Broadway is offering cut-price tickets in an attempt to woo back audiences. As a result, there has never been a better time to go to a show, argues JOE QUEENAN
JANE FONDA HAS not been seen on Broadway since 1963. Thus, when it was announced that she would be appearing in a new play called 33 Variations, as a dying musicologist obsessed with the fact that Beethoven spent three years writing the Diabelli Variations, you would have thought theatregoers would turn out in big numbers.
So far, it doesn't look as if that's going to happen. Tickets for the play, which has not yet opened, are already being discounted at organisations such as Theatre Development Fund, which sells seats at half price or less to teachers, union members and freelance writers like me. Simultaneously, tickets for a new production of Waiting for Godot, starring Broadway stalwart Nathan Lane, the incomparable mime Bill Irwin and the likable movie star John Goodman, can already be bought for as little as $24.95 (€19.52). The play hasn't even opened.
This is not good news for the theatre business. Godot can wait. Theatre owners can't. The full impact of the recession on the theatre business began to be felt last month, when 11 plays closed. Some, like the cracking comedy Boeing-Boeing, had come to the natural end of their runs, but other shutterings came as a shock.
Gypsy, starring Broadway icon Patti LuPone, is the kind of cash cow that would normally run for at least a year. It closed after 10 months. The New Mel Brooks Musical: Young Frankenstein, a lame show that would nevertheless have proven critic-proof in another time, also got put out to pasture. Add to their numbers long-running middlebrow fare such as Spamalot, Grease, and Hairspray, and critical favourites such as Spring Awakening, and the verdict is clear. Broadway is on the ropes.
A lot of us saw this coming. In January 2008, when there was still a good deal of inane public debate about whether a recession had already begun, I went to see Tom Stoppard's clever Rock'n'Rollat one of New York's most venerable theatres. The house was less than half full; my tickets cost just $35. And New Yorkers love Tom Stoppard.
From that point on I started going to the theatre roughly once a month, taking advantage of a cut-price bonanza that might only come along once in a lifetime. I saw Ian McShane in a revival of The Homecoming, Ciaran Hinds and David Morse in the well-received drama The Seafarer, Marisa Tomei in a reprise of Top Girls, and Morgan Freeman and Frances McDormand in The Country Girl. Getting good seats for a fraction of their normal price was never a problem. I never paid more than $35 (€27).
The God’s honest truth is that I don’t even like the theatre that much. I’d rather hear music. But when you can see plays of this quality featuring actors of this pedigree, you’d have to be a fool or a skinflint to pass up the opportunity. I am neither. What I am is a fiscal patriot. I see my countrymen clasping their wallets shut and hunkering down, waiting for the four horsemen of the apocalypse to canter in. And I see cowardice where there should be courage, timidity where there should be brass. It is simply not the American way to slam on the brakes, to turn down a screaming bargain, to keep one’s cash in one’s pockets.
I am fully aware that consumers bought too many things they did not need in the last decade. They did not need houses that big or cars that massive, and they certainly did not need all those Cuban cigars. But it is the consumer and only the consumer who can bring the present nightmare to an end.
I for one am doing my part. I bought a new car in November and will buy a new computer this spring. I will also buy a new TV.
I understand that most Americans do not need new cars, computers or TVs; they have plenty in stock. But by the same token, I don’t need theatre tickets. Yet I buy them, partly because they have never been cheaper – and partly because, if people don’t start buying tickets to the theatre, they won’t have any theatre left to go to.
I am not asking my fellow Americans to buy things they do not need. I am asking them to zone in on things they really do enjoy and spread their cash around. The situation is so desperate that I am willing to suspend my lifelong aversion to Andrew Lloyd Webber and encourage theatregoers to pony up for Phantom.
Things might get so bad that I enthusiastically recommend the purchase of music by Billy Joel and Phil Collins. I sure hope not. Bear in mind: a dying musicologist investigating Beethoven's obsession with writing the Diabelli Variationsis not the role Jane Fonda was born to play. But I'm going to see her anyway.
– ( Guardianservice)
