July 2022
COMMENTARY: (inspired by the speeches and commentaries by a number of strong, successful arts entrepreneurs).
“Live theatre spaces are today’s societal vaccines or antidotes for all the screens in our lives. Humanity needs to balance the real, visceral, and sensory experience – real human interactive experiences are essential nourishment for our souls. We need dinners with friends, yoga classes, sports, poker tables, beaches, coffee houses, and live music, live dance, live art of all kinds, not with screens but with each other.
Live theater will persevere into the future if it feels like a safe and welcome home base. Making theatrical spaces cleaner, roomy and comfortable, more accessible, less costly, and much, much more “green” will secure the future of live theater for the next generation. Not all artists have disposable income. Theatres need to offer GIVE WHAT YOU CAN tickets and FREE work spaces for creators and their artistic partners.
And then, we must share a variety of visions from writers of all ages, all ethnicities, all genders, and daring perspectives to balance some of the biased beliefs of previous work from our traditional repertoire. Our cultural legacy demands that we keep our eyes open for talent, and develop new financial strategies for bringing hundreds or thousands of new writers to the stage every year.
Producer extraordinaire Joe Papp (“A Chorus Line” “For Colored Girls…” “Sticks and Bones” “Hair”) once told me: “I have a better chance of finding an artistic AND commercial hit if I produce a hundred shows each year without reading them, than if I read them all and choose the ‘best’ three.” Theater is a collaborative art form, and it’s the team that works together on it that will determine how a particular story/concept/theme reaches an audience on a stage. It’s the finished product from multiple talents that the audience experience.
So, in summation, we can change the world, literally, by working to make the LIVE experience better than it has been. Perhaps that’s the “new normal” that the theater community was talking about during the pandemic. – Mitch Weiss July 1, 2022
CHAPTER 5: MARKETING & PROMOTION
As a new Broadway season begins, industry research suggests social media strategies.
Keep it short and sweet: Short-form video is 2.5 times more engaging (66%) than longer forms according to a 2022 consumer survey, up significantly from 2020.
Taking a stand on social issues, shared values, and raising awareness is good for brand loyalty according to 71% of ticket buyers.
Facebook and YouTube are still in the game. While TikTok’s popularity is building among “brands” (49%), Users say they will use Facebook (71%), YouTube (51%) and Instagram (49%) more often in the next year when making their decisions.
CHAPTER 6: TONY AWARDS
As expected as Tony Award season begins to end, and an annual occurrence, Broadway shows are beginning to announce closing dates. Long runs. Short runs. The run is over. (Announced so far: “Come From Away”, “Company”, “Dear Evan Hansen”. Expect half the theaters to empty out, some as soon as July 4th weekend.
CHAPTER 10: PRODUCERS, INVESTORS, SUBSIDIARY RIGHTS
How Broadway shows translate into high school royalties… Notice how few Broadway dramas and how many Off-Broadway dramas are include in the lists. Here are 2022’s top 10 high school productions:
MUSICALS: 1. Mamma Mia! 2. All Together Now (a special free offering from Concord Theatricals) 3. The Addams Family 4. The SpongeBob Musical 5. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast 6. You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown 7. Little Shop of Horrors 8. Into the Woods 9. Tie: Disney’s The Little Mermaid and Newsies.
NON-MUSICALS: 1. Clue 2. Puffs 3. A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4. Almost, Maine 5. She Kills Monsters 6. Twelve Angry Jurors 7. Alice in Wonderland 8. Radium Girls 9. Peter and the Starcatcher 10. Our Town.
CHAPTER 11: UNIQUE FINANCIALS
ATG & ITS SHOWS GOT $79 MILLION IN U.S. AID by Philip Boroff (edited)
ARTS JOURNAL EXCLUSIVE: As lead producer and landlord of Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite, Ambassador Theatre Group has bragging rights to the most commercially successful play of the 2021-22 Broadway season.
The average ticket price for the Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick revival was $213 last week, behind only The Music Man and Hamilton. Pairs go for as much as $2,051, which includes Piper-Heidsieck Champagne and Ladurée macarons served in a semi-private lounge at ATG's Hudson Theatre.
The U.K.-based conglomerate isn’t crowing. “ATG does not control, and cannot provide comment about” Plaza Suite, an ATG spokesman told Broadway Journal in an email.
Control is a high-stakes question for the company, which suffered heavy losses during the theater shutdown. In last year’s Federal bailout of live entertainment, the U.S. Small Business Administration allocated $79 million to five venues operated by ATG and to three shows its subsidiaries produced, including $10 million for Plaza Suite. ATG insists that the eight grants didn’t run afoul of an SBA rule that no more than five “affiliated” entities were eligible for the funds. ATG and Plaza Suite said they’re not “affiliated” with each other as the SBA defines the term, because of an absence of control.
Sparked by 2020 legislation to protect the live music and theater industries and championed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Broadway League, the $15 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program helped save countless jobs and bolstered about half the Broadway shows that opened or reopened in 2020-21. For many producers, the money was a godsend in a start-and-stop season undermined by virus variants and anemic tourism.
