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How Broadway emerged from ruin to become a billion-dollar business
Last Updated: 8:43 AM, June 12, 2011
Posted: 10:47 PM, June 11, 2011
The Tony Awards are tonight, and approximately 12 people will be watching.
Broadway’s big award show on CBS is always ratings challenged,
lagging far behind sporting events and reruns of “Murder, She Wrote.”
But
the Tonys’ poor track record belies the truth about the industry it
celebrates: Broadway has in the past 15 years become a
multibillion-dollar global empire. Even in a down economy, gross
receipts for the 2010-2011 season totaled a record $1.1 billion, up 6%
from last year. Attendance jumped 5.4%, to 12.5 million.
Without
much fanfare, Broadway has become an economic cornerstone of New York
City, as big a tourist magnet as the Empire State Building and Katz’s
deli.
And productions of long-running hits like “Mamma Mia!” “The
Lion King” and “Chicago” aren’t only popular here, they rake in billions
of dollars worldwide. The international gross for “The Phantom of the
Opera” alone stands at $5.5 billion, which makes it a more lucrative
property than “Jurassic Park” and “E.T.”
Broadway’s shows and stars have lodged themselves firmly in mainstream popular culture.
Two
weeks ago, on the very same day, Kristin Chenoweth sang “For Good,” a
song from “Wicked,” on “Glee” and Oprah Winfrey’s farewell show.
“The
movies and the recording industry used to be the glamorous businesses,”
says a veteran theater producer. “Now it’s television and theater.”
How did Broadway, once the backwater of the entertainment industry, get so big?
The
story begins in 1972, when New York, to say nothing of Broadway, was
bankrupt. Times Square was seedy and crime-ridden, and Broadway’s
once-great theaters were empty and dilapidated.
The Shubert
Organization, which owned many of those theaters, was being run by
Lawrence Shubert Lawrence, great nephew of J.J. Shubert, who with his
two brothers, Sam and Lee, founded the empire in 1900.
Lawrence
was a drunk who conducted business, such as it was, over a phone from
the second-floor bar at Sardi’s. Two middle-age lawyers who worked for
him — Bernard B. Jacobs and Gerald Schoenfeld — watched him run the
Shuberts into the ground.
They staged a coup.
With the
backing of the Shubert board, they ousted Lawrence and took over the
organization, which was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. While they
were scrambling to shore up the company, Jacobs got a call from his
friend, a young director named Michael Bennett. He was working on a show
about Broadway dancers, but his producer, the Public Theater, run by
Joseph Papp, had run out of money. Bennett offered the show to Jacobs.
“I
can’t do that to Joe,” Jacobs said. “But maybe we can lend him some
money, and if it works, we’ll put it in one of our theaters.”
The
show was “A Chorus Line.” It ran 15 years at the Shubert Theater,
earning several hundred-million dollars. “Before ‘A Chorus Line,’ there
was no money,” says Philip J. Smith, chairman of the Shubert
Organization. “After ‘A Chorus Line,’ there was nothing but money.”
Jacobs,
who died in 1996, and Schoenfeld, who died in 2008, used that cash to
fix up their theaters and produce new shows. Schoenfeld also spearheaded
a movement to clean up Times Square. Broadway, he believed, would not
survive if people were afraid of the neighborhood. His pleas, though,
often fell on deaf ears. According to several Shubert sources, Mayor Ed
Koch, who had other battles to fight, often said: “Where’s Broadway
going to go? New Jersey?”
Always on the hunt for new talent,
Schoenfeld and Jacobs spotted a young producer from London named Cameron
Mackintosh. He had little money and used to sleep in Jacobs’ guest room
on trips to New York.
In 1980, Mackintosh and his friend,
composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, decided to do a musical based on T.S.
Eliot’s poems about cats. The show — called, of course, “Cats” — opened
in London with about 10 cents in the box office. It quickly took off,
however, and the Shuberts snatched it for Broadway, where it ran 18
years.
“Cats” also spawned some 25 productions around the world, all tightly controlled by Mackintosh.
Old-time
Broadway shows such as “Fiddler on the Roof” and “West Side Story” had
traveled the world, too, but they were usually licensed to local
producers, sometimes with sketchy results. Mackintosh set up a global
distribution system to ensure that the same production of “Cats” that
wowed them in New York wowed them in Shanghai. His worldwide production
company then rolled out three more mega-hits — “Les Miserables,” “The
Phantom of the Opera” and “Miss Saigon” — each of which has grossed
billions of dollars.
Broadway, however, was still something of a backwater.
“Nobody
really paid attention to how much money Cameron and Andrew Lloyd Webber
were making,” says a theater producer. “People just saw the grosses for
New York in Variety, and they just didn’t compare to what a hit movie
made. But they weren’t looking at how much these shows were making
around the world — and the fact that they never closed.”
By 1991,
the era of the Mackintosh-style show — big sets, serious themes, lush
scores — was drawing to a close, with critics complaining that these
British pop operas were all about spectacle.
At the same time, however, Broadway musical comedy, a home-grown art form, was beginning to regain its footing.
