Leaked grosses show impact of Omicron on Broadway
That’s the headline from a Broadway News article that was published yesterday. The previously “leaked” grosses weren’t what I was interested in, because they were from a period shortly after the reopening and before the Omicron wave.
These, however, I am interested in because they reflect the grosses from December 19 through January 9… traditionally the biggest selling weeks on Broadway.
The impact of Omicron on Broadway isn’t the whole story.
The story is what else has impacted those numbers.
https://broadwaynews.com/2022/02/15/leaked-grosses-show-impact-of-omicron-on-broadway/
There’s a palpable, undeniable fear on Broadway to discuss what has nothing to do with a pandemic, but has everything to do with perhaps why some of these shows are flops.
Broadway is terrified.
Not the terror of trying to keep your floundering show afloat, even in the best of times … no, not that normal nail biting that’s the constant nervous habit in commercial theater.
It’s the fear of saying “Slave Play” and others were flops and the impact of the culture wars may be a reason.
There’s a desperation in theater to support ..more than support…black artists primarily, which seems to be predicated on a simple belief, in my opinion, that white people in theater have it better.
Always have. It’s just easier for white people. Way easier. Always was. White people are rich, wear sunglasses and go to parties. And just work all the fucking time…like whenever they want.
And, we’re in the fucking way.
Part of tattooing that belief on your soul, part of that ink is the remedy:
Anything but white
Directors and authors have agreed to insist on diversity riders — to include members of underrepresented communities — in all new contracts they work on and “will never assemble an all-white creative team on a production again.” Producers have agreed to widen the talent pool to more diverse candidates.
Black Theater United
The signatories also commit to “sensitivity” steps for shows dealing with race. “For shows that raise racial sensitivities, we will appoint a racial sensitivity coach whose role is akin to an intimacy coach,” the document says. And separately, it says, “While acknowledging that creatives can write about any subject that captures their interest or imagination, we will, when writing scripts that raise identity issues (such as race), make best efforts to commission sensitivity reads during the drafting process to assist in flagging issues and providing suggestions for improvement. Playwrights and/or those individuals or entities with contractual approval rights will retain creative control to accept or reject the sensitivity reader’s recommendations.”
Adding some uninvited cooks into the kitchen to make your Broadway soup
This battle has been brewing for a while… well before the tragic death of George Floyd clumsily transferred to professional theater. All of the justifiable outrage and anger over Floyd’s death will never result in a prison sentence in theater. Justice in theater is measured mostly in 💰.
Yes, there has certainly been historical social and economic disparity and injustice affecting many marginalized communities. That’s a fact.
Theater, however, is a different arena. The numbers in the most recently released Actors Equity diversity study tell a story that, from a working perspective, show a much more equitable, if not surprising racial representation, at least in terms of work weeks. Not so much if you’re a woman though.
A few years ago, I saw this little organization pop up called Project Am I Right. It was spearheaded by a woman who wasn’t very accomplished professionally.. maybe that’s why she started it.
The stated goal of the organization was for white actors to give away their contracts, for jobs they already booked, to people she deemed more suitable ethnically. Again, the common denominator was just not white. And the bedrock of the project is that “white people have it easy”thang.
I hope it goes without saying.. ok, it doesn’t… that “white” is a very tough thing to define. The only thing we really have in this life is to define our own identity. Nonetheless, that’s the shell game we’re currently playing…
After starting a campaign to try and force a Jewish actress.. who she outed as Jewish publicly against her wishes…to give her role, her job as “Evita” away in a smallish theater in New England to someone “Latinx” … a term most Latin peeps aren’t on board with.. I was acutely aware that she had never cracked a book open not only about the Holocaust, but the migration of Western Europeans to Argentina in the early 20th century.
I was also aware that this was going to be a big problem for the union, but also professional theater if it gained steam.
She went on to greener pastures of a leadership role embedded in Actors Equity where her project morphed into her deciding who was onboard for “inclusion” in a Council election based on…
Their last names. And skin color.
In this part of our story, I think it’s also important to state the obvious, which is as actors, we are essentially hired on how we look when we walk through the door. No one knows our ethnic background, which I’m on board with, as well as the federal government.
In the further battle lines of appearance, the armies are now BIPOC and white. BIPOC can include pretty much anyone who’s not white, and who identify as a minority.
Oh, and EDI is another Tupperware grouping of social justice.. Equity Diversity and Inclusion.
