We’ve Hit Peak Theater

One of the last premiere parties of the Broadway season felt a little on the nose. The Great Gatsby, a ballad-belting, pyrotechnic glow-up of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American tragedy with two onstage cars and a budget approaching $25 million, celebrated its official opening on April 25, the night of the Tony-nominations deadline, with an after-party at Tavern on the Green. The theme was the Roaring ’20s — the louche decade of easy money that preceded the Great Depression.

Producers in newsboy caps raised their coupe glasses to actors in feathered flapper fits. They were not necessarily in the mood to talk about the specter haunting the ball. Spring 2024 saw a frenzy of new shows opening (21 since January) in the face of two formidable obstacles: costs that have nearly doubled over a decade and an audience almost 20 percent smaller than it was pre-pandemic. Yet Broadway was partying on, stuffing 12 premieres into the nine days before the Tony deadline. “It’s like the planes lining up on the tarmac at La Guardia in bad weather,” as one publicist put it.

The weather certainly isn’t balmy. Two spring shows have already closed: Days of Wine and Roses, a musical of love and alcoholism that ran for two months, and Lempicka, the story of a little-known Polish decorative painter that shed thousands of dollars a week until its low Tony haul sealed its fate. There is always a cull in June, but with sky-high operating costs, an unusually high number of shows are on the bubble. Six new musicals are currently less than 90 percent full; many of them are unlikely to make it through the summer. The low survival rate means theaters are churning through productions with no obvious candidates for the kind of long runs that sustained Broadway in its pre-pandemic boom. Some producers predict a drastic correction with theaters sitting empty for months for the first time since the 1980s.

A couple hours into the party, Cory Pattak, Gatsby’s lighting designer, sidled up to a finger-sandwich station. “And with that,” he shouted over to two tech-production managers, “the season that we thought would never end … has ended!” He debriefed us on the show’s chaotic, last-minute transfer from New Jersey.

Gatsby landed the grand Art Deco Broadway Theatre only because another show, David Byrne’s Imelda Marcos musical Here Lies Love, failed to find an audience and abruptly closed after four months, unable to recover the $22 million investors poured into it. Pattak and other techs, scrambling to beat a rival Gatsby musical to Broadway, were tasked with building a set in five weeks versus the usual 18. And that’s nothing compared with what Illinoise had to do: The Sufjan Stevens dance musical dropped in so late in the season, replacing a failed Spamalot revival in a matter of days, that it opened (the day before Gatsby) without previews while actors were still rehearsing. “When a theater opens up and they offer it to you,” Pattak explained, “you take it.”

This round-robin of shows, developed in better days and slowed by COVID, has been shuffling at an accelerating pace. Theater owners, eager to keep the lights on, have been plucking them up one after the other. A Huey Lewis jukebox musical? Why not. Randomly timed revivals of Tommy and The Wiz? Sure. A Hamilton-lite revue of women’s suffrage? Don’t mind if we do. And producers, pressed to unload shows before they get stale, are not in a position to sit out the season.

As the jazz age attests, bubbles can be fun. More cast and crew are working more than ever and getting paid better for it. The variety of shows — indie-rock dramas, an R&B jukebox musical, the darkest Cabaret you’ll ever see — has hard-core fans excited. But if you’re an investor, you’re watching the whole spectacle through your fingers. In a season when the biggest musical hit is Merrily We Roll Along, Stephen Sondheim’s most famous flop, and the hottest play, Stereophonic, is just about breaking even, anything might work and anything might fail. Call it Peak Theater — the best and worst time to open on Broadway.

Nearly 30 years ago, the big, bloated musical everyone was talking about was Titanic, produced for the then-astronomical sum of $10 million. Its former star, Brian d’Arcy James, remembers eavesdropping on the crew. “They said, ‘This show has got 18 pounds of sausage in a two-pound bag,’” said James, who starred in Days of Wine and Roses, which closed at the end of March. “And that’s kind of what this season feels like right now.”