In
1992, a spiffy revival of “Guys and Dolls,” perhaps the greatest
musical comedy ever, opened on Broadway, launching the career of one of
the greatest musical-comedy performers ever, Nathan Lane.
Artistically,
there is a direct line from that revival of “Guys and Dolls,” which
overflowed with wit, vitality and showbiz know-how, to Mel Brooks’ “The
Producers” in 2001, the musical that made Lane a household name.
At
the same time “Guys and Dolls” was reinvigorating musical comedy, two
writers from the musical theater were revitalizing the animated film
genre. In 1986, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman wrote a hit Off-Broadway
show called “Little Shop of Horrors.” This led, of course, to Broadway
offers. But a show Ashman wrote called “Smile” was a big flop, leaving
him bitter about New York theater.
So when a friend who worked at
Disney asked him to go to Los Angeles to write a movie about a mermaid,
he jumped on the first plane, bringing Menken with him.
“I had a
5-year-old daughter at the time, and so I was watching a lot of the
great old Disney movies,” Menken told me recently. “Basically, Howard
and I wanted to do a ‘Snow White.’ ”
They wrote “The Little
Mermaid,” followed by “Beauty and the Beast,” which was the first
animated movie ever to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.
When
“Beauty and the Beast” was released in 1991, Frank Rich, then the drama
critic for The New York Times, called it “the best musical of the
year.” When Disney executives read the article, they got ideas. “Beauty
and the Beast,” the actual musical, opened in 1994. Critics pooh-poohed
it as a “theme-park show,” but families flocked to it and it ended up
running 13 years.
While “Beauty” boomed, the Shubert’s drive to
clean up Times Square was picking up steam. New York’s tough-on-crime
mayor, Rudy Giuliani, was closing the peep shows and rounding up the
squeegee men. His administration courted Disney to be a part of the
revitalization. In 1993, Disney took over the grand but broken-down New
Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street and restored it to its former glory.
Disney presence in Times Square attracted other brand-name corporations, which opened stores and restaurants along 42nd Street.
In
1995, Disney made one of the great artistic decisions in the company’s
history — it hired Julie Taymor, then an avant-garde director, to stage
“The Lion King” on Broadway. The show, which featured gigantic
Indonesian-inspired puppets and authentic African music, was a smash,
winning the Tony for Best Musical in 1997.
“They took the most
popular cartoon at that point in history and made a musical that was so
good it made you think Broadway is an art form as well as
entertainment,” says David Stone, the producer of “Wicked.”
“The
Lion King” wasn’t the only show that was changing Broadway’s artistic
landscape. Jonathan Larson’s “Rent” proved that rock music could work on
Broadway. The show, which won the Tony in 1996, also attracted hordes
of hip, sophisticated teenagers who wouldn’t be caught dead at a musical
starring Carol Channing.
Around this time, Broadway acquired a
national cheerleader — Rosie O’Donnell, who had yet to embrace her inner
freak and was being cute and cuddly on her hugely popular talk show.
Broadway
performers were regular guests. Her show also featured live
performances from Broadway musicals, something that hadn’t been done on
television since Ed Sullivan went off the air in 1971.
Other TV
shows followed suit, and soon Broadway casts were singing and dancing on
“Good Morning America,” the “Today” show and David Letterman.
Broadway’s also inspired everything from “High School Musical” to
“Glee,” hooking an entire generation on theater.
With such
exposure, Broadway was starting, as it had done decades ago, to create
star performers — Lane, of course, but also Chenoweth (“Wicked”) and
Hugh Jackman (“The Boy From Oz”).
Meanwhile, mega-stars from other
areas of the entertainment industry started seeing Broadway as a place
to prove their artistic chops. In 2006, Julia Roberts, then at the
height of her career as a film star, did a Broadway play, “Three Days of
Rain.” She wasn’t very good, but there wasn’t a ticket to be had.
Movie
studios have tried to chase Disney’s success. The results have been
scattershot, with such flops as “Lestat” (Warner Brothers) and “The
Wedding Singer” (New Line) painful to sit through. But Universal struck
gold with two of Broadway’s most beloved musicals — “Wicked” and “Billy
Elliot.”
Broadway’s profits have also soared thanks to so-called
“premium pricing.” Producers sitting atop hit shows have raised the
price for good seats from $100 a decade ago to $375 today. As a result,
weekly grosses for hit musicals run to $1.5 million.
“The Book of
Mormon,” which will be showered with Tonys tonight, is, in many ways,
the culmination of Broadway’s resurgence. Written by Matt Stone and Trey
Parker, who created “South Park,” it’s a traditional musical comedy
that’s also hip and subversive. Jon Stewart loves it. With premium seats
at $425, it grosses more than $1 million a week. Theater owners from
London to Sydney are desperately trying to get it for their markets. And
its producer, Ann Scott Rudin, is one of the most powerful people in
Hollywood.
Though you’d never know it from watching the Tonys, Broadway’s the hottest ticket in town.
Harris's opening number was funny.