Robert DuSold

Well, today marks 802 days that I’m Broadway sober. I know, it hasn’t been easy… it’s taken some self reflection and awareness… but here I am.

Since the pandemic shut down Broadway and most of the performing arts on March 12, 2020, I’ve tried to be rational and pragmatic about the theater industry that I’ve been a part of for so long.

It helps me to write blogs and talk to friends to stay on the wagon.

Believe it or not, this is probably the first article that I’ve read in the NY TImes that was… sober.

If you read Playbill the headlines are quite different..

Congrats to “POTUS”for closing with the highest numbers of it’s run!

Broadway continues to bring in the bucks this summer!

Audiences rush to see “Dear Evan Hansen”

I’m still dizzy from the spin.

Now, I guess it’s somebody’s job to make theater seem like it’s all sunglasses and blowjobs.. and I get the need for some positive press. But what lies underneath the spin is pretty ominous…not only from a business standpoint but a cultural one.

Not one person is quoted in an article that paints this bleak of a picture of the performing arts, who says specifically how they are looking to cultivate an audience.

“Artistically it was a great year,” said Barry Grove, the executive producer of Manhattan Theater Club, noting that that nonprofit’s three Broadway shows were critical successes. “Financially, it was a different story: Despite all of the success artistically, both subscriptions and single tickets were off by almost a third, and that’s a significant shortfall.”

The truth is, there is no artistic success without a financial one. That’s how shows exist. That’s how they have runs. It wasn’t, soberly, a “great year.”

Broadway has managed to stay drunk in large part due to federal subsidies last year. This year, the wine box is empty. And inflation is high. And so are ticket prices. Stupid high.

Sure, COVID has had an impact. But, that’s an easy out.

I think the truth is Broadway, and theater in general, has gotten lazy… and she’s running scared at the same time.

What do audiences want to see?

The answer to that one, it appears, is star vehicles and behemoth tourist shows.. but even those are taking a hit.

Why aren’t there more shows that appeal to a paying audience?

If you’re Actors Equity, the remedy for a severe shortage of cash is turning to identity politics. Last week, strippers joining AEA are now the hot button remedy to distract the membership from the obvious dire financial shape of the union… in person auditions are out of reach due to the lack of resources… but, strippers.

There have been rallies in LA, led by the president of the union, to fire up the membership to advocate for the strippers and organizing strip clubs… which must cost nothing and need no oversight.

I’m auditioning though… I need a job in, um, theater.

Diversity has taken a very weird hold on theater.

Boards of not for profit theaters are blowing themselves up… literally all resigning.. as I guess some mea culpa and evidently a pathway to the future of a utopian theater.

It seems a bit more dystopian to me, especially given the chaos that will ensue when they put tearing down and rebuilding an entity with a fiduciary responsibility into practice. It’s quite risky. It’s playing with other people’s money… and I’d put my bet on losing it.

There’s also a trend to “reimagine” existing shows, as some revivals and particularly Encores is doing, to make them fit the “moment”.

After being in the moment, I suppose, for a while, I still don’t know what the moment is.

But what some of the diverse diddling has done is fracture the people who pay for theater.. and make it pretty unappealing to fork over the big bucks.

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.

I don’t know, as a not rich white-adjacent belonging to a social network of men who have sex with men, that doesn’t make me feel warm. Or welcome. Oh, translation…I’m a white middle class gay guy.

Gee, I’d like to think I’m in the smart white person category.. maybe the dumb ones won’t have to fork over money for the privilege of seeing a show that’s not really that show anymore.

There’s such an obvious surge in mandating diversity that it’s exposing the folly of every aspect of theater, from casting … only a _________ can play a ________, to writing, to producing, to who is racially smart enough to see a show.

And that, my friends, is turning a lot of people off.

I do believe it’s time for theater makers to ask the ticket buyers what they want to see. Not what you want them to see. Or what you’re afraid of wanting them to see.

“It would be a mistake to simply focus on trying to restore what perhaps existed before the pandemic, because our world has changed in fundamental ways,” said Mark C. Hanson, the president and chief executive of the Baltimore Symphony.

So what happens next? Arts leaders say they are making peace with not knowing. The risk of serious illness seems to be far lower than at the beginning of the pandemic, but the danger of business interruption remains high, as infections continue to prompt periodic cancellations. And it’s not clear when — or if — arts audiences will return to prepandemic levels.

Arts leaders are not “making peace with not knowing”.

It seems the wine is still getting to them…. they’re throwing up their hands and ignoring the pink(no offense to pink) elephant in the room. They are grasping at a Covid lifeline while the ticket sales and grosses continue to go the wrong direction.

I’d suggest they ask the audience. They’re smarter than all of us.

And get sober.