| re: Broadway's longest running play ... | |
| Posted by: MFeingold 04:41 pm EST 12/29/17 | |
| In reply to: re: Broadway's longest running play ... - NewtonUK 11:37 am EST 12/29/17 | |
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| Fascinating the comments - many of them highly perceptive - that your post has provoked! But what your response suggests is not that you feel the play as such is dead on Broadway, but that Broadway as a force for creating dramatic stars is dead: Today's stars come from tv and film, or from the pop world (like Josh Groban), and go back there, which limits the time they can give to a Broadway run. In the era you're talking of, stars not only stayed with a play for a year or more in New York, but then toured with it, so that audiences nationally knew them as stage stars, and not just two-dimensional figures on a screen. But the issue of use of theatres is a highly relative one: Is a house suitable for intimate plays better used by a multi-year run of a single play or by a season of shorter runs? - and as ryhog points out below, there's no shame in a short run. And these days, plays that are done and discussed widely across the country, as Broadway plays were between say 1920 and 1970, mostly begin Off-Broadway. Whether they transfer to Broadway or not doesn't matter as much: Paula Vogel and Lynn Nottage both made their Broadway playwriting debuts last season, but both have long been familiar to resident-theatre and university audiences across the country. (I found it a source of great irony that Vogel was making her Broadway debut while receiving the Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement. And I doubt that the irony was lost on her.) And in a sense, Jax's comment below weakens your argument by mentioning Annie Baker - whose plays have attracted audiences (and controversy) everywhere without benefit of Broadway. And the notion that it's better for a Broadway theatre to house a play than a musical is exactly as nebulous as the issue of whether a piece of skillful commercial craftsmanship like LIFE WITH FATHER is betther than a troubling, eyebrow-raising play like SWEAT or INDECENT, which won't run as long in a money-centered arena but might last longer in other respects - and perhaps be revived more often. Would a nonmusical play necessarily be "better" for Broadway than DEAR EVAN HANSEN or THE BAND'S VISIT? These are musicals that give some of the gratifications of fine plays - along with those we get from the best musical theatre. So that finally I think the answer to your concern is: The world has changed, and it's going to keep changing. No use sighing over that. Just look for what benefits we can derive from the change, and how we can make it a change for the better. |
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| Previous: | re: Broadway's longest running play ... - NewtonUK 11:37 am EST 12/29/17 |
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