Getting to the ‘What’ of it

HowlRound: Last Monday I was fortunate enough to be able to attend TEDxBroadway at New World Stages in New York City. With no direct experience, but a keen interest, in the Broadway scene, I was excited to have the opportunity to spend the day listening to fourteen experts, industry and outsiders, answer the question: “What’s the Best that Broadway can be Twenty Years from Now?” Many have done an incredibly thorough job reporting on the event and so I won’t attempt to offer a complete summary. (If you’re interested in such a recap, I recommend Howard Sherman’s live blog of the day’s activities here.)
Much of the conference was spent discussing who Broadway should be attracting (in terms of both audience and industry), how Broadway could be courting said targeted audiences (largely capitalizing on social networking), and why theater. The why was most succinctly and quotably summed up by Gregory Mosher: “You can’t Google a broken heart. That’s what we need Shakespeare for.” A conversation about what the theater in the theaters should look like and what it should address was slightly less fleshed out. I wanted to take a minute to distill the what in hopes of continuing the conversation that was started on Monday.