Thursday, August 27, 2026
Has Broadway lost its way?
It's Been a Minute : NPR: Actors are performing some of the most demanding shows in Broadway history, but the take-home pay isn't quite matching up. Meanwhile, producers are facing skyrocketing costs and shrinking margins. And I don't see anyone jumping for joy at how high these ticket prices have gotten. Is Broadway at the risk of taking its final bow? To understand whether or not Broadway is broken or maybe just broke, I'm here with Broadway Sensitivity Specialist Ann James and entertainment lawyer and Broadway producer Marc Hershberg.
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4 comments:
The work culture of the theater industry has always been somewhat concerning for me so to learn the reasons why things have gotten so bad was both comforting and frustrating. As someone who works on the design production side of theater, the physicality of eight show weeks isn’t as present in my future. However this does give me pause when thinking about working on crews. They don’t discuss this to the same extent as the issue with actors but it made me wonder what the new average experience of a crew member is. The increased workload with stagnant pay and benefits worries me and makes me wonder how an ideal world could have more government and community support. Since the shows are so dependent on the theater owners I wonder how they have been impacting this issue both positively and negatively and how we could change this with more theaters or shifting away from the pedestal broadway has been placed upon.
I think that the evolution or devolution of Broadway in the last 10 years truly has been fascinating to watch. As a person who grew up in NYC, the way people treated Broadway then vs now is truly drastic. With Broadway shifting to a younger and more diverse audience, there is the opportunity for new, fresh, and thought-provoking ideas, but with rising costs and especially the growth of social media, these younger audiences do not feel the need to go to the theater to watch a show. At any given time, if you search hard enough, there are bootlegs or “slime tutorials” of probably every show currently running on Broadway, and countless ones that have closed. Bootlegs and audio recordings are posted to platforms like TikTok, which arguably has the biggest presence of young theater fans. This platform provides a place for young audiences to experience the new media and discuss it with one another through comments and other videos. This, to me, is the death of Broadway. In 2016, when all anyone could talk about was Hamilton, everyone listened to it, but no one actually could see it, and therefore fully experience the magic. This had audiences (like me) entering the lottery for tickets every day for years, or paying an arm and a leg for back-of-house restricted-view seats. But now, if Hadestown just had its first performance with a new cast member last night, all I have to do is go to social media, search it up, and find a video of every song sung by a new actor, just 12 hours earlier. The instant nature of social media has strained audience expectations and made it harder to entice people to actually come see shows in person.
One thing that did stick out to me is the issue of the eight-show week being unsustainable for the average actor. While this article’s statements on it are entirely true, The Lost Boys has demonstrated a solution to this problem. When more and more actors must call out of shows, that’s where the understudies and swings come in. While sometimes having an understudy or a swing can dishearten a theatregoer that was really hoping to see a certain actor, The Lost Boys makes sure that their audiences are equally as excited to see their understudies as you would be for the main cast. The show’s social media heavily posts images and videos celebrating their understudies and standbys. This technique has been so effective that fans online have been trying to plan their visits to this show just so they can catch an understudy’s or swing’s performance as a certain character. When the eight-show week became too much for one actor to bear, The Lost Boys found a way to evenly spread the work between all the actors in the show without as much fear of losing money due to a “star” needing a physical break (as a side tangent, understudies and swings deserve so much more attention and support than the modern Broadway machine supplies! They are the backbones of productions and deserve the level of attention The Lost Boys gives to their cast). I’ve read several articles where people claim that Broadway doesn’t use social media as much as it should in a highly digital age. I agree because the phenomenon of promoting all members of a cast, not just the stars, could break the cycle of “star-studded” productions taking up a majority of Broadway stages. Anyone can go viral on the internet. If anyone could figure out how to go viral, it would be a group of theatre makers. If shows spent more time promoting their entire casts online, they could create “star power” for their current actors without needing an already-known star in the cast. Once again, The Lost Boys’ use of celebrating all their actors, not just the main cast, has already generated star power for their understudies and swings, which I believe can be replicated and used to start healing the broken Broadway machine.
I agree with the fact that a lot of Broadway shows have been using stars or celebrity personalities to bring in larger audiences to make more money. A show I specifically think of is Chicago which consistently brings on famous and well known women to play Velma and Roxie. Announcing this new casting creates more traction for the show and boosts ticket sales to an extent. It really is unfortunate that all these sold out and success full shows are barely breaking even and at the cost of the company being overworked to dangerous levels. During and after Covid theatre itself was really in danger and now theatre is still trying to recover from that impact. Unfortunately I don't think the industry will ever recover completely back to its former glory. There are so many shows on broadway. Some are new revivals, or long time runners and all are quite successful but like the blog stated there hasn't been a hit with the entire public like Hamilton. Most popular shows reach there niche audience of arts and theatre lovers, but Hamilton reach everywhere all over social media right when Tiktok started to blow up. Those 2 phenomenons happening together at the same time create this massive explosion of popularity for both the show and the platform.
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