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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations
The Graduate School
2003
Corporate Theater: The Revolution of the
Species
Susan Russell
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF THEATRE
CORPORATE THEATER: THE REVOLUTION OF THE SPECIES
By
SUSAN RUSSELL
A Thesis submitted to the
School of Theatre
In partial fulfillment of the
Requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Degree Awarded:
Fall Semester, 2003
The members of the committee approve the thesis of Susan Russell defended on October 30,
2003.
Mary Karen Dahl
Professor Directing Thesis
Carrie Sandahl
Committee Member
Laura Edmondson
Committee Member
The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members
ii
My Thesis is dedicated to all my artist friends who dreamed of Broadway. I carried you in my
heart every night. My thesis is also dedicated to all my artist friends in Phantom of the Opera.
You were never invisible to me.
Most of all, my Thesis is dedicated to my Wife, Elizabeth Nackley, whose love awakened me to
the miracles, and whose artistry shows me the possibilities.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract
……………………………………………………………………………............ v
INTRODUCTION ..…………………………………………………………………………….. 1
1. CHAPTER ONE: ARTISTIC CAPITAL …………………………………………………… 22
2. CHAPTER TWO: THE ECONOMY OF REPITITION ……………………………………. 43
3. CHAPTER THREE: PROFITS FROM PAIN …………………….………………………… 62
CONCLUSION ….………………..……………………………………………………………. 83
AFTER THOUGHT ……………………………………………………………………………. 89
BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………...…………………………………………….… 95
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ………………………...………………………………………...100
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ABSTRACT
My thesis explores the artistic effects of two different kinds of financial investment on
Broadway. I define and then trace the rise of what I term the “corporate producer” over the past
twenty years, then document the fall of the independent creative producer, which had been the
traditional means of producing shows on Broadway prior to the 1980s. This rise and fall is
documented through personal interviews with Broadway professionals, and through newspaper,
magazine, and literature on current and past practices in theatre production both on Broadway
and on tours. The rise of the corporate producer has resulted in an increasing pattern of revivals;
musicals based on movies from the past, and expanded musical revues. Broadway has begun to
resemble the mass produced product seen in any department store across the country, and
Broadway’s actors are turning into assembly-line workers exercising in front of a constant
stream of mediatized and mass marketed consumers. The demands of such a life are changing the
concept of theatre, performance, and acting. In addition to life on Broadway, the touring business
of Broadway has been taken over by corporate producers as well, and tours have begun to take
on characteristics of other industries based on the principles of Henry Ford, suffering from
downsizing of labor and materials, division of labor to its smallest units, and de-unionization and
control by an ever expanding middle management with an eye on the bottom line. The Broadway
actor is becoming standardized, like a piece of machinery on an assembly-line. Liveness is being
traded for frozen or “cinematized” events, and Broadway is becoming a movie. These theatrical
movies are being taken across the country, changing what the United States views as theatre, and
preparing the next viewing generation for accepting these movies as Broadway.
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INTRODUCTION
CORPORATE THEATER: THE REVOLUTION OF THE SPECIES
Introductory Narrative
All art began to disappear that year, all the beautiful art that we treasured, all the art that we
believed was a form of maximal experience. All that art making its privileged audience believe
that the sight of the face of God is imminent…
Julian Beck
_Philip Auslander, Presence and Resistance
After twenty-five years as a professional actor on Broadway and in regional theatre I
returned to graduate school. I immersed myself in a Master of Arts degree in theatre studies and
began exploring the scholarly theories behind what I had experienced throughout all my years
onstage. My research did not encounter any writings concerning the material conditions of the
actor, any writings supporting the living embodiments of the art form that theatre scholarship
calls its home. In my thesis, I will attempt to bring this discussion to the forefront. I will reveal
the decline of the material condition of the actor on Broadway due to the rise of the purely
financially motivated corporate producer. I will focus on the Broadway actor, posing that
whatever occurs on Broadway will eventually radiate throughout the country. In my thesis, I call
to the scholarly community to come to the aid of theatre artists everywhere by adding concerns
or the craft of the actor to the discourse of theatre studies.
For most young actors, Broadway is the dream. It is a symbol of theatrical excellence and
success, and as commercial as it is, not many actors would turn down the experience of
performing on a Broadway stage. The symbolism of Broadway lives in our culture at large in
films such as Singin’ in the Rain, Stage Door, Bullets over Broadway, and The Goodbye Girl.
Broadway’s symbolism is alive in plays such as The Royal Family, All About Eve, and A Chorus
Line. George Benson evokes the magic in his familiar pop song “On Broadway,” and legions of
young tappers learn their craft to the tunes from 42nd Street. Journals and magazines such as
American Theatre, Modern Drama, TCG (Theatre Communications Group) and newspapers
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such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal make it their
responsibility to inform the world about Broadway and its current achievements.
Universities like Florida State bring in Broadway professionals in performance, set
design, lighting design, costume design, and playwriting to teach their students and offer advice
on successful careers in theatre. FSU brings in School of Theatre alumni like Davis Gaines and
Michael Piontek, both veterans of Broadway, to perform in the “Seven Days” series, showing the
subscribers and the press FSU’s qualifications to train young talent. FSU takes its senior BFA
acting and musical theatre classes to New York each spring and gives them an opportunity to
perform for invited New York agents and Broadway casting directors hoping that one of them
will be “discovered” and ushered onto the “Great White Way.” FSU has an outreach
organization in New York that offers help for new arrivals, showing how to market their talents,
how to audition for New York agents and casting directors, and how to break into the inner
Broadway circle through networking. Broadway is the center of this country’s theatrical world,
and just as Florida State University supports this in its teaching, so do the Tony Awards each
year in an internationally televised award show.
Broadway’s cultural symbolism in the theatrical world is unchallenged; however,
symbolism is not a guarantee of economic stability. Like businesses across the United States, the
business of theatre follows the ebb and flow of capital. Over the past fifteen years, the economic
demands facing Broadway have taken a toll on the traditional means of producing theatre, and
given rise to a new trend: the corporate producer. In the past, Broadway had been fueled by
another kind of financial mechanism - a more personal, collaborative, and artistically based one:
the independent producer. Production costs have risen by millions of dollars over the past fifteen
years, and many independent producers who had been financing productions on their own or
with a small group of investors have no longer been able to take the financial leap. Corporate
interests stepped in, and within the last five years corporate producers have begun to dominate
Broadway.i As I demonstrate in Chapter One, corporate producers differ from independent
producers because they are large multi-interest theatrical producing corporations that invest in
theatre solely in order to generate profit. By independent producers, I refer to those producers
who have been personally, or with a small group that incorporates for the show, financing theatre
projects without a major corporate structure, or a publicly traded or privately owned diversified
corporate entity, or a media conglomerate attached. Instead, their primary goal is an artistic
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mission. It is sometimes difficult to make a clear separation between the two concepts, as in the
case of Hal Prince, who has many investors in his productions; however, for the purposes of this
thesis the most important aspect of the independent producer of the past is to note that, as Hal
Prince is quoted as saying in an interview by Bernard Rosenberg for The Broadway Musical,
“Creative producing did, in the old days, involve people who for one reason or another generally lack of writing talent, but with great taste-wanted to be in the musical business” (33).
It would seem logical to support the infusion of corporate money into Broadway since the
costs of productions have risen to at least $8 million a musical (18). If this trend were based in
benevolence, it could be the answer to the constant challenge of finding funding for all of the
arts. However, corporate America’s track record of benevolence is not what it could be. My
thesis is not about the ethics of Sam Waksal, Ken Lay, or Bernis Ebbers, however, Imclone,
Enron, and WorldCom serve as cautionary tales for anyone wondering about the future of
corporate investing on Broadway. As columnist Ariana Huffington says in her book Pigs at the
Trough, corporate America is “not content to conduct themselves according to a code of fair play
[. . .] they’ve created their own set of rules that defy logic, violate basic decency, corrupt
commerce, and laugh in the face of laws and regulations established to protect the rest of us” (6).
In a perfect world where corporate behavior was reflective of the honor and respect that power
should bring, Broadway and corporate America might make a mutually beneficial couple, but
just when we think that the arts in our country could be saved by a corporate benefactor, 9/11
(Chapter Three) demonstrated the shady ethics of Broadway’s new corporate owners.
Taking Broadway as a significant symbol of culture in America, it is possible see the
effects of corporate funding on artistry, creativity, and inspiration. Broadway’s collaboration
with corporate funding has resulted in the emergence of a “corporate theater” genre. This genre
has characterized itself by a substantial increase in revivals of old musicals just within the last
five seasons in productions of 42nd Street, Oklahoma!, Flower Drum Song, Man of La Mancha,
Sweet Smell of Success, Superstar, Annie Get your Gun, Tom Sawyer, Show Boat, Bells are
Ringing, The Music Man, Big River, Little Shop of Horrors, Annie, State Fair, Gypsy, Nine,
Wonderful Town, musicals based upon successful movies, Footloose, Thoroughly Modern Millie,
The Producers, Hairspray, The Full Monty, Victor/Victoria, Urban Cowboy, The Lion King,
Saturday Night Fever, musicals based on operas like Rent, Aida, La Boheme, and musical revues
like Mama Mia, Swing, and Movin’ Out represent a trend that reflects the intention of their
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corporate producers: to foster a consistent duplication of what has already proven successful.
These examples are just a representation of the musicals on Broadway. The Broadway plays and
their repetitive nature are not a topic of my thesis.
There have always been revivals on Broadway, and my thesis is not a discussion of their
history. In The Cambridge History of American Theatre, John Degen traces the beginning of the
current revival trend back to the mid 1970s. However, he attributes its beginnings to a “heavy
dose of nostalgia, perhaps generated by the tumultuous social-political climate, perhaps by
distaste on the part of traditional theatre goers for the new sounds and subjects. The nostalgic
movement took two major guises: revivals of older musicals, and new musicals written to
celebrate an earlier age” (3: 450). In the 1970s, Broadway still managed to balance reviving the
old with creating the new, as demonstrated in 1976 with revivals of My Fair Lady and Fiddler on
the Roof, which opened the same year as Steven Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures and the ground
breaking Bubbling Brown Sugar. The seventies were Sondheim’s golden years, seeing the
openings of Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeny Todd.ii Even
in the turbulent seventies, Broadway was championing originality; in the 1990s and 2000s,
however, it champions adaptation, imitation, restoration, and maintenance of the past.
The United States is a capitalist country, so theater for profit is going to exist; however,
corporate theater as it is now is replacing one of our country’s cultural legacies with a simulation
of itself. In addition to corporate theatre’s domination of Broadway, corporate theater’s reach
into the country as a touring power is deep, and it carries the symbolic name of Broadway with
it. Touring can be a fiscal triumph for producers, and corporate theater’s driving motivation is
the economic benefit. Corporate producers prove this by consistently downsizing, synthesizing,
and nonunionizing the tours, then labeling them as Broadway productions and charging
Broadway prices for shows that are not Broadway quality.iii My thesis will grapple with some of
the repercussions of this economic upheaval, and most directly, how this upheaval is affecting
the theatre artists themselves. Not only is Broadway changing as a cultural institution, but the
actors within the culture of Broadway are being changed as well. The craft of acting is being
affected by corporate investment, and when the material condition of the actor undergoes a
change, the art of performance changes. My thesis will discuss how theatre artists are
negotiating, or not negotiating, those changes.