The actor, who was making the red-carpet rounds campaigning for his fifth Tony nomination (which he would earn), looked over at a modest step-and-repeat outside the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for Peter Morgan’s play Patriots. It was 1 p.m. on a blustery Monday, when Broadway shows are usually dark. “It’s a Passover special,” publicist Jim Byk explained with a tight grin. The evening holiday was only one reason for the lunchtime red carpet — three of the last four days of Tony-deadline week had two openings apiece, and The Heart of Rock and Roll would open in a few hours.

Patriots carries a timely premise: Michael Stuhlbarg plays a Russian oligarch who engineered the rise of Vladimir Putin. But it owes its Broadway transfer from London, which critics judged to be premature, to a TV oligarch. Morgan created the Netflix hit The Crown, and the streamer is co-producing, hoping to develop Patriots for the screen. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos also walked the red carpet. “My attraction to all this goes back to Norman Lear,” he told me. The legendary showrunner plucked all his best talent from the theater. Broadway’s current reliance on spectacle musicals in search of big crowds, he says, “might be at the cost of drama” — meaning straight plays with subtle acting. “Which is not great.”

It’s a noble sentiment, except that Netflix played a role in Broadway’s current predicament. When COVID shuttered midtown for a year, would-be theatergoers turned to their Rokus. Broadway came back, but it was transformed. Hybrid work meant fewer commuters catching a show after a day in the office; fear of crime (rational or not) didn’t help. The resulting drop in demand has already lasted longer than the dips Broadway saw after 9/11 and the Great Recession. Audiences are down 17 percent since the boom season of 2018–19 with older suburbanites accounting for most of the falloff. “The drop was at 50-plus,” says Damian Bazadona, president of the Situation Group, which recently polled 1,700 Broadway-ticket buyers. Other demographics held steady.

Is that why The Heart of Rock and Roll, a jukebox musical centered on “Hip to Be Square” Huey Lewis, has been so anemic at the box office despite surprisingly good reviews? Is the missing fifth of suburbanites responsible for the fact that, an hour before Monday’s opening-night performance, seats were available at the TKTS booth for 40 percent off?

Rock and Roll is not the only opening-night show at which I found theatergoers with discounted last-minute tickets. When I tell Rocco Landesman, a producer who once owned five houses through Jujamcyn Theaters, about these half-price openings, all he says is, “Wow. That’s usually not a good indicator.” In early May, even the big hits had plenty of seats available in June. Advance sales can sustain a show through the slow summer months (and earn interest). But now audiences are seeing fewer shows and buying tickets much closer to showtime, says producer Rachel Sussman, who developed Suffs, a musical about the women’s-rights movement that’s currently treading water. “And we therefore have had to recalibrate how we forecast.”

Producing on Broadway, where roughly 80 percent of shows fail to recoup, has always been a leap of faith. Yet the leaps behind this year’s shows were mostly made before COVID. The Theater District was booming when the pandemic hit, capping a ten-year run in which attendance rose 25 percent and grosses nearly doubled. It was easier then to believe a mantra that has been recited to me several times, though not always in earnest: If you build it, they will come.

Rebuilding it in 2024 is more like restarting a fire: You need fresh kindling and a spark. You need a show that absolutely everyone wants to see. “Hamilton rose all boats,” says producer John Johnson. “You couldn’t get into that show for months and months, and it drew people to Broadway,” where they could buy a ticket for Kinky Boots or take a flier on Fun Home.

Since the pandemic, no shows seem to be a candidate for canonical status — or even a Kinky Boots–length run. Before the Tony nominations on April 30, no one had much of a clue which of Broadway’s 15 new musicals would break through. Hell’s Kitchen, the Alicia Keys catalogue musical, earned 13 nominations; The Outsiders was close behind with 12. Yet Tonys no longer guarantee solvency. It used to be that if a show won Best Musical, it would earn its money back. Moulin Rouge! The Musical, the last winner to open before the pandemic, ultimately reopened and recouped. The next two winners, A Strange Loop and Kimberly Akimbo, failed to break even before closing. That hadn’t happened since 2002.

