this kind of market control was in effect on Broadway was 1991, when the British-led Phase One of the megamusical phenomenon was in full stride and four shows Cats, Les Miz, Miss Saigon and Phantom ruled the street.
Watch out: 'Phase Two', more transnational in scope and structure, has arrived.