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Historical Context
From 1932 until the late 1970s, single producers were the rule on Broadway, and show
business in New York City reflected the economic health of the city. The theatre owners rented
their houses to producers who hoped their musicals returned enough investment to pay everyone
for their work, and to pay for the next project. The business was a simpler one, much of it done
by handshake, and much of it unfair to the actors. Even the most cursory survey of theatre
history does not hold the independent producers of the 1900s -1920s in high regard. In fact, the
Actors Equity web site says that the birth of Actors Equity Association (the actor’s union) in
1913 came out of the unfair labor practices of these independent producers. However, even with
the black mark against fair labor practices, the independent producers still had an artistic
investment in their projects as well as an economic one, and these producers were still in charge
of all creative aspects of design, direction, and management. Between 1932 and the late 1970s
there were an average of fourteen musicals a year, and 75-80 percent did not return their
investment during the Broadway run, so the high-risk business of producing musicals in good
economic times became even more volatile in bad (Rosenberg and Harburg 7). Craig Jacobs who
has been the Production Stage Manager for Phantom of the Opera for six years, and has been
working on Broadway for thirty years, sums it up:
Producers have always been in business to make money, but years ago the
producer was much more interested in the process of the play. From the rehearsal
studio to New Haven to Boston to Philadelphia, then opening in New York, the
producer and the director would work together, watch the show every night and
make it happen. Robert Whitehead could talk to Arthur Miller intelligently about
his plays, or David Merrick who had a great eye for what worked, he didn’t have
to know why, he just knew what worked.iv
These independent producers traditionally worked alongside writers and composers, and the
theatre district was full of collaborations based upon the love of theatre. It was not that
independent producers did not wish to make money; however, as independent producer Hal
Prince said in a telephone interview, “the ultimate goal was a piece of theatre.”v If they needed to
raise additional money for the show, they would seek out investors; however, the control of the
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project and its economic viability and stability was the responsibility of the single, creative
producer.
With the advent of new technology in the 1980s, stage capabilities increased rapidly. This
helped give birth to mega-musicals like Cats, Phantom, and Les Miz. As the technological
capabilities grew, so did the shows. An organizational change also took place in the business of
producing on Broadway that exploded production costs and precipitated the corporate theater
domination of today. “Cost management by a single strong executive, the producer, ceased to be
the norm. Instead, three corporate roles took on joint responsibility for controlling costs: they are
the newly dominant directors; the emergence of multi-producers; and the appearance of more
powerful general managers” (Rosenburg and Harburg 7). These changes, drastic in themselves,
came upon the heels of a rise in the demand for musical theatre pieces. Musicals were already an
expensive proposition, and with the unions and guilds fully organized, now there were seventeen
groups negotiating with the producers trying to mount new productions. The theater owners and
some key producers had organized as well and were now represented by a stronger and
restructructured League of American Theatres and Producers. The League had been loosely
formed in the early thirties, but with the rising power of the unions and the guilds, the owners
and producers decided to fully organize to present a unified bargaining front. The owners were
demanding up to 25 percent of the box office gross in some cases, in addition to keeping the
interest in the advance ticket sales and points (a percentage) in the show. On the one hand,
profits were potentially enormous. The interest for advance ticket sales of the mega musicals was
unlike any profit the owners or producers had ever seen. In the case of Phantom of the Opera,
which opened in 1987, there was a three-year advance ticket sale, and there was still “$23
million in advance sales” left in the coffers after the first two years (33). On the other, the
number of stake holders had expanded exponentially. More drain on the production costs
occurred from choreographers and directors who petitioned for “points” just like the producers
and owners had given themselves, and these points on top of the points awarded to the authors of
the pieces were taken from the gross weekly box office receipts (Rosenburg and Harburg 22)
The lack of an independent producer’s central control on production costs, and the lack of
a creative producing eye on the show allowed directors and their teams of designers to exert “far
more artistic leadership than in earlier times…shar[ing] financial power with the general
manager to whom budgetary control was delegated by multiple co-producers, who are also heavy
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investors.” (30) The general manager was hired by the multiple co-producers to budget the show,
deal with the unions, take bids on work, and job out all of the work to shops. The old dictatorial
style of independent producing had placed all responsibilities in the producer’s hands, and had
for forty odd years kept some cap on spending. But the escalating costs, plus replacing a single
experienced theatrical producer with a general manager and a large group of “absentee businessoriented investors” became a formula for increasing costs and little return. The shows were hits,
profits huge, but the costs were astronomical (24).
In other words, by the mid 1980s (and today) the artistic and production teams increased,
there was no one person in charge, and money was tight. As opposed to the days of the
independent producer who was overseeing the budget, there is now a general manager who is
budgeting, dealing with unions and jobbing out work, then reporting difficulties to groups of coproducers who are inexperienced in the theatre business and used to throwing money at
problems. This sounded good in practice, but it created communication issues. Not only were
there people from business backgrounds dealing with people from theatre backgrounds, they
were speaking different languages. The artistic staffs were not communicating with the general
managers on mismanaged rehearsal times, overtime expenses, costume designs and changes, set
changes, etc. In other words, the early eighties were a nightmare of cost over-runs brought on by
too many artistic heads and too little centralized control. The answer to the financial nightmare
came in the form of national tours (Rosenburg and Harburg 30).
There have always been tours and touring companies. As Thomas Postlewait writes in
“The Hieroglyphic Stage,” “touring plays, stars, circuses, variety entertainment, Chautauqua
presentations, tent shows, vaudeville, spread throughout the nation. By the end of the nineteenth
century, performers had carried a shared national culture into almost every village, town, and
city” (2: 150). By 1982, box office returns from Broadway touring productions far exceeded the
returns from Broadway. The eighties were a time of expansion into the country for most
Broadway shows, and it became standard practice to open a show in New York, then open the
tour quickly and take it to large regional theatres across the country to repay the investors
(Rosenberg, Harburg 52). Some shows even began on the road, recouping the original
investment, and then came into New York with just the burden of renting Manhattan real estate
on the investors’ shoulders.
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Cameron Macintosh’s Phantom of the Opera started the corporate frenzy on Broadway.
When it opened in 1987 at Broadway’s Majestic Theatre on 45th Street, New York had never
seen such a success. It can be said that Cameron Macintosh was the first corporate (as I use the
term) producer. There were three years of advance ticket sales, and people were sleeping in front
of the theatre every night in the hopes of buying a returned ticket. With the success of Phantom,
and Cameron MacIntosh Production’s global marketing of apparel and gifts, corporate investors
saw huge potential. “They saw us making money and that’s where it started,” says Prince.
“Phantom is responsible for all the attention big business has in theatre today.” Imitators have
tried to capitalize on Phantom. Other than attempting to replicate its spectacle, Jekyll & Hyde, a
musical by Frank Wildhorn produced in 1995 by Pace Theatrical Group (which has since been
purchased by Clear Channel Corporation) was an attempt to cash in on the Phantom mystique, as
were other corporate productions including Maury Yeston’s The Phantom, and Dance of the
Vampires, starring the original Phantom, Michael Crawford, which was produced by USA Ostar
Theatricals and Lexington Road Productions.vi
Phantom of the Opera still runs eight shows a week today, filling 1,600 seats on a nightly
basis. Costing $400,000 a week to run, it is the last of the mega-musicals left, fitting for a fullfledged phenomenon that changed the theatrical world for better and perhaps for worse. Its
spectacle has been copied, its grandeur has been imitated, but its appeal has not been duplicated.
“It was a fluke,” said Prince. “We hoped it would last a year. I still can’t believe it.”
In conclusion, Broadway was originally funded by independent producers who, as the
single artistic head of the project, had absolute final control of each aspect of design, direction,
and budget. Now Broadway is dominated by corporate producers who divide power equally into
several divisions: the general manager (budget), the director (artistic vision, including dance and
music), and various designers. The overseeing corporate producing body is an entity of many
middle management positions that represent the ultimate power, which is the CEO of the
conglomerate. The business of Broadway changed with the infusion of corporate money through
its structure, its methods of mass production, its emphasis on mass marketing, its expectation of
high cost and return, its increased pattern of revivals and adaptations of movies, and through its
disintegration of the touring system, and undermining of the unions. The spirit of Broadway
changed also, as Jacobs says:
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Now it’s the fact that you’ve got a producer who wants to be a figurehead, he
wants to be involved in the meetings, he wants to be at the opening night, he
wants to have his name above the title, I don’t think he’s interested in doing the
work. But he still wants his opinion to be known [. . .] and the thing that makes
me the most nervous about this whole process is that we don’t have any strong
directors anymore. We don’t have strong choreographers, there’s Jerry Mitchell
and there are others but not to the extent that we used to have. It’s the creative end
I’m most concerned about. And the whole idea of collaboration, people are afraid
of collaboration…it pits people against people but it only makes things better.
You throw things out at each other. New ideas come out. Look at Gypsy, (Arthur
Laurents, Jules Styne, Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins) that’s what’s missing
from theatre today. And there was a leader, a producer who put this package
together. The producer hired the director, hired the authors, hired the designers,
we don’t see that anymore. These producers don’t understand theatre people,
don’t understand the love of theatre, why we come here eight times a week. [. . .]
The Tommy Tunes, we don’t have Tommy anymore because he got tired of the
fight. What Grand Hotel was about. The artistic freedom to do what you want.
You have to fight the producers. He got tired.
An era has passed, and clearly Jacobs equates the era with a deterioration of artistry. Another
name in the old days for the independent producer was the “creative” producer. In all of my
research on corporate producers, I have not seen the word “creative” and corporate mentioned in
the same sentence.
Clear Channel Entertainment and the Walt Disney Company are the two largest and most
powerful corporate theatrical producers on Broadway today. Clear Channel Entertainment is a
unit of Clear Channel Communications, which is an $8 billion global music and broadcasting
company. Clear Channel bought into Broadway four years ago by purchasing SFX, an
entertainment company that had itself purchased Pace Productions (a corporate theatrical
producer) and Livent, the independent production company of Garth Drabinsky.vii Currently,
Clear Channel is a producer or investor in eight Broadway shows, and through its absorption of
smaller corporate and independent production companies and producers, it boasts a list of 130
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Broadway shows since 1983 (Marks 14). Since the publication of Marks’ article, Actors Equity
reports that Clear Channel is now invested in a majority of all the shows now open on Broadway.
The Walt Disney Company came on the Broadway scene nine years ago with Beauty and
the Beast, adding The Lion King and Aida to the roster in 1997 and 2000. Disney bought and
restored one of the grand old theaters for The Lion King. A marvel of restoration, the New
Amsterdam Theater on West 42nd Street is the jewel in Disney’s Broadway crown. Clear
Channel then bought the theater across the street from the New Amsterdam, and named it The
Ford Center for the Performing Arts. This purchase, added to the 15 touring venues it owns in
the US and the 23 it owns in Britain, makes Clear Channel “the prime mover on the touring
circuit, operating a ‘Broadway Series’ with 275,000 subscribers in 56 cities across North
America” (Marks 14). Clear Channel’s ability to mass produce and mass distribute their product
has unparalleled potential to reshape popular expectations of what “Broadway” signifies, and in
turn what theater and performance mean to a vast number of Americans.