But the Shuttered Venue rules can be murky. They’re less detailed than those of other federal pandemic aid programs and haven’t been tested in court, noted Jessica Abrahams, a Washington, D.C.-based partner with the law firm Faegre Drinker. “So there is no case law or court precedent for how all of this should be interpreted, including the scope of terms that are not expressly defined in the SVOG language,” Abrahams said in an email.
To take one example, the original Broadway production of the hit musical Waitress closed on January 5, 2020, two months before Covid-19 upended theater. It still collected $10 million from the SBA, the largest sum available for a single entity.
To be eligible, businesses must’ve been in operation as of Feb. 29, 2020, but the SBA didn’t fully define “in operation.” Entities that didn’t have performances in February 2020 were able to submit box office reports and other documentation for any month between January 2019 and January 2020. Waitress lead producer Barry Weissler didn’t return calls seeking comment.
Publicly traded corporations, or companies owned by publicly traded corporations, were barred from the SBA program. There was no prohibition against private equity firms, including Providence Equity Partners, the majority owner of ATG. Multinational companies couldn’t apply if they operated in more than 10 U.S. states. That didn’t affect ATG, which has venues in six states and generated about half of its revenue in the U.K. in 2019-20.
In addition to Plaza Suite, recipients of the federal program included Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway and in San Francisco, produced by ATG subsidiary Sonia Friedman Productions; Harry Potter’s U.S. venues, the Lyric and Curran theaters; and three other ATG theaters in New Orleans, Louisiana; San Antonio, Texas; and Sugar Land, Texas, outside of Houston.
The $79 million for ATG and its productions eclipsed the $50 million procured by five companies of Hamilton.
The Small Business Administration said it uses the principle of “affiliation” to determine whether an entity is eligible for a program reserved for small businesses. Affiliation occurs “where one firm has the power to control another firm, or a single person or entity has the power to control both,” according to an SBA document about the Shuttered Venue program. ATG maintains that it doesn’t control Plaza Suite or Harry Potter, so aid to those shows doesn’t count toward ATG’s five-grant maximum — which it exhausted on five of its venues.
ATG may have minimal control at Hogwarts. Sonia Friedman Productions — a lead producer, or general partner, of Harry Potter in New York and San Francisco — is said to operate independently of its majority owner, ATG. Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling is another general partner. “We can confirm that the Ambassador Theatre Group is not affiliated with the production and therefore has no conflict with SBA requirements,” Adrian Bryan-Brown, a spokesman for the show, said in an email.
Plaza Suite is less clear cut. ATG subsidiary ATG NY LLC is listed as the first general partner, or managing member, of Suite 719 LLC — the company presenting the play. The operating agreement, filed with the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, notes that “conduct and control” of the show is “exclusively vested in the managing members.” Rick Miramontez, a spokesman for Suite 719, said that there are three managing members, “none of which have the power to individually control the production entity, as contemplated by applicable SBA regulations,” he said in an email.
Nicholas Solosky, a Washington-based partner of the law firm Fox Rothschild LLP, said that rationale doesn’t always fly. “A lot of times, the SBA will say, ‘when no one has control, everyone has control,'” he said in an interview. (Besides ATG NY, the play’s managing members are Hal Luftig and Gavin Kalin. Miramontez is a spokesman for both ATG and Plaza Suite.)
Shuttered Venue applicants were required to disclose their affiliates, according to the SBA. “Congress did not direct SBA to challenge an applicant’s conclusion that a minority owner is not ‘affiliated’ for SVOG purposes without in-depth knowledge about the inner workings and management arrangements of a company,” an SBA spokeswoman said in an email. (An entity that owns at least half of another’s voting stock is automatically considered affiliated. Minority ownership is the gray area.) “So the affiliation disclosure as it relates to minority owners is assumed correct absent clear evidence that it was false,” the SBA spokeswoman said.
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While the SBA required applicants to submit financial statements and tax returns to document revenue loss, there was no account for actual need. Applicants merely had to provide a “good faith certification that the uncertainty of current economic conditions makes the grant necessary to support ongoing operations,” the SBA said on its website. The SBA didn’t define “necessary” or require set language “because every eligible entity’s circumstances are different.”
The success of Plaza Suite, whose Broadway opening was postponed for two years because of the shutdown, could be evidence that its federal handout was a waste. Or that it worked wonders. That’s the conundrum when subsidizing theater to spur economic development. Blockbusters may not need help, but they contribute disproportionately to the industry’s recovery.
CHAPTER 19: CUSTODIANS, USHERS & HOUSE STAFF
"We have gone through a lot over the past two years," said Lorraine Feeks, 51, who has worked on Broadway with Jujamcyn Theaters for 29 years. "When Broadway returned, we were given all sorts of new cleaning duties. We do the hard jobs and we are risking infection, that makes us essential."
In the new contract, the essential workers will get wage increases, increased pension contributions, and continued paid family healthcare which is 100% covered by their employers.
About 230 cleaners from four companies — Jujamcyn, Nederlander, Shubert and Circle in the Square, which collectively manage 16 Broadway theaters — were represented by Local 32BJ in the contract negotiation. Their last four-year agreement was bargained in 2016; that contract was extended twice during the pandemic. As a result, workers didn't receive any wage increases in more than three years, despite the rigorous new COVID safety protocols which they said made their jobs more stressful, dangerous and demanding.
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