MJ, the Michael Jackson musical, is the closest we’ve come to a post-pandemic hit. And this season, Merrily We Roll Along recouped its $12 million cost after only six months. Producer Oliver Roth, who this season backed Merrily, An Enemy of the People, and Lempicka, holds up the Sondheim revival, starring Daniel Radcliffe, as a best-case scenario. “Franchises and stars sell,” he says, “and anything else has a really tough time.” Enemy has Jeremy Strong; Sweeney Todd opened last year with Josh Groban (and Sondheim again). Both are rare post-pandemic success stories.

Another road to recoupment is event theater — the Broadway analogue to the $5,000 Taylor Swift ticket. Cabaret, starring Eddie Redmayne, offers a premium nightclub experience, beginning with a Sleep No More–style back-alley arrival, for up to $700 apiece. Despite mixed reviews, it recently grossed $2 million in a week, which is better than Hamilton. Still, revivals are self-contained, especially if they feature stars with tight schedules. (Merrily must close July 7; Redmayne is out of Cabaret in September.) It’s the new, surprising musical — Wicked, The Book of Mormon — that breathes life into Broadway and draws tourists for two or five or 30 years.

Besides, in 2024 you almost have to be a blockbuster to make money. Starry, sold-out limited runs can earn out, but the kind of moderately long run that used to be Broadway’s bread and butter — the middle of the pack — doesn’t work on a modern balance sheet. “The days of The Band’s Visit or A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, where a show has a one-to-three-year run and makes its money back, are sort of over,” Roth says.

Sue Wagner co-produced Gentleman’s Guide. “Back then,” she says, “we did shows on the bubble. You’re not losing hundreds of thousands, but you’re not making money. You could survive for months and months. The bubble has popped.” Which brings us to a problem that won’t go away even if every single Massapequa accountant comes back to his midtown office tomorrow: Production budgets have exploded.

The capitalization of Broadway shows this season adds up to $410 million, compared with $290 million last year, according to Broadway Journal columnist Philip Boroff. Before 2023, only a handful of shows were ever made for more than $20 million. This season, there are at least five, topped by Cabaret, which at $26 million is the most expensive Broadway revival in history. This can’t be pegged purely to inflation. Titanic would have cost $19 million in today’s money — the exact cost of the relatively modest Lempicka, which closes this month.

Even more important than capitalization is the cost of staying open, which has also ballooned. In November, Boroff reported that Water for Elephants has weekly operating costs of $960,000; Back to the Future costs $980,000 to run, and Cabaret needs $1.16 million to break even. Before the pandemic, $700,000 was considered to be very high. The reasons for rising costs run across the rest of the economy: supply-chain disruption, inflation, a strong labor movement, the price of idling projects during a year of lockdown. Because tourists favor spectacle — and shows now desperately need them in order to run long enough to break even — producers can fall into a razzle-dazzle arms race. “You see a lot more shows these days who say, ‘Well, if I’m going to risk $16 million, and an extra five can add this other thing, I’ll add the five,’” says Roth. “Because it’s either going to enjoy a five-year run or we’re not going to get there.”

So why would you even try? Roth, who is in his mid-30s, comes off as the Broadway equivalent of a quant. He frets over the “interquartile” of weekly grosses. He speaks methodically about maximizing the timing and star appeal of An Enemy of the People. And yet he also produced Lempicka, which he readily admits “has none of the things we talked about.” “The gamble we were taking on Lempicka,” Roth says, “is that something comes by and sweeps the audience and becomes an undeniable cultural and commercial force. Because historically, it’s not that infrequent.” He mentions the plot of Kinky Boots: “This drag queen that stops a shoe business from going on sale — I know that’s going to work. It’s always been the case of, This makes absolutely no sense.” If you believe in a story, it doesn’t need stars or a pedigree or IP. That was the assumption, anyway, when Lempicka was being developed. “I’ve been involved in that show since basically 2015, so it predates these trends,” Roth says. “It’s not like a year ago I said, ‘You know, what I’d like to produce right now is an original musical.’ It’s the only original musical I’ve done since the pandemic — and there’s a reason for that.”