My thesis does not feature a discussion of the history of Broadway tours, but a specific
look at the tours of the last five years with the emergence of corporate producer Clear Channel as
the dominant tour presenter on the road. Mary Leigh Stahl, who is a member of the Actors
Equity Association Council, says of Clear Channel and their touring practices:
[. . .] they have their fingers in so many pies and can self produce so much at such
a reduced cost that they don’t have to, for want of a better term, bargain in good
faith, because they own the theatres now, because they own the road as presenters,
and they are now producers so they have three pockets to put things in. And they
can lock out somebody who doesn’t play ball with them. Meaning other
producers. They can lock out the independent producers. And that, while it
fractures the League, our traditional negotiating partner, what it does is make the
position of other producers weaker. I am leery of them. You can negotiate with
Disney, but these Clear Channel people just don’t care…because they are
presenters of packages on the road, and because they are the owners of theatres,
they can fill a season with almost totally nonunion stuff and then try to bookend it
with a couple of big new hits from Broadway. viii
Clear Channel is the largest producer of tours in the United States, owns the largest number of
touring houses, and currently they are the largest corporate producing entity on Broadway. An
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example of Clear Channel’s corporate process on Broadway itself is seen in Mel Brook’s The
Producers. Hiring Nathan Lane at a staggering “$2.5 million for just the first year” and Mathew
Broderick at a comparable salary, Clear Channel launched a media blitz campaign that broke all
records in pre-show sales, $3 million on opening day (Witchel 3). The Producers also broke the
record for ticket price gouging, raising their premium ticket to $100, the first ever on Broadway,
then establishing the Inner Circle, which charged $480 a ticket for the best seats in the house.ix
After all of the money and all of the hype, Craig Jacobs says what is missing from theses show is
symptomatic of Broadway now:
I don’t want to do a new show anymore where there are twelve people in charge,
because there’s no one person’s vision to follow. I think it reflects itself onstage.
For The Producers to be the hugest hit Broadway’s ever seen and for that to stop
nine months after its open, once Nathan and Mathew left, is unheard of. As far as
I’m concerned the show has not been maintained properly, everyone’s mugging,
they’re way over the top, no one over there knows how to take care of a comedy.
[. . .] There was no doubt who was in charge when you worked for Hal Prince or
Bob Fosse. It’s the outside eye [that’s missing] who doesn’t have to know why
something isn’t working or why it works, but just knows that it does. And
producers like David Merrick, and Robert Whitehead who could talk to Arthur
Miller intelligently about his work and help make the play better. But The
Producers, it’s sad, and Hairspray will go through the same thing. They don’t
know how to maintain their show. Hairspray has seven people backstage giving
notes. Seven.
Clearly, money cannot make a show run smoothly on Broadway; it takes a human being with an
artistic eye and an experienced hand. Speaking of the seven people giving notes backstage at
Hairspray, Phantom of the Opera has three people regularly giving notes, six when middle
management comes, and nine when the Cameron Macintosh team arrives from London for
surprise inspection. When the Macintosh team arrives and gives notes, middle management
always attends with notes given as well. When middle management attends and gives notes,
regular management gives notes as usual.x
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Description of Project and its Benefit to the Field of Theatre Studies
After the success of Phantom of the Opera, Broadway’s corporate producers can be seen
as having begun a cycle of theatre production similar to development, marketing, and
distribution of a consumer product in any commercial retail sector. Phantom was the model, and
its spectacle and mass marketing plan were patterns for success. Capitalism is based upon mass
consumerism, and corporate theater can be said to have answered the consumer’s request for the
mega or mass musical. The laws of supply and demand say that if there had not been a demand
for what corporate theater was supplying, there would not have been an audience. However, in a
media-driven society the demand can be created. Jean Baudrillard theorizes in Simulacra and
Simulation that “everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages [. . .].
Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning homologous
to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital” (80). Corporations
manufacture a product and the media converts the masses, and Baudrillard says that no one in
our society can escape the cultural, political, and social process of mediatization. The power of
the media is one of capitalism’s greatest assets, and it can be used to promote whatever corporate
theater chooses to promote whether it be art or entertainment.
The field of theatre studies can benefit from critical analysis of ways an American art
form has changed, because the change is not necessarily advancing in a forward motion, but
rather in a circuitous one. Creativity does occur, but instead of creating new forms of musical
theatre, new expressions of sound, new ways to present stories with music, in what I term as
“corporate theater” the creativity is occurring within the bounds of what has already gone before.
Is the nature of performance one that can withstand repetition or one that resists imitation? My
analysis adds to the discourse on performance itself; however, it also adds to the discourse from
the viewpoint of the material condition of the actors themselves within the changing art form.
How do theatre artists adapt their originality to existing forms? Perhaps adaptation is a new form
of originality? Perhaps imitation and duplication is becoming a new form of art? These are
questions for theatre scholars to explore, because these are the kinds of theatre that corporate
funding is supporting.
Within the changing form of musical theatre a new form of performance has emerged as
well: what I am calling the “corporate actor.” Long running shows are now Broadway’s goal,
12
and as much as repetition had been a part of the life of an actor, actors have not been trained to
repeat a role for ten or fifteen years. There are exceptions to the rules of course, but the star
system is not the issue of my thesis. The life of a star on Broadway is very different from the life
of an ensemble member, just as the life of a top executive in a company is different from the life
of a salesperson in the same company. The backbone of every business is the line worker; so the
health of the line worker is the health of the business.
Until recently, the life of the New York actor had been centered on the occasional tour,
two-month engagements on the regional circuit, and perhaps a year run on Broadway for the
lucky few who made it there. Now Broadway is experiencing a fundamental change in the role of
its performing artists. Performance replication has changed what actors do on stage by replacing
creation with imitation. Broadway actors no longer live in a present tense moment of inspiration;
they live in a past tense moment of simulation. Simulation is a necessary quality of the long
running show, and the long running show is here to stay because of economics. “It appears that
the longer a musical runs on Broadway … the greater the attraction it often has on tours in other
prime American and foreign cities” (Rosenberg and Harburg 53). Since the tour is the most
profitable aspect of producing theatre in New York, corporate producers are going to look at the
long run as a way of life. They are, in fact, going to be the same thing for an actor.
In the US, most method-based actors are trained to create spontaneously and
imaginatively within the bounds of the piece. Using the maintenance of Broadway’s Phantom of
the Opera as a model, and my personal experience as an actor in the company of Phantom as a
primary source, corporate theater demands that its actors replicate the same performance over an
extended period of time without altering it. No creativity, no spontaneous imagination is
involved, just repetition of the original moment created in 1987. If an actor leaves the show, then
their replacement must re-enact the performance of the actor he or she replaced. If that actor
leaves, the replacement must re-enact the performance of the actor who was replaced who was
re-enacting the performance of the actor who was the original interpreter. Management staff
controls the replication by watching every show looking for those who step out of formation in
blocking, gesture, vocal inflection or interpretation. The performance must look spontaneous, but
this spontaneous look must be exactly the same look as that of the actor before. The daily
regimen of exacting choreography and staging, the constant rehearsals to obtain conformity, and
the ever watchful eye of the stage managers all work to achieve maximum control over the show
13
and the actors. As Michel Foucault says in Discipline and Punish, an “infinitesimal power over
the active body,” joined with “an uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of
the activity rather than its result, […] assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed
on them a relation of docility-utility” (Foucault 139). Foucault renamed this “docility-utility”
discipline.
Corporate theater becomes disciplined exercise in the Foucauldian sense, and a new form
of performance emerges: an assembly line of corporate actors stepping on and off a treadmill,
exercising over and over for the watchful eye of an administrative representative of the corporate
producer. Traditionally in American musical theatre, it has been the job of the actor to do what
the director wants, but it has not been the job of the actors to do what other actors did before
them until recently. It has not been the job of an actor not to interpret their role to the best of
their creative ability until recently, and it has not been the job of the actor until recently to repeat
their performance in exactly the same way night after night, year after year for sixteen years.
Is it possible for a human being to perform the same way night after night? It is being
accomplished on the New York stage at one time or another every night of the week. The actors
call this kind of performing “automatic pilot.”xi They reach the end of the show and they cannot
even remember walking into the theatre. They may have hit all of their marks, gotten all of the
appropriate reactions from the audience, but they cannot remember putting on their makeup.
The producer of a mass musical in maintenance does not want originality. The producer
wants a picture of the past because that is what worked originally. The performance is not in the
now; it is sixteen years ago in the case of Phantom. The producer does not want innovation,
inspiration, or interpretation, the producer wants a movie. The corporately produced long run
alters the fundamental role of the actor, live theatre becomes cinematized, and the theory of
performance and of theatre itself is called into further question. In the best possible situation, can
the present moment be extended indefinitely? Theatre studies can benefit from this analysis
because performance theory is being tried and tested with each evolution of theatre, and
corporate theater is another evolution of the species.
Lest we stare at the new species without understanding what is at stake, performance
theory with no one to perform is simply another piece of literature. What is at stake is the
material condition of the actor, the creative artist at the center of the species. If you strip an artist
of the ability to create, if you limit the body to discipline and conformity, if you trap an artist’s
14
spirit within a species that defies inspiration, what does that do to the art form, yes, but what
does that do to the artist? Without the artist, there is no form; there is only concept and the past.
There is only mediatization.
Review of Literature and Methodology
Basing my thesis primarily upon current events, I am using newspaper and magazine
articles to supply current applicable literature on corporate theatre and generalized corporate
behavior. I am using Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Harburg’s The Broadway Musical to
compare the financial and administrative structures of independent producers of the past and the
corporate producers of the present, and articles by Thomas Postlewait and John Degen in
volumes one and two respectively of The Cambridge History of American Theatre are providing
compelling sources for the history of touring in the United States and the history of the American
musical theatre. Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra described in Simulacra and Simulation
provides the pivotal framework from which my discussion of the production cycle created by
corporate theater is launched, and the theory itself suggests that postindustrialized societies have
been in a state of replication for decades, and that we have come so far from origin that we have
lost all concept of what is real.
I am also exploring the changing role of acting in corporate theater, and Peggy Phelan’s
Unmarked, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and Liveness by Philip Auslander, though
a mixture of performance and theoretical texts, are providing clear signposts of performance
commentary that guide my ideas of a new genre of “corporate actor.” The new genre of actor
must perform in the new genre of theatre, so I frame the “corporate musical” requiring its
assembly line performers in Post-Fordism and Social Reform edited by Werner Bonefeld, and
New Times edited by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques. None of these texts discusses acting, but
each frame an assembly line worker in a mass production line. Each text gives credence to my
supposition that repetition breeds efficiency, but at what effect to the worker, and is efficiency
what actors have been striving for since the craft began?
The personal interviews are the most important aspect of my thesis. These interviews
were conducted over a year-long period, both over the telephone and in person. My thesis is
centered on the material condition of the actor, and Phantom of the Opera is my model for
15
corporate theater, so I selected to interview several performers, who have spent at least ten years
in Phantom and on Broadway in general, and have experienced and borne witness to the affects
of corporate theater on the actor. My thesis is also about how the business of Broadway has
changed art, so I interviewed director Hal Prince, playwright Anne Nelson (The Guys), and stage
managers, both inside and outside Phantom, who have seen the changes, and even effected the
changes themselves. The post-9/11 interviews are from those performers on the inside of the
union negotiations, and on the inside of what actually happened to the actors on Broadway.
I am also using my personal experiences as a four year company member of Phantom of
the Opera, calling upon experiences as both a principle understudy and an eight role swing, and a
member of the Broadway community post-9/11. I specifically call upon personal experience in
discussions of Fordism, and identifying Broadway vernacular, occurrences, and traditions that
are common in the life of a Broadway actor.
Chapter Breakdown
Chapter One: Artistic Capital
In my first chapter, I introduce the corporate players - Disney, Clear Channel, and the
League of American Theaters and Producers - and critically analyze these corporate players and
their practices in both their theatre and their corporate holdings. I am using the Musicians’ strike
of 2003 to offer illustrations of their ethical, moral, and artistic integrity. I am also using Clear
Channel and Disney as models of capitalist industry, and I attempt to reconcile capitalism and
creativity in the theatre projects the two choose to produce. I cite SAS, the largest private
software industry in the world, whose world wide headquarters is located in Cary, North
Carolina, as an example of a national industry acclaimed for their employee treatment and
working environment. This corporation was created in 1972 and has an unbroken record of
revenue increase since then. It dominates the world market in privately owned software, serving
90% of the Fortune 500. I compare and contrast the ethics and ethos of this large corporation
with Disney and Clear Channel in an attempt to create a theory for a capitalist industry that can
foster and promote creativity as a viable part of their theater production. This will be a Utopian
industry, but one that will be based in an existing model.
