Broadway where it is and how it is is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Before the spectacles, there was a polyglot audience going to theatre all over the borough -- Daly's Fifth Avenue Theatre, the Yiddish theatre on the Lower East Side, some with thousands of seats--from which no plays survive. Eventually it coalesced in midtown thanks to a Syndicate, a Guild, and a taste for spectacles that had been staged by a professional manager, rather than an actor-manager.
(Speaking in broad terms, as I know there are some proper Broadway historians on this board.)
The thing that coalesced in midtown has become a mass of intercalated contracts, CBAs, press lists, bus tour contacts, casting agencies, design firms, etc. -- thousands of very precisely balanced business arrangements, and the sharks fight to get to the top of things by knowing each of them as thoroughly as possible. A production reality as savage, complex and controlled as the stage spectacles that it arose around. The fragility of that precise balance of business arrangements, and not any shortfall of audiences or artists, will determine if the present arrangement survives. If the old scheme can accommodate new production realities and economics, the midtown theatres might continue to be the be-all and end-all, and the worldwide brand survive. But if it can't, the theatre in Manhattan, and its tens of thousands of local artists, will simply become the next form of New York City theatre, just as large, and probably, for a while at least, significantly more diverse. The fabulous invalid totters on.
~pcot |
