More Ragtime Fallout

The recent acclaimed Ragtime revival is just one of many recent examples of a Broadway show that was pretty well liked and enthusiastically reviewed yet could not eek out a review of more than two months--and even that at a heavy financial loss at that. It's, sadly, not exceptional anymore--after such well-received plays as Journey's End, Brighton Beach Memoirs, and Well. But for a popular musical I supposed this is news--as is the closing of the Finian's Rainbow revival, despite a last minute effort to save it by, of all people, the jailbound Garth Drabinsky.

(I didn't see Ragtime, but did see Finian's at Encores, which I enjoyed very much and found the 1947 musical totally viable.)

So without making any crusade about it, I do think there's yet more to learn about current Broadway's problems from the Ragtime case--the common factor between all these shows being, No Star.

But the Ragtime also displays a truly clueless set of assumptions about what it takes these days to transfer a nonprofit hit to the commercial venue of the "Main Stem." Michael Riedel last week laid the blame squarely at the feet of Michael Kaiser, the head of the Kennedy Center, which premiered the Ragtime revival and then fought to get it to Broadway:

Sources say a driving force behind this $8.5 million fool's errand was Michael Kaiser, the head of the Kennedy Center.

"He really wanted a Kennedy Center show on Broadway, and was very particular about it being billed as a Kennedy Center show, even though they really didn't put up all that much money," a production source says.

Kaiser unsuccessfully tried to raise $250,000 last week to keep the show afloat, sources say.

There were some old hands on board, including veteran producer Emanuel Azenberg -- "the only voice of reason in the room," says a source. But a lot of the producers were novices who fell for the usual nonsense about how "audiences are loving our show, we're getting standing ovations every night, we just need time for word of mouth to kick in."

Kaiser has not taken the bait, though. Even though he has a platform as a frequent HuffPost blogger, he used his space there this week to simply reflect on what he learned from the whole experience.

I have learned to appreciate how much easier it is to sell a show when it is produced by a not-for-profit institution than when it is a stand-alone, for-profit venture, as most Broadway shows are.

Uh...duh? And this guy leads one of the largest performing arts institutions in the country right now?

Ok, to be fair, he goes on to spell out some very pertinent particulars: that all Broadway shows must start from scratch in marketing and sales AND start raking in income very quickly--a process that subscription theatres have the benefit of building up over long periods of time.

The other shock to Kaiser is how--with the possible exception of Disney--the producer's name no longer means anything. (Yes, surprisingly the name "Kennedy Center" did not translate into B'way gold.) Obvious, yes. But worth pausing over how names like David Merrick, Feuer & Martin, Alexander Cohen did once attract ticket sales, based merely on the reputation of these men's personal tastes.

Kaiser speculates:

It would not surprise me to see theater owners and producers collaborating in the future to create mock 'institutions' that can establish permanent brand name, mailing lists, websites, and newsletters that emulate their not-for-profit cousins. It would make their lives easier and their productions cheaper.

Well you can bet the Shuberts, for instance, already see themselves as doing that. But the problem is that Broadway consumers will never develop a loyalty to any one producer because their loyalty is to one thing only: Broadway itself. To most audiences, all Broadway shows are essentially the same animal from a business standpoint, all creations of the same factory known as...well, Broadway.

Typical example was a conversation I overheard behind me at the final performance of In the Next Room: or, The Vibrator Play last week. (More about the play anon.) Basically a group of four (two married couples "of a certain age") were enjoying this new, racy little comedy by a young playwright but were completely flummoxed over why it was closing. To paraphrase, the chatter went something like this:

This is so funny. And so well done. I wonder why it's closing.
I don't know. Maybe it has to go on tour.
Or maybe someone else booked the theatre. I don't know how these shows work.

What struck me was that although these folks were exactly the demographic one images as the "typical" Broadway audience (white, suburban, and over fifty) they had no idea of how Broadway works, or how the show they were watching got on that stage--particularly revealing in the case of this show, since it was a nonprofit production presented by Lincoln Center Theatre, who was renting out a Broadway house for the production, which had already been announced as a limited run.

I certainly didn't expect these patrons behind me to be tracking the box office stats on the show, which showed sales in only the 50%-60%capacity range (until the final week which did shoot up to nearly 80%). And after all, the final matinee was packed with an enthusiastic crowd, so it probably seemed like a hit. I guess what surprised me was that--despite, let's assume, paying something at least close to the list price of the four prime-location orchestra seats they occupied--they had no idea this was a Lincoln Center production and no idea that a play with no stars might have trouble selling out a 1,000-seat house eight times a week at $100 a pop.

No, not all playgoers are as obsessive theatre nerds as, well, "Playgoer." But Kaiser's dream of people caring who produces a show and buying tickets based on that seems remote at best.

(Another possible exception: Oprah & "Color Purple". Of course, the answer to that is: Rosie & "Taboo.")

Finally, even more folks are talking about Ragtime! Blogger Laura Collins-Hughes thinks a local NPR radio reporter makes too much hay of the show's 40-actor/20-musician closing as a "jobs issue":

[T]he vaporization of jobs on Broadway simply comes with the territory -- even when a show is terrific -- and the people involved know the risks. Shuttering a show can't be assumed to be a reverberation of trouble in the broader economy. It's normal, just as it will be normal, and not a sign of boom times, when another show creates jobs by opening.

As I say in a comment on Collins-Hughes blog itself, while the closing of Ragtime may not be the fault of, say, Obama, there's no getting around the fact that actors are temps, and that's an even worse thing to be in a Great Recession. So while shows always close--and, yes, no show has some right to run forever on commercial Broadway just for being good--those of us who love the theatre really should be concerned about what happens to all those performers who are effectively laid off when a show closes that probably would have run longer in a stronger economy.