16
Chapter 2: The Economy of Repetition
I am using the second chapter of my thesis as an in depth exploration of the production
cycle begun by corporate theater. As I already noted, currently twenty out of Broadway’s twentyfive theatres are running a revival, an adaptation, or a musical revue. This ratio has been
increasing steadily for the past six seasons, and is proving to be a sign of the times to come.
Caught in an economy where fewer chances can be taken, Broadway is losing its creative
identity. Using Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra to explore this cycle of artistic reproduction, the
pattern of simulation is not seen as a stagnant or dormant act in our culture. It is seen as having
repercussions that affect culture at large. According to Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation,
replications are misleading, they are dishonest, they are misrepresentations of our culture and its
richness, and they threaten our culture with hypnotic “sameness.” In my view, theatre’s best
intention is to elevate humanity, to bring humanity closer its origin and truth, but by constantly
imitating and circling around the same ideas, origin recedes further from our grasp. If societies
are unchallenged with new ideas, new thoughts or new views, societies collapse into themselves
and away from the rest of the world. “[T]here is a kind of contraction of one over the other, a
fantastic telescoping, a collapse of the two traditional poles into each other: implosion [. . .] an
implosion of meaning” (Baudrillard 31). Thus, as corporate theater cycles further into mediatized
society and further away from origin, creativity becomes less and less the object of desire, and
repetition of the familiar becomes the only goal. Broadway is already there. Communication is
becoming circular. We have seen it all before. Baudrillard calls it “the antitheater of
communication, which, as one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the
traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative” (80). If simulation continues,
entertainment and distraction are destined to become normative on Broadway, and not a choice.
I also use the second chapter to discuss the changing role of the actor, and how repetition
and imitation take the corporate actor further from truth as well. Although the subjugation of
actors has been theorized before, the long running show is a new phenomenon, and its
requirements, only now understood and experienced fully, have set a new perimeter of
exploration for the craft. New skills must be defined if the profession and the craft are to survive
an evolution of the art form. Through a frame of discipline and docile bodies theorized by
Michel Foucault and through a frame of twentieth-century Fordism, I will offer a discussion of
the current material condition of the corporate actor on Broadway. Through this discussion, a
17
comparison between the craft of the past and the craft of the present can be made, posing a
possible future for this country’s most vulnerable and invisible player in corporate theatre; the
actors .
Chapter 3: Panic on Broadway: Profits from Pain
In my third chapter I will describe the practices of the corporate producers on Broadway.
The model of this practice is corporate theatre’s behavior post 9/11 as Mayor Guilliani charged
Broadway with symbolizing New York’s recovery. My chapter is a factual account of the reopening of Broadway on 9/13, how it happened, who made it happen, who paid for it, and who
profited from it in the weeks after. If the League of American Theatres and Producers are to be
understood from their actions as much as their words, then this account of their behavior when
asked to work in concert with the artists of the theatre community to restore faith and hope in the
resurrection of a city, should prove to be a worthy marker of their future dealings with the artistic
community at large. This chapter sets out the ethos of corporate theatre in practice.
Chapter 4: Conclusion: To What end?
In my conclusion, I draw upon the power of the Peggy Phelan’s “now” in an event on the
stage of The Majestic Theatre (146). When the gears of the “now” begin shredding the corporate
machinery, it takes human beings to put a machine back together. The moments of Phelan’s
“manically charged present” that come from unpredictable events, the crisis situations that wrest
a corporate theater piece from the hands of the producers and place it back in the hearts of the
actors create those performances that are resistant to mediatzation and to corporate
cinematization (148). These performances throw the artists back into their true artistic identities;
they reclaim ownership over the piece again, and return the performance to its mythic liveness.
The impact of this liveness is tangible to the artists, to the show, and to the audiences. This is a
return to mythic theatre. My conclusion begins with one such evening at Phantom. I then
introduce present day myths and myth-makers, bringing my reading of “the hope of Baudrillard”
full circle. Resisting the assembly line and simulacra and docile body, I show the power of the
Real is alive and making its presence known in the world today. One source of the Real is new,
and one is as ancient as the Greeks, yet each uses theatre to propel messages of mythic truth and
revelation forward. The truths are simple, yet their effects are lasting and profound.
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After thought: The Revolution of the Species
Returning to the title of the thesis, this after thought lies in the word “revolution.” A cycle
is destined to return to the beginning. Hal Prince said, “It will take something like the decadence
of Marie Antoinette, the powdered wigs and such to bring everything back again. But it will
happen. I’ll be dead, but it will happen.” The revolution is already happening. On February 27,
2003, at the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway, two producing theatres, the Donmar Warehouse
and The Public Theatre opened Take Me Out, by Richard Greenberg. In this morality play,
hopelessly fey Mason observes a baseball game for the first time and discovers a surprising
thought:
I like this because I don’t believe in God. Or - well – don’t know about God. Or
about any of that metaphysical murk. Yet I like to believe that something about
being human is…good. And I think what’s best about us is manifested in our
desire to show respect for one another. For what we can be. And that is what we
do in our ceremonies, isn’t it? Honor ourselves as we pass through time. (38)
Greenberg uses the American opiate of sports to move through the commonplace and into a
greater understanding of being human. To, as Joseph Campbell writes in The Power of Myth,
“discriminate between the mortal and immortal aspect of one’s existence” (287). Mason leads the
audience through a series of metaphoric analyses of baseball, painlessly opening ears to a
universal language of common identity and unified meaning.
The greater function of theatre is to move past the visible into a greater understanding of
being human. The playwright arranges words that open a door to a common identity, the artist
energizes them and delivers an epiphany on personal and collective scales, and the audience’s
catharsis transforms the human experience for a moment. Greenberg uses “ceremony” to open a
door to human connection. Ceremonies and rituals have been a part of the human experience for
thousands of years. Yet, our mediatized society is losing the connection to liveness with every
day that passes. This can be seen in our schools, this can be seen in our culture, this can be seen
on Broadway.
Humanity is in a crisis of identity, civility, and culture. The very nature of art and that
which it represents is assaulted daily by the media, politics, and mass consumerism. Its terms are
appropriated and its forms are assimilated. Theater scholarship and its tradition of diagnostic
exploration of texts and evolutionary forms is in a position to pose a theory that defines theatre’s
19
transformative energy in order to reclaim theater’s mythic place in culture and society. Theatre
scholarship is in a position to pose the importance of this human ritual, just as the Greeks
claimed it in the past. The technological world locks humanity in the temporal, and theatre
throws humanity into the eternal. Theatre scholarship can embrace the difference, the human
essence, the presence of liveness, and give words and meaning to an irreplaceable part of our
culture. Theater scholarship can embrace one of the functions of art: to show humanity its
potential to move beyond “the normal world and into the gifted…to identify with consciousness
instead of its vehicle” (286).
By posing and interjecting artistic essence into scholarship, scholar and artist can join in
practice to empower humanity, and the artist can return as shaman to the human tribe offering
experiences of identity, origin, and truth to a society dulled by mass marketing and media
bombardment. This is the second meaning of revolution, and this revolution would be lead by
artists and scholars. This is not a new scholarly paradigm, but one worthy of revisiting: the
paradigm of the artist as mythic storyteller, and theatre as a transformative ritual used to elevate
humanity. The scholars of the world can prove the existence of the transformational power of
theatre, and the artists of the world can carry the message forward.
20
i
As of this writing, Actors Equity reports that Clear Channel Corporation owns or is invested in a majority of the
shows on Broadway, and the Walt Disney Corporation owns three. This means that two corporations control or
heavily influence the business of Broadway, and they only entered the theatrical producing business in 2001and
1997 respectively.
ii
Sondheim’s show’s were not all commercial and critical successes, however, as time goes by his body of work is
appreciated as an important and lasting one to musical theatre.
iii
As a practice, corporate tours go on the road with much smaller casts, crews, and orchestras. The instruments that
are cut from the orchestra are duplicated on a synthesizer, which is an electric piano that can be programmed to
imitate instrument sounds. Some shows are going out non-union, which is much less expensive for the producer
because they usually hire very young, usually inexperienced talent. The actors are unprotected by the union,
uninsured, underpaid, and overworked on the whole.
iv
All quotes from Craig Jacobs come from a telephone interview on 12/26/02.
v
All quotes from Hal Prince come from a telephone interview on October 16, 2002.
vi
Both Jekyll & Hyde and Yeston’s The Phantom have popular regional theatre lives in the US and Europe.
Yeston’s show has never been seen on Broadway. Vampires closed after three months, but continue a healthy life in
European tours, and in Germany where it was originally produced. See www.danceofthevampires.com for more
information.
vii
Garth Drabinsky is a Canadian theatrical producer, who’s Livent Productions was one of the most powerful
presenters in North America. He was responsible for producing “Ragtime” and bringing it to New York, along with
productions of “Showboat” and Candide.” He awaits trial in Canada, accused of 19 counts of fraud, each carrying a
10 years sentence. He is accused of 16 counts of security fraud in the US. He is accused of mismanaging money,
cheating investors, lying to the governments of Canada and the US, and bankrupting Livent. Should he ever set foot
in the US, he will be tried here, so he has not set foot in the US since 198l. SFX bailed “Ragtime” out, and the show
ran for another year at The Ford Center. (Brunt 1-5)
viii
All quotes from Mary Leigh Stahl come from a telephone interview on October 15, 2002.
ix
The Inner Circle tickets were originally reserved for corporate parties but could be sold individually at 8pm if they
were available, at full price. The Inner Circle seats are now available individually.
x
In defense of Jacobs and his stage mangers, he runs a well oiled, well tended, and almost impossible ship. For
clarity’s sake I consider members of stage management as much artists of the theatre as anyone on or backstage.
They are as trapped as the actors, and their role in the discipline of the future chapters, though closer to middle
management, sometimes acts as the only buffer between the actors and the producers.
xi
The phrase “automatic pilot” was in common usage backstage at Phantom. It was used by actors to describe
certain performances, and used by management to denigrate as well. The phrase is in common vernacular among
Broadway actors.
21
CHAPTER ONE
ARTISTIC CAPITAL
The United States was built upon the solid rock of “capital,” and capital has great power.
One of capital’s greatest powers is its beauty. Capital is the United States’ sign of success, and
success is beautiful. Success is the measuring stick by which the American society bestows its
trust and approval. But capital is beyond the money and success it represents, and although
capital is as tangible as the banks, factories, malls, institutions of learning, hospitals, government
offices, in fact every building we see, capital is also theory, practice, school of thought, and way
of life. Capital, according to theorist Jean Baudrillard, has laws of its own, outside humanity, and
inside capital’s own frame of behavior. In this chapter I will present two examples of corporate
theatre as seen through Baudrillard’s critique of capital and capitalism, and then discuss a
counter example that suggests a possible re-direction.
In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard describes capital as “a monstrous
unprincipled enterprise, and nothing more […] Capital, in fact, was never linked by a contract to
the society that it dominates. It is a sorcery of social relations, it is a challenge to society, and it
must be responded to as such.” Baudrillard perceives humanity as making the mistake of
approaching capital with expectations of equanimity, with hopes that it will “fulfill its obligation
to the whole of humanity,” but capital approaches humanity with no promises of fulfilling
anything except its function. (15) Capital is not something that subjugates itself to idealism,
ethics, or morals, but it is something that must be dealt with according to it own definitions.