Again, these groups are very hard to define on sight.. the needs of all of the disparate communities in every one of the catch-alls are very unique and different, and in my opinion do a disservice to all when thrown in the same tub o’ grievance.
At some point soon, or perhaps now, we’re all a 23 and Me away from being a racial mixture that qualifies.
The truth is
Anything but white
In reality is
Anything but grey
But, that’s just not catchy, and it requires some nuance and thought. It also might just bite the battalions of arbiters on the front lines of who’s the whitest on a creative team in the ass.
But, beware the boogeyman is white!
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to grasp the nuance here, but if we do, it sorta blows the whole “moment” we’re all supposed to be a part of into the shitter.
The social justice groups in theater that have popped up in the last two years while we’ve been trying to stay alive are comprised of quite accomplished entertainment hoi polloi …many famous and wealthy. Lin and Viola and Lynne and so on.
They have succeeded in a 🌎 where it was easier for me? I guess, but I’d be up for a Freaky Friday with almost all of them. Perhaps the irony is they are all much more successful than the overwhelming majority of people in the entertainment industry, even with gay white me exploiting, diminishing and excluding them.
Here’s the truth. Show biz ain’t easy. For anybody. With a fraction of a fraction of union actors employed at any given time, everybody is hustling, dying and starving to get a gig.
It’s really the one thing we have in common.. or did.
The change that evidently theater needed so desperately in terms of black representation, and representation in general, is teetering on the brink of insincerity. And self aggrandizement. It pretty much started out that way. It’s mean spirited at times, and so driven by ambition and self serving that it’s blinded the revolution to the obvious:
The butts in the seats.
The audience. The ultimate kingmakers. The peeps with the credit cards.
I found this opinion piece in the Times so beautifully written and thought out about the latest skirmish in the war…Encores! The home of musical revivals.
“Some Musicals are Unwoke”
It’s bad enough that on the political right, a degree of comfort with book-banning seems to be taking hold. An idea from the left that good art must seek social justice strikes me as a not entirely different quest to erase the past.
Another example is “The Life,” about Times Square sex workers in the 1980s, which had its debut on Broadway in 1997, not all that long ago. Encores! has brought in Billy Porter — of “Pose” and “Kinky Boots” fame — to adapt and direct its revival of “The Life” that opens next month. Asked about his insistence on having the right, creatively, to rewrite portions of the show’s book, and if, specifically, he was “creating radical empathy,” Porter said:
Yes. I had to ask myself, “Who is our audience?” They are very often progressive, rich and white. They have empathy, but do they understand the infrastructure that creates pimps, prostitutes and drug addicts? Probably not. But after seeing this show, the smart ones will understand that these characters are trying to get better, but they have nowhere to go. Hopefully that will crack open the space for the audience to have empathy for everybody around them.
Billy, honey, they do understand. They’re smarter than you. And me. They get it. They’re full up on empathy, especially the rich white ones. Even the white dumb ones, who may have flunked your woke SAT.
Their empathy is more palpable primarily because they paid to be there. To watch your show. They are trafficking in empathy.
Theater doesn’t exist without empathy, and the scary thing to me is we’re at the point now where that communion in theater is dictated and defined by race instead of heartbeats.
The playground of old musicals as some touchstone to social justice not only doesn’t make sense, it’s lazy. And not creative. Taking a woke sledgehammer to an old musical doesn’t make it better or relevant. Pimping out the past to suit a narrative pretty much existing in an echo chamber isn’t productive.
Because maybe, just maybe, all of the thought provoking and audience challenges were there to begin with.
The panic to both embrace and not offend is obvious in the behemoth revival of “The Music Man” ..where the sexual and gender dynamic has been neutered both in the script and performances. And, it seems the pressure to satisfy diversity in casting has resulted in a hefty lawsuit.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-music-man-is-a-nostalgia-machine/amp
During Christmas week, shows that had been posting lower grosses continued in that vein. “Slave Play” grossed $77,152 across seven performances during Christmas Week and played to a capacity of 22%.
Broadway News
There’s a whole lot of reasons for those abysmal numbers, but I do wonder if the current climate didn’t have something to do with it.
The revolution may have missed. And that’s a shame because every story deserves to be told. In a sincere, safe and loving environment.
But this ain’t it.
The hope is maybe we can still laugh together……
Robert DuSold 
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