I call Johnson, a producer on Stereophonic and Lempicka, on the day the Tony nominations are announced — “The highs and lows all in one morning,” as he puts it. The first play set the historical record for straight play nominations at 13; the second picked up three, but that didn’t help it stay open.

Johnson is more eager to discuss Stereophonic: “We’re having a record-breaking day at the box office. But we still have a ton of tickets to sell.” Stereophonic, which tracks the backstage relationship dramas of a Fleetwood Mac–ish rock band, features actors who play their instruments, an innovative single set, and songs by Will Butler, formerly of Arcade Fire, making it an exciting hybrid of play and musical — and it only cost $4.8 million to make. Its Tony haul vindicates Johnson’s theory that Broadway must now adapt to a “new core audience.” It’s younger — yes — but also tends to live in the city, particularly Manhattan and Brooklyn’s artier precincts, and at least has pretensions to edginess. It’s more like the well-pierced crowd I saw at the Illinoise premiere, as if teleported from BAM.

According to a 2023 Broadway League report, the average age of a theatergoer is now 40.4, the youngest in at least 20 years. “The nature of the shows that are rising to the top of this field are showing that,” Johnson says. “The Outsiders did great today. They have a much younger audience. Hell’s Kitchen, Appropriate, same thing.” Johnson and a younger cohort of producers are placing bets on their generation. Others are not so sure. “I’m just trying to be a realist,” says Bazadona of the Situation Group. “So you’re going to produce a show for $25 million, and your recoupment chart requires you to have an average ticket price of $150, $200 a ticket. And you say to yourself, Who am I designing this for? A 25-year-old? I don’t see that happening.”

What the optimists and pessimists agree on is that the business model has to change. In part, this means boosting revenue. The tour circuit is having a great year, able to capitalize on the scarcity that comes with short, sold-out runs. The current revival of The Wiz, which is selling well, had a commercial tour before opening, working its way toward recoupment well in advance of its New York arrival.

But controlling costs feels like the top priority. One way to do so might be to defer them, altering contracts so that everyone involved waits for some payments and royalties until after a show recoups. But that seems a little far-fetched in a system where so few shows break even. “The way the problem solves itself is empty theaters,” says one producer. “Suddenly, okay, we have empty buildings because producers can’t afford to make shows and they can’t afford to raise the money on these shows. Then the theater owners are going to start to cut deals.” Desperate for shows, they could offer breaks on rent. Actors’ agents, hungry for work, could do the same. Power brokers across the system, unions included, could bring down costs if the alternative is disaster. And until then, some feel producers could show a little more restraint. “I have a big sign in my office that says WHY NOW,” says longtime producer Tom Kirdahy. “Why this show at this moment? Shows need to be ready for the kind of scrutiny Broadway invites.”

On the long red carpet rolled out ahead of The Great Gatsby premiere, the cast and crew seemed to have gotten the memo that the musical is not only ready for prime time; it’s arriving just on time to save Broadway. “I think it was a surprise to everybody that we were able to move this fast” and transfer to Broadway, says Marc Bruni, the show’s director. “That’s a tribute to our producer Chunsoo Shin and also just real estate.” (In the coming weeks, Gatsby will pull in more than $1 million a week and fill around 90 percent of its capacious theater — in no immediate danger of either closing or becoming the next Hamilton.)

“This year feels like we’re roaring back,” says Linda Cho, the musical’s costume designer. Jeremy Jordan, who plays Jay Gatsby, makes the clearest sales pitch: “Gatsby is the quintessential musical-theater show. It fills that hole Phantom and Les Miz left open; it’s bigger than life, beautiful clothes, eye-popping sets. It gives you exactly what you’d imagine Broadway to give you and unabashedly so.” When I compliment his salesmanship, he responds, “You know what? We’re trying to stay open, girl! We’re trying to stay open!”