Unwittingly, I keep thinking that capital, when placed in the hands of those who seem worthy,
will find its way to the right places. The adage follows “power corrupts,” referring to capital’s
social relation that becomes the challenge to society. Capital, “immoral and without scruples can
only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever revives this public morality [. . .]
works spontaneously for the order of capital” (14). Capital empowers, that is its function, but it
empowers for capital’s purposes, not humanity’s. Eager to maintain its own balance, capital
jumps party lines with every changing CEO or administration because capital is always seeking
more wealth. That is also capital’s function. Capital must create consumers, and consumers must
22
give capital back to capital, thereby enslaving the populace in ever increasing numbers to
capital’s ever expanding need.
In Candide, Voltaire’s hero and his teacher Pangloss wander through the ruins of Lisbon
after an earthquake. Candide expresses his horror at the decimation of Lisbon’s population, and
Pangloss remarks that the devastation was predictable and merely the next thing to happen. The
earth was fulfilling its natural function. The cycle of transformation and adaptation was not only
probable but an absolute (23). And just like Candide, I ask of Baudrillard, can creativity survive
the function of capital?
I immediately concede that this thesis is complicit with one of capital’s plans.
Baudrillard’s “order of capital” is dependant upon notoriety, and I become a willing participant
in the order. “All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of
rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name or morality (15). I begin the Mobius
Strip by observing the ethics behind capital today. Based upon the ethics of CEO’s across the
country, I write a thesis supporting the return of a more humanistic producing process with the
ultimate desire of restoring a place for the creative arts on Broadway. I desire to bend capital to
my ethics and make it play by my rules of societal engagement. But capital’s energy flows
beyond me unceasingly, glad to be the center of attention, but unwilling to be anything other than
be a tool of those already in power. Capital’s chameleon nature allows it to bend to the will of
those in control, but only for as long as they can sustain the power that keeps the capital flowing,
but time has proven that nothing is forever. Baudrillard theorizes that although our world is one
of “more and more information and less and less meaning,” the masses have to tune into the
media for it to have effect. The same Mobius Strip has always depended upon the masses
receiving the message, but the masses can subvert media, the tool of capital, through silence or
“reflecting the meaning without absorbing it” (79, 86). If the masses can subvert the media by
refusing the message, then audiences can do the same thing with Broadway. If the audiences
cease their consumption, the product will cease to be profitable, and corporate America will turn
to another source for capital. The masses only need to decide that they have had enough revivals,
remade movies, and revues. Baudrilliard goes further and says that the masses can stem the
cultural tide by re-inserting the “real.” “The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this
defection, is to reinject the real and the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of the
social …” ( Baudrilliard 22). The real is origin, Broadway in its most collaborative, imaginative,
23
symbolic excellence. The masses, the audiences of Broadway have the power to restore
Broadway to its historical place in our culture. But hyperreality is hypnotizing and contagious,
and that is what corporate producers are counting on.
This thesis is not an answer to ethical challenges in corporate production on Broadway,
nor is it a deconstruction of capitalism; it is an alert to agency, to the power of the consumer
within an individual construct of capital. The consumer is not outside what is consumed. The
consumer may be outside the broad social contexts of capitalism, the huge social issues of city,
state, and national economic concerns, but the agency I am talking about is the individual control
over the individual dollar. Broadway does not have to be made up of revivals, movies, and
revues if audiences do not want to see them. Each individual has the power not to buy the ticket.
That is the agency of the individual. That is a part of the flowing energy capital looks for. If
capital senses a shift, then capital begins looking elsewhere. The individual is not without power.
Capitalism is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “an economic system in which
investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is
made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations” (198). In unpacking the
definition “corporation” further, I discovered something that corporations have in common with
capital: they exist outside of the individual. Webster’s says that a corporation is “an association
of individuals created by law and having an existence apart from that of its members as well as
distinct and inherent powers and liabilities” (300). The corporation, like capital, is separate from
those who make it up. The corporation, like capital, has its own rules and its own life outside of
the human beings who “people it.” It was the creative producer who used to produce shows on
Broadway, now it is the corporate producer.
Richard Hooker says in his essay “Capitalism” in The European Enlightenment Glossary,
that capitalism is based upon individual rights to personally, or in a group, amass wealth.
Government supports capitalists by recognizing these rights, participating in free trade, and
promulgating rules of law that enforce private property. Beyond a social and economic practice,
Hooker also asserts that capitalism is also “a way of thinking” (1). When a society perceives
these pursuits as a right rather than a choice, as a manifest destiny rather than an option, then
their way of life, their existence in their human community is based upon amassing personal
wealth and nothing else. When a corporation, which is an entity outside of its individual
members, sets out to produce a Broadway show, is art the imperative or a financial return?
24
The Mercantilism of the Middle Ages can be said to be the earliest form of capitalism.
Rome and the Middle East “bought goods at one site for a certain price and moved them to
another site and sold them at a higher price,” and capitalism is based upon the same definition:
“the large scale realization of a profit by acquiring goods for lower prices than one sells them”
(Hooker 1). Capitalism is also based in ownership, and the owners are few and elite. Laborers are
defined by their productivity and efficiency, and they are not invested in the product. Capitalism
promotes the smallest divisions of labor, which in turn lower the value of the workers and their
wages. The industrial era of Fordism, named for the innovations of Henry Ford, is characterized
by mass assembly-line production, standardized products, special purpose machines, labor
divided into its smallest component and time managed by specialists, and a traveling assemblyline that moves past the workers (Murray 38, 39). Fordism created the format from which
consumers in the United States are used to consuming their goods, and Fordism is a key to
understanding Broadway today. Broadway is not unlike an assembly-line, churning out long
running shows that do the same performances night after night, for sixteen years in the case of
Phantom of the Opera, or churning out revival after revival, or musicals based on hit movies, or
musicals based on revues, with little hope of more than one original musical a season that does
not come from an existing book or score.
Placing capital within this theoretical context, does incompatibility lie between capital
and creativity? Capital seems to be the unemotional party, just waiting to see the outcome and
going where the most powerful ally establishes dominance. Perhaps it is not capital, but
capitalism that is incompatible with creativity.
Some people would argue that capitalism is based in creativity, because people are
always looking for new things to buy. Perhaps the mass consumer is just buying the same
products over and over and they do not recognize it. Perhaps the hyperreal of Broadway has
infiltrated the market place at large. Capitalism is based on predicting the future, counting on the
economy behaving in a predictable manner. “This means that economic behavior can be
rationally calculated, and these rational calculations are always future-directed” (Hooker 4).
Therefore the risk factor for investment is unfavorable unless the product can be predicted or
guaranteed. That explains why there are so many revivals and movies on Broadway, because
they have already proven themselves successful, and it is safer to risk money on a sure thing than
to risk money on something new. That makes sense. You cannot predict creativity. You have to
25
be able to count on it. You have to be able to control it. You have to be able to predict it. There is
venture capital too, innovators who take large risks without being able to predict the future.
Perhaps all of the problems do not just lie with capitalism; perhaps it’s the capitalist too.
The Walt Disney Company
We have no obligation to make history.
We have no obligation to make art.
We have no obligation to make a statement.
To make money is our only objective.
__Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney, AFTRA
On May 19, 2002, in an article for The New York Times, Tom Schumacher, a fourteen
year Disney employee who was in charge of Disney Theatrical division in New York at that time
gave an interview to Peter Marks which stands out in my mind as one of the reasons behind why
I wrote this thesis. When Marks questioned Schumacher on Disney’s legendary spending on
problems instead of fixing them, Schumacher revealed that Disney was far more “tightfisted than
most producers because it answers to shareholders.” He went on to say how he resents Disney’s
reputation:
[. . .] big companies are out of step with Broadway because they lack
idiosyncrasy, a sense of humor. You cannot complain about that fact that the Walt
Disney Company under the direction of Michael Eisner said ‘Let’s spend our
money and save this theater. And somehow I’m blamed because the neon sign at
Chili’s offends people? I mean, what is that? I don’t understand it, because our
part is beautiful. When you are the tallest poppy you’re the one who’s going to get
chopped down first (AR 14).
In two sentences, two important facets of corporate producing make their presence known, two
very important facets of The Walt Disney Company in particular, two very important reasons
why Michael Eisner, a business man from Hollywood, is getting into the theatre business in New
York: shareholders and real estate.
26
Kim Masters says in The Keys to the Kingdom, Michael Eisner is “the last chief executive
of a major entertainment company to have risen through the Hollywood ranks” (447). Eisner’s
success story is awash with all of the scandals and scurrilous behavior that delight tabloid
America, but his accomplishments as a businessman are truly remarkable. The capital that he has
accumulated for Disney and the money with which Disney has rewarded him are astonishing.
Forbes published that Disney’s revenue in fiscal 2000 was a Disney record of $25 billion. Eisner
set another all-time record for CEO stock options in 1997 exercising a total of $570 million in
one year (Lau 1). Eisner’s base salary is $1 million a year, but he receives bonuses based upon
the company’s performance. His salary in fiscal 2000 was $9.3 million, but it fell to $8 million in
2001 (1). Currently, he owns $243.5 million in Disney shares. Under Eisner’s leadership Disney
has created two tremendously successful movie studios, 4 top-ten prime time TV shows, a TV
syndication business, the Disney Channel on Cable, a vast home video market of classic Disney
and current Disney films, and purchased ABC broadcast network. Eisner has also experienced
some failures, but primarily he is the definition of the American businessman’s success story.
Eisner has his skeletons. Russel Mokhiber and Robert Weissman reported in their book
Corporate Predators that Disney had clothing sweatshops in “Haiti, Burma, Vietnam, China and
elsewhere.” The MacDonald’s Happy Meal toys from the early cartoon films were made in Da
Nang City, Vietnam, and these workers earned an average of six to eight cents an hour, and
ninety percent of them were young women 17 to 20 years old (1). Eisner has his own political
views. He went to Washington in 2001 to convince Congress that the Internet needed to be
censored. He wanted to outlaw software that powered independent internet sites. He does not like
negative publicity either. The book that I used as a resource for this thesis, Keys to the Kingdom,
was delayed in its publishing because its original publisher, Broadway Books, dropped it after a
deal with Disney to buy its share in a German TV network suddenly looked to be in peril. The
book was quickly picked up by William Morrow, a division of Hearst, and went on to become a
best seller.
In spite of the conglomerate structure today, and the one-man-show appearance, The
Disney Company’s roots were in creation and the abilities of its creative staff of artists. Walt
Disney’s adherence to innovation and imagination created the groundwork on which the Disney
of today rests. The early films were based on famous fairy tales, and these films brought visions
of color and artistry to the movie screen that the world had never seen. The landmark creations of
27
Disneyland and Disneyworld sealed the public’s perception of Disney as the purveyor of all
things fantastic and all things American. Baudrillard looks to Disneyland as “the objective
profile of America, down to the morphology of individuals and of the crowd… But what attracts
the crowds the most is without a doubt the social microcosm, the religious miniaturized pleasure
of real America” (12). Walt Disney created a venue in which the spectator could disappear into
the familiar and emerge in a land free of everyday worries and strife. He created a living cartoon
for all who entered his Magic Kingdom, and he asked nothing of his patrons but to submit to the
wonder of it all. The Walt Disney Company was a marvel of capitalist creativity, because Walt
Disney created a consumer market that stretched from toddler to adult. He did this by appealing
to the child in everyone, producing desire in tangible and purchasable forms, and distributing the
forms all over the world. He even brought the forms all together in Disneyland for convenience,
and invited the world to come visit. The Disney empire serves its consumers from birth to old
age in every medium available to the public.
By the time Disney decided to produce theatre in 1997, the formula for success was
obvious and guaranteed to succeed: take their most popular cartoon movies, The Lion King and
Beauty and the Beast, and put them on the stage. To bring cartoons to life takes a threedimensional creativity, so Disney Theatrical Productions branched off from Disney’s corporate
tree, and Thomas Schumacher, a fourteen-year Disney veteran, was assigned the task of heading
its 140 employees. Beauty and the Beast was a leap towards a corporate theatrical endeavor. The
Lion King followed. Aida was a move beyond Disney’s cartoon formula: but it was an attempt to
cash in on the success of Rent, which was based on Puccini’s opera La Boheme, and since Aida
was a piece patterned on Verdi’s opera of the same name, there was a good chance it would
work. Already in production in London is a musical version of Mary Poppins, and musicals of
Tarzan, Pinocchio, and The Little Mermaid are in various stages of pre-production. Also in preproduction is a full-length show based on 50 to 70 of Disney’s songs from movies called When
You Wish.
As glad as Broadway is to have theatres open, even those people who have been in the
business for years look at Disney skeptically. In an article for The New York Times, “As Giants
in Suits Descend on Broadway,” Peter Marks quotes Jed Bernstein, president of the League of
American Theatres and Producers as saying, “The range of products that fit comfortably under
the Disney label is limited by the Disney brand” (14). Marks goes on to report that Bernstein
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expresses doubt about the ability of these companies “to slip into the role historically held by the
independent producer, to engage in artistic partnerships that lead to consistently thrilling work,
as represented by the creative alliances of Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim or Robert
Whitehead and Arthur Miller” (14). Is the question of the compatibility of capitalism and
creativity a question of the theories, or the men within the theories?
New York theatre has never been a solo operation. It is a relatively small island, with a
relatively small community of highly experienced and trusted artists. There are new people
breaking in all of the time, however, everybody knows everybody, and everybody works with
everybody. There are individuals, yes, but everyone gets along because everybody works
together. The union crews swing between houses and shows, the performers move between
shows and theatres, and the directors and choreographers swim between. It has always been a
large family. From the beginning, Michael Eisner set his own rules. Eisner refused to join the
League of American Theaters and Producers, preferring to establish his own kingdom in
Manhattan. Having dealt with Actors Equity in Florida in the early 1990s concerning
Disneyworld, Eisner established a presence at the Nederlander’s Palace Theatre first, like in
Orlando, and then struck a deal with the actors union. A stage manager who has worked for both
Disney and Clear Channel, who is still working as a stage manager professionally in New York
and wished to remain anonymous, explained the inner mechanism of a Disney theatrical
production:
They have their own deal [with Actors Equity Association.] The League
negotiates the contracts with Actors Equity and every member of the League and
every producer that was a part of the League did what that contract said. But then
Disney made their own deal. They have to do their own thing. Disney has a ton of
middle management. There are eight million middle managers that don’t do
anything. The whole trick at Disney is to stay as low profile as possible. Every
show has three executive producers but nobody knows what they do. It’s all very,
very corporate. And all the merchandizing is run by Team Disney, the kids, who
do all the merchandizing in the lobby. The stage managers have to send their
reports over the gigantic Disney email system web thing. At Beauty and the Beast
they asked one of the stage managers to cut his beard. Just like the theme park.
That was interesting. The union had trouble getting hazard pay for the actors who
29
had to walk up and down the plate stairs in the big costumes. They didn’t believe
in hazard pay. But the fact that the show was mounted out of town under a
Houston WCLO contract as an out of town Broadway tryout but we were paid
under Houston Music Hall, and Equity let them do that and bring it in to town and
turn it into a union show…that was interesting. This was a pre-Broadway tryout
and Disney was calling all the shots, yet we were paid by Houston. Houston
Music Theater was the front guy for Disney. When Disney moved Beauty they got
rid of a stage manager, Equity let them do that, got rid of a contract, then got the
contract back when they got rid of the stage manger they wanted to get rid of, and
then got rid of a lot of things to make it cheaper.i
Disney brought Beauty into New York and into a Broadway theatre without a union contract, and
then wrote a Disney contract with Actors Equity Association. No other producer has an exclusive
contract. “Our union is the ‘bend over you can drive union,’” said the stage manager, “they don’t
care. They’ll sell us up the river. Look at all the tours going out. They’re afraid of Disney. Afraid
they’ll get left behind and there won’t be anybody working. All they care about is getting their
2%.” Capital has appeal. Equity was afraid it would not get its share, and this single act by
Equity can be perceived as the beginning of a landslide of conciliations by the actors union that
continues today. Concessions by Actors Equity will be discussed later in my thesis.
Disney is amassing capital. Disney is creating consumers. Disney is distributing goods,
and they are distributing profits to themselves and to their shareholders. They have amassed The
New Amsterdam Theatre, The Palace Theatre, The Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, and the casts, crews,
musicians, technicians, production, and artistic staffs. They are distributing The Lion King, Aida,
and Beauty and the Beast to Broadway; and they are then moving their goods from one place to
another across the country. Making money is also based upon consolidation of capital. After
establishing their shows on Broadway, it will be shown in subsequent chapters of my thesis that
Disney is down-sizing their touring and Broadway companies, not their middle management
Disney staffs, and cutting instruments out of the orchestras. Disney’s goal is to make money, to
amass more capital. As Disney says on its website, its primary goal is to “maximize earnings and
cash flow from existing businesses” (1). That is capital’s function. It has nothing to do with art.
30
Clear Channel Communications
“There is a lack of appreciation of art at the core.”
__A former program director for Clear Channel Communications
Like Disney Theatrical, Clear Channel Entertainment Theatrical Worldwide has recently
gotten interested in theatre on Broadway. As a branch of Clear Channel Worldwide, a global
advertising giant, Clear Channel Entertainment Theatrical Worldwide has already acquired The
Ford Theater, right across the street from The New Amsterdam Theater, and Clear Channel only
got into the theatre business in 2000. The Ford Center joins the other fourteen theaters across the
country that Clear Channel already owns. Up until five years ago, Clear Channel had been
buying Broadway tour packages from New York producers to fill these “road houses.” Now
Clear Channel does the job themselves.
Clear Channel’s website says its CEO L. Lowry Mays created Clear Channel
Communications in 1972. Now Clear Channel Communications “owns 1,225 radio stations, 39
televisions station, over 776,000 outdoor advertising displays (50 in Times Square alone) and the
world’s leading LIVE entertainment company…doing business in over 66 countries with over
50,00 worldwide employees” (1). Its website is a brilliant display of high technology, offering to
send you at any given moment to cc.com where you can purchase tickets to any concert (over
70% of all concert ticket revenue in the USA, at 100 venues in North America, and 41 in Europe)
or a sporting event, or play in the Unites States or any part of the world in which Clear Channel
is presenting or producing (Moore 28). The Clear Channel website offers you a glimpse at the
inner sanctum of L. Lowry Mays and his two sons who run the company with him. It offers you
the opportunity to read about the extraordinary returns on your investment if you choose to
invest in the company. You can read about Clear Channel’s various community outreach
programs, and you can read every press release from Clear Channel for the last three years, but
in reviewing the press releases closely, there were only two concerning Broadway. The first
announced a partnership with Mastercard as the official card of the Broadway Across America
tour which visits 56 cities housing Clear Channel venues. The second was the announcement of a
“Consumer Magazine for Theatergoers” called “Show People” which debuted in the fall of 2002.
The magazine is distributed in 45 markets across the United States. “Show People is the first
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consumer magazine dedicated to the thousands of people who create, perform, produce, and most
of all, enjoy the live theater experience,” said Hailey Lustig, publisher of Show People. “From
rising stars to Broadway legends, Show People will be packed with the news, drama, gossip, and
excitement that make live theater such a unique cultural experience.” (Kleinberg, 2) Show People
is also a complete guide to all Clear Channel venues across the country. As the largest distributor
of live theatre throughout the United States, it is curious why the web site, which is the only
access the general public has to information about the company, would not even mention it.
There is a listing of the staff of Clear Channel Theatrical, but nothing else. It is as if they do not
want anyone to know what they are doing.
But Clear Channel has done this before. Without the country knowing it, L. Lowry Mays
swept through the United Sates and bought “110 out of the 112 major [radio] markets” available
and no one knew it was happening (Moore 27). Not many people seem to know even now. Clear
Channel owns the radio business in the United States of America. Owning the Broadway touring
market is not enough for L. Lowry Mays, he seems to want Broadway too. Mays is seeking more
wealth, which is what capital does. Clear Channel is the largest corporate producer on Broadway,
controls most of the touring market across the country, and nobody seems to know it. If the
pattern holds true, he will own Broadway very soon.
L. Lowry Mays, like Michael Eisner, is a business man. He holds a BS in Petroleum
Engineering from Texas A&M University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He
started with one radio station in 1972, and by purchasing and consolidating radio stations, he has
become the largest radio owner in the country. Clear Channel consolidated its programming as
well. Rather than keep the traditional local disk jockey addressing local tastes and requests, Clear
Channel’s stations are, as Walter Kirn reported for The New York Times Magazine, “automated
pods, downloading their programming from satellites linked to centralized, far-off studios” (12).
“Clear Channel [has] attempted to promulgate national formats that ignore local communities,
while establishing exclusive relationships with Indies” (Moore 29). Indies are independent record
promoters who are paid by record companies to get their songs played on radio stations. Indies,
in turn, pay radio stations to play the songs. Clear Channel owns 110 out of the 112 major
markets across the country, so Clear Channel is amassing a great deal of wealth from the Indies.
This “new form of ‘payola,’” as Dick Moore, editor of AFTRA magazine refers to it, adds to the
massive profits generated from their holdings in the already mentioned industries, plus talent
32
agencies, marketing and software companies, a high speed Internets system, and a company that
builds race cars (29).
L. Lowry Mays is the producer of Clear Channel’s radio product. “A computer does
everything now,” says a former program director for Clear Channel who chose to remain
anonymous. “A program director does the job of seven or eight djs in a station. You can
condense every station down to one person. In fact you can condense every cluster down to one
person.”ii As explained by the program manager, clusters are the stations, radio or TV or both,
that Clear Channel owns in a particular market. The size of the cluster depends upon the size of
the market. The larger the city, the more varied the stations owned, and the larger the market.
Markets include Country, R&B, Urban, Top 40, Classical, Rock, and Talk. When Clear Channel
chooses a market to buy, they buy a cluster of stations at once and send in a program director to
downsize the staff, upgrade the technology, and automate the station. Mays chose to eliminate
people and replace them with a machine. Like on an assembly-line, a special machine does
special jobs, and in the case of a Clear Channel station, then one person does a small repetitive
thing. Then station becomes automated the exact same way that every other Clear Channel
station across the United States becomes automated: the same music, the same programming, the
same formats, and the same jokes, the same everything. Clear Channel turns their radio stations
into as assembly-line.
The NEXGEN System is the automated program that replaced the human beings in Clear
Channel’s radio stations. Each radio station is connected to the primary NEXGEN located in
Ogallala, Nebraska.iii The NEXGEN uploads jingles, promos, and pre-recorded banter from the
local djs, and stores them in the central Clear Channel pod in Ogallala. The local program
director chooses the songs from NEXGEN’s selections (uploaded by Clear Channel) for each of
their cluster stations, chooses the jingles, creates a program for each individual station, uploads
them into the NEXGEN, and sends the completed program to each individual station’s NEXGEN
download system. The program director then presses play. The program director can do this for
all of the stations in his cluster. If the cluster is a small one, a program director can run the radio
and TV stations at the same time. There is a backdoor in each NEXGEN that allows entry into
the Clear Channel satellite for National events, or for direct Clear Channel programming from
the main branch in Ogallala.iv This aspect of Clear Channel’s abilities, and its domination of the
major markets in the USA has several anti-trust suits pending, FCC complaints, and a National
33
Labor Relation Board Complaint filed. It has been estimated that over 10,000 radio related jobs
have been lost due to Clear Channel (Moore 27). Clear Channel’s domination of the radio
stations across the country took twenty years to accomplish, and Mays was starting from nothing.
Mays is already the largest single producer on Broadway, and he just started in 2000.
Ironically, when the programming director I interviewed was hired by Clear Channel to
downsize, update, and re-organize a radio station cluster of three stations in his area, he ended up
downsizing his own job by choice.
They run lean and mean…their profits are huge. They’ve helped propel the
current technology being used which I think is legitimate, valid technology. It’s
the next step certainly, but that human element and that local commitment is
going to have to come back and they are going to have to find a balance…but I
quit. As the staff ticked away I was the left only man standing with the great and
powerful Oz. There was no joy in it. I saw the damage to the industry firsthand
because I was participating in it. It had made good corporate sense and it had
made for good corporate approval, but the spirit of the art was lost, I think…they
want short, concise and generic. These djs were about communication. There is a
lack of appreciation of art at the core.
Clear Channel has changed the art of radio broadcasting.
L. Lowry Mays has amassed great deal of capital, and Clear channel is publicly traded
but managed by his family. It amasses and controls the capital it takes to make its goods, it
distributes its goods to the consumers it has created, it divides and downsizes labor to its smallest
properties, and it distributes its profits to itself and to it shareholders. It considers the economy a
machine that can be manipulated and predicted, and its future-directed rational calculations
prove it to be right. But like Jed Bernstein’s doubts about Disney’s future in theatre,
professionals in the radio industry “fear that consolidation has hurt the quality of programming
and the number of available work opportunities…the current environment offers little chance
that innovative, provocative programming…will ever see the light of day” (Moore 27). Their
fears have merit. Clear Channel chooses the music. Clear Channel chooses the talk radio hosts.
Clear Channel decides what the 1,125 stations play, and there are only a few people making
those decisions.
34
Beyond the creativity question, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps expressed a broader
concern. After announcing publicly on September 12, 2002 that the FCC would review “all
remaining regulatory rules limiting broadcast ownership,” Copps went on to say that what the
FCC felt was at stake were “old and honored values of localism, diversity, competition, and the
multiplicity of voices and choices that are the undergirds of American democracy [. . .] the
opportunity to nourish the diversity that makes this country great and which will determine its
future [. . .] and the opportunity to make this country as open and diverse and creative as it
possibly can be.” (Moore 25) Adding to the discourse that Clear Channel owns Premiere Radio
Networks “the syndicator of Dr. Laura and Rush Limbaugh,” perhaps diversity is not L. Lowry
May’s prime motivator in programming (29). Whether or not the American public is aware of the
domination or Clear Channel or not, and approves or disapproves is not what my thesis is about.
My thesis is about the impact of Clear Channel’s behavior as a corporation in the markets that it
enters, and it has entered the “market” of theatre production. v
Clear Channel Entertainment Theatrical Worldwide entered the world of theatre
production in 2000 with the purchase of two theatrical production companies: Livent and Pace
Theatricals. Livent and Pace Theatricals had been in the theatre producing business for years,
and with the purchase of these two companies, Clear Channel inherited a history of over 130
Broadway and touring productions. It was certainly a quicker path for L. Lowry Mays than with
the radio stations. Mays’ methodology has consolidated itself over the years, and what had taken
him twenty years in the radio business only took him two purchases and three years in the theatre
business. Since the year 2000, Clear Channel has produced or invested in ten Broadway shows
and become the leading Broadway touring producer in the world. They even produce two Disney
shows in The West End. vi Scott Zeigler, who formerly worked for Livent and Pace, revealed that
Clear Channel has created “a full-time department in which all they do is book shows into
theaters that we own and operate. And there is a full-time staff of 14 that develops and mounts
shows to make sure the product supply is fluid” (14). A fluid supply of product would indeed be
corporate theater’s dream. What an extraordinary opportunity to observe a theory of capitalism
directly applied to creativity: Clear Channel is predicting that they can produce and distribute
creativity efficiently and en masse. They are predicting that they can manufacture creativity,
distribute it throughout the country, filling their own theaters with their own product, and then
touring their creativity in their vast touring market. If the formula of the successful
35
musical/play/revue/ is discovered, it can be posited that a computer program will be designed to
created other works based upon the formula. Unfortunately, within months of the discovery of
the theatrical serum, so to speak, the research scientists will be out of a job, and the only ones in
the lab will be those middle managers keeping paper in the printers.
As I stated, touring is where producers make money, and when you produce, own touring
houses, and own the production company that books the houses on the road, your profits are
exorbitant. Concerning the tours themselves, Clear Channel is not sending its actual Broadway
show on the road. Broadway Across America is not the Broadway show seen in Manhattan. To
cut costs, the tours are minimalized in cast, costumes, and sets, and some have a much smaller
numbers of musical instruments in the orchestra pits. Some of the live orchestras are partially
synthesized and on their way to becoming virtual orchestras. Synthesizers simulate the sounds of
instruments, and these synthesizers have been used in the past to add depth to live orchestras.
Now many instruments have been replaced by synthesizers to cut costs. A synthesizer looks and
plays like an electric piano, and has many different settings that are punched in manually by the
musician playing it. A virtual orchestra is a prerecorded CD.
“They are getting ready to put our tour out,” said the Clear Channel stage manager, “and
they are making it as simple and as easy and as cheap as they can do it. The cast is cut down by
two, and some wanted the orchestra down by half, but we’ll see…” In essence, the shows are cut
down in every way except the ticket price, which is one large aspect of Clear Channel’s profit
margin. As Jesse McKinley reported in an article entitled “Rising Costs Alter Rules For Shows
On Tour” for The New York Times, “touring houses are typically larger than Broadway, with
upwards of 4,000 seats in some markets,” so the $643 million that the touring season brought in
last year (2002) on shows like Clear Channel’s tours of The Producers and Hairspray shows the
economic sense of Clear Channel’s overall corporate strategy of dominating the markets
whenever it enters an industry (2).
Disney and Clear Channel dominate their markets. They accumulate the capital from
which the goods are manufactured on a continuous basis. They manufacture their goods
efficiently and in a highly productive manner. Clear Channel reduces its work force to its
minimum, dividing the work force into small components. Disney increases its middle
management workforce and divides their duties, and then decreases it line workers. They both
distribute their goods worldwide, at the same time building a larger and larger base of
36
consumers. Elitist management, domination, mass marketing, mass consumerism, division of
labor, and future-based economics: all of this behavior centers, or attempts to reign in, the
unpredictable nature of creativity.
Clear Channel was not satisfied with the efficiency of Broadway in the winter of 2003, so
it attempted to abolish live music in favor of recorded music. From a source inside contract
negotiations between the Musicians Union and the League of American Theaters and Producers,
Clear Channel was the leader in the push for virtual orchestras, and the strongest presence within
the League that called for elimination of live music on Broadway. Scott Zeigler, CEO of Clear
Channel Entertainment Theatrical, is now on the Executive Council of the League of American
Theatres and Producers. A virtual orchestra is a computer that plays digitally sampled sounds
that simulate musical instruments. It makes fiscal sense, because orchestras cost an average of
ten percent of each musical’s budget. It makes sense technologically, because with all of the
recording resources available to Clear Channel, it would seem the most obvious way to create an
efficient and predictable product. “It sounds very Clear Channel,” said the former program
director, “they don’t feel like they need to pay all those people. They can get a more accurate,
consistent performance from a perfected recording.” To Clear Channel it was the natural
progression of things. It was downsizing. It was doing what it knows. Clear Channel is trying to
do to theatre what it did to radio, and the most visible price, not even the artistic price, is the
people, the 10,000 people who have lost their jobs have due to Clear Channel’s central business
plan of mechanized, generic, simulated, and repetitive programming.
The jobs immediately affected by Clear Channel’s Broadway business plan in the winter
of 2003 were the musicians. The point of contention between the League and the Musicians
Union was the minimum number of musicians to be agreed upon for each pit on Broadway. In
the last contract negotiation in 1993, 3 to 26 instruments were settled upon depending on the size
of the theater. Composers decide on the instrumentation of the musicals, and based upon the
requirements of the musical coming into the theater, the producers could always contract more
than the minimum, but never be less. Periodically, musicals did not require as many pieces as the
house did, and the union would assign a “walker,” which is a musician sitting in the pit paid to
do nothing but take up the required chair. There had not been a walker on Broadway for ten
years; however, the producers used the threat of walkers to call the system antiquated and
without justification. This negotiation was about more than minimums. It was common
37
knowledge among the three unions, the Musicians Union, Actors Equity, and IATSE (the
stagehand’s union), that the touring contracts, which are governed essentially by individual
producers, had been reducing orchestras, casts, and union status for the last five years, so there
were future negotiations at stake. As the Musicians Union settled in for a battle, the other two
unions knew that a war had just begun.
When the Musicians Union announced after the first round of negotiations that the
League wanted to eliminate the minimums altogether, Equity began consulting its membership.
Eliminating the minimums would give producers power to make the artistic decisions that the
composers, conductors, and musical directors had made in the past. The producers would decide
how few, if any, musicians were in the pit, and then tell the composer to write his piece based
upon those limitations. When the producers themselves said, as Robin Pogrebin and Steven
Greenhouse reported for The New York Times in an article entitled “Broadway Lights Go Back
On,” that the minimums were “an archaic employment guarantee that had become increasingly
onerous in an age of escalating production costs,” unions presented to the artists of Broadway the
negotiations were a confrontation between those who wanted to preserve live music on
Broadway and those who wanted to end it.
The producers did not count on union solidarity, and began requiring their Broadway
shows to rehearse with virtual orchestras to keep the shows open in case of a strike. Elizabeth
Nackley, a member of the cast of Phantom of the Opera, recalled a cast rehearsal in a recording
studio on February 25, 2003, when she sat with the entire company attempting to sing with a CD
that had been used by a European cast. The European companies of Broadway shows are under
different contracts, and many of the productions are already performed with virtual orchestras. “I
remember sitting there thinking, oh my God, how are we going to dance to this, how are we
going to sing? The tempos are set. This is for another company. We just looked around at each
other. It was a very bad day.”vii The fact that the performers were being required to sing with a
CD created for another set of performers was bad enough, but when the aspect of dance is added
to the mix, a level of danger is present to the performer. Stages and spacing are different, as are
conductors, yet the dancers are expected by the producers to risk their bodies. Barry Weisler,
producer of Chicago said to Robin Pogrebin in “Musician’s strike Dims the Lights on
Broadway” for the New York Times, that his CD sounded “terrific. The show looks, feels,
sounds, the same,” but in the very same article Harvey Fierstein of Clear Channel’s Hairspray
38
said their CD sounded “like a roller rink. It was not a pretty sound. That’s not why people go to
live theatre. That’s not why I want to be in live theatre. We’re professional, we’re artists. A
machine is a dead thing” (20). Fierstein encapsulated the debate beautifully. It was a question of
the living, or the dead representation of the living.
During contract negotiations on Friday, March 7, 2003, Local 802 reported that the
League refused to negotiate on minimums, so a strike was called. The actor’s union and the
stagehand’s union refused to cross the picket lines, and the strike occurred.
The Musicians Union had 325 musicians employed on Broadway at the time, and 1,000
more who earned a living as substitute players. Broadway contributes $4.5 billion to New York’s
economy, and 6,000 jobs depend on it, so when Local 802 called for a strike, very important ears
listened (20). In the end it was Mayor Bloomberg who brought both sides to Gracie Mansion
with a mediator to settle the dispute. The final agreement reduced the minimums in the large
Broadway houses by seven musicians to 18 or 19 for the next decade for each new show. The
current shows are unaffected. This will save producers an estimated $600,000 a year per show.
The strike cost the city $7 million a day, lasted four days, and cost the major shows hundreds of
thousands of dollars each. In the end, live music stayed on Broadway, at least until the next time
the contract expires in 2013. (Pogrebin, Greenberg 1) Disney never voiced an opinion. Its
performers are under their own contracts with their own agreements, and Disney is still not a
member of the League.
Clear Channel was only doing what Clear Channel does. Clear Channel was performing
its function. Clear Channel was trying to consolidate capital by cutting costs. The contract
negotiation was not about art, the contract negotiation was about money. Clear Channel does not
understand or care about anything but money because nothing else makes sense. Clear Channel
is outside of art. We cannot expect Clear Channel to act in an artistic manner. Clear Channel is
capital.
If the virtual orchestra and the long running revival (from the introduction) are the
theoretical basis of corporate theater, are corporate producers attempting to freeze or
“cinematize” parts of performance, and separate them from spontaneity and creativity? If the
theatrical form is based upon the repetition of standard formats, in both the performance and the
writing of it, what kind of artist does that create? What kind of artist does that require? When
realized, this form could be the predictable theater capitalism is looking for. This form could
39
fulfill the obligations of capitalism. This form could fulfill the future-based, rationally calculated,
profit-making art machine of corporate theater. Is this what corporate theater is trying to do? The
final line of the Clear Channel Creed is: “We believe the ultimate measure of our success is to
provide a superior value to our stockholders” (1). Can art and this capitalist co-exist? Because to
him, it is all about the money.
Breaking the Mold
I qualified myself early on as an artist, and I qualify myself here as an idealist. This
country is based on more than capital, and this country was created by people other than Michael
Eisner and L. Lowry Mays. It did not take me long to find someone to write about who fulfilled
my desires for an imaginative capitalist, a capitalist with human essence, with a sense of
Baudrilliard’s symbolic law. SAS, based in Cary, North Carolina, is the largest privately held
software company in the world. For the sixth straight year in 2003, it was named one of Fortune
Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For in America.” SAS has been featured on “60
Minutes” in a segment called “The Royal Treatment,” and in July of 2003 it was featured on The
Oprah Show as “The Best Place to Work” in the country. President and CEO Jim Goodnight has
built his entire company around the premise that his employees are the primary creators and
visionaries, and that his employees and their innovative problem solving are his greatest assets.
Originality and spontaneity do not always cost too much or affect profits negatively, and
sometimes it is the human touch, in both the care and welfare of the employee and the client, that
creates the art of life as well as the art of business.
In the SAS website, Goodnight offers a look into business beyond the purely future-based
capitalistic goals. “SAS gives you the complete vision to learn from the past, monitor and
communicate the present, and gain insight into the future” (1). Serving more than 90% of the
Fortune 500, with 10,000 employees, in 100 offices, serving 40,000 sites, in 50 countries, at
$1.18 billion overall revenue, he has found an innovative formula for success. In fact,
innovation is one of his key words in describing his company. The SAS formula is one of
continuous innovation based upon specific needs of the client: new waves of technology based
upon the new waves of “real time” problems. Their mission is to deliver the “next generation” of
business intelligence built from what they know of the past, the present, and what they can
40
imagine about the future. Their sense of imagination comes for their research and development
department in which SAS invests 25% of their revenue, almost twice the average investment of
other large software companies. In the last three years, with the US economy in decline, SAS
increased its employee base by 6 percent each year, adding specifically to the R & D and sales
departments (3-5).
SAS, incorporated in 1976, is entering its twenty-seventh unbroken year of revenue
growth. This growth is based upon employee value, employee expansion, imagination,
calculations incorporating the past and present, and reinvestment in innovative development. If a
corporate theater followed the SAS formula for success, it would create an extraordinary
complex. It would have a branch that developed new works about social issues as they arose,
about problems in our culture as they occurred. If that branch developed works in “real time,”
what an opportunity. This R & D branch would be supported by the body of the theater housing a
company of onstage, backstage, and front-of-house artists and technicians that worked closely
with people in the community as well as with the core of the theater. These artists would value
their patrons, who in turn would value their artists and feel a part of the process of creating the
art in the theater. There would be a strong support group from the patrons who came to the
artistic staff with social issues and concerns of the community that outreach from the theater
could respond to. Seeing interaction from the artists with the community, the community and
businesses would offer time, support, goods, and production assistance to keep the theater a
viable part of the community. Several spaces would be created for productions, meeting the
different tastes and needs of the community, and offering new experiences as minds were opened
to the potential for the new. Playwrights would be writing new works, actors would be
performing standard works, directors and actors would come in and out from all over the world
with world experiences to offer, sending roots solidly coursing through the ground from children
coming to take classes from performance teachers in order to experience their artistry first hand
and explore themselves with their families. This entire theater would be run by an administrative
staff and a CEO who believed that the greatest asset to the theater were those people who walked
in and out of the doors everyday. If SAS were a corporate theater, it would look like this place,
and the world would be better for it.
Baudrillard looks at the negative potential of capital, and Clear Channel and Disney
reveal aspects of Baudrillard’s theory in their corporate dealings and their theatrical producing.
41
One of the more compelling aspects of their human dealings is the number of anonymous quotes
in my thesis. For two corporations that rely on communication, their employees are certainly
reticent to communicate about their employer’s business policies and practices. Yet, amidst the
maze of Disney and Clear Channel’s capital and repetition, Baudrillard offers a way out of their
maelstrom: re-insertion of the real. SAS is the real. SAS breaks Disney and Clear Channel’s
rules of capital, so there must be some other rules out there, and there must be a different kind of
capitalist. Broadway does not have to work for Disney and Clear Channel. If theatre is destined
to seek corporate sponsorship, perhaps writers and composers must be willing to take
responsibility for its destiny and do the research. It’s time for theatre to grow up. It never wanted
to, but here it is.
In spite of its appearance, theatre is real, it is ritual, it is history, and it is the ontology of
the human spirit. Creativity and capitalism can co-exist. SAS proves it. It is about the capitalist
after all.
i
The interview with the stage manager took place on August 26, 2003. Under a WCLO contract the salaries are not
Broadway minimum, but WCLO minimum which was much lower. Prior to this, if a show was a Broadway tryout,
Equity required a Broadway production contract. A WCLO contract also allowed Disney to fire anyone they wanted
to between the Houston opening and the New York opening. Equity gets 2% of every union actor’s paycheck as
dues.
ii
The interview with the former Clear Channel program director was recorded on 3/17/03.
iii
When you track down the central NEXGEN system, you find it is located at PSI, or Prophet Systems International,
which is a subsidiary of Clear Channel. Details of this corporation can be found on its web site at
prophetsystems.com. One of its newest features is the ability to voice track from one location into any station
anywhere in the country. The central program manager brings up the far off station site on the computer monitor,
clicks on the voice track, records the desired information, and sends it. The local news in Tallahassee can be voice
tracked from Ogallala.
iv
This explanation of the NEXGEN system is compiled from the interview with the former Clear Channel program
director.
v
Currently the FCC is reviewing broadcast-newspaper cross ownership rules, local and national TV and radio
ownership rules, and dual network rules. These rules would try to limit the number of stations any one network or
company could own in a market. The latter rule prevents the large networks from buying each other. (Moore 25)
vi
Dick Moore, editor of AFTRA magazine reports that there is a curious producing relationship between Disney and
Clear Channel in London, but not in the United States. See article by Moore.
vii
The interview with Elizabeth Nackley took place on August 24, 2003.
42
CHAPTER TWO
THE ECONOMY OF REPETITION
Jean Baudrillard places the twentieth century, especially from 1970 on, in pure simulation
of the past. Nothing in present reality is based in origin. Everything that surrounds us is a
simulation, and is more real to us than the original form. The simulations or the “hyperreal” that
surrounds us have become what is real, and the hyperreal is so far removed from origin that we
could not recognize the “real” if we encountered it. Baudrillards’ theory of simulacra helps
explain why corporate theater’s concentration on revivals, movie adaptations, and revues is
merely extending a trend that has characterized society for decades. A virtual orchestra is a
perfect example of Baudrilliard’s theory of simulation in practice. Actually, Clear Channel is an
example of Baudrilliard’s theory in total. Clear Channel is in the simulation business. They have
spent so much time in radio, recordings, amplified and click tracked concerts (concerts that the
artists lip sync) that the simulation has become their reality. In the previous chapter Clear
Channel was behind the drive to end live music on Broadway in favor of CDs, because to them
the CDs sounded just as good. Arguable, the sound might have been good, but the missing factor
of liveness is what this chapter of my thesis is about. Actually, the Musician’s strike is fighting
for maintenance of a simulation itself; because the recording industry has so shaped culture that
the sound of live music has been replaced by the sound of amplified live music, so the live
orchestra that Broadway is fighting to preserve is in reality an amplified simulation. The truly
live orchestras are a thing of the past, because if it does not sound like our CDs, the public does
not accept it.
Capitalism and simulation are compatible. Simulation is a proven commodity because
there is a model by which its risks and its outcome can be future calculated. That is the structure
of simulation. Simulation imitates, it repeats what it is programmed to repeat. If what is repeated
has been successful, then obviously the success will repeat itself as well. Corporately produced
theater is programming Broadway to imitate the successful past, then downsize the show, hire
young, low-paid, non-insured, non-union actors, take the event across the country and call the
43
simulation of their simulation “Broadway.” Eventually the hyperreal, itself will open on
Broadway and no one will know the difference.
But what exactly has changed? Oscar Brockett says that by the fourth century in ancient
Greece, “actors were reviving works already produced elsewhere,” so simulation seems to be a
fact of life in theatre (21). A play is rarely produced for one performance, and after the first
performance a simulation must take its place. Actually, after the first off-book run certain parts
of the show are preserved by the director to fulfill the dramatic vision. In American theatre it is
traditionally the actor’s job to fulfill the director’s vision of the play, and the director’s vision is
accomplished by step-by-step achievements of stage mechanics and acting. The actors cannot do
whatever they desire whenever they desire to do it. There is a plan, and the plan must be adhered
to. What the corporate sector is asking of Broadway is not unusual. It is how actors make a living
and how theatre has always existed. Corporate producers are seeking the profits from what has
brought has kept audiences coming to the theatre for thousands of years. But now, corporate
producers are trying to produce, market, and distribute their own corporate product, but they do
not understand performance. Corporate producers understand capital. It is not about art. It is
about the money.
Can Liveness be Performed?
The work of theory, …can only be, for most of us, a labor of love.
…a description, a transcription of what one cannot see or prove with visible evidence.
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked
In seeking tangible assets for all of their financial outlay, corporate producers turn to the
actors. Actors are tangible, just as the sets, costumes, lighting instruments, and virtual orchestras
are. Performance is not. In Unmarked, Peggy Phelan says performance is “representation without
reproduction” (3). Phelan further states that: “Performance’s only life is in the present. To the
degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the
promise of its own ontology […] Performance occurs over a time which will not be repeated”
(146). Phelan refers to the “now” as the time frame of performance, and if the “now” is only
44
present once, what have theatres been showing night after night? Is it possible that tangibility is
not the only necessary factor of performance? Perhaps there is something other than spectacle
that makes performance compelling by nature, and can this something be mass produced for an
extended period of time? If not, what does a theater turn into if the event continues without the
“performance” informing it any longer? If the corporate theater event strips performance of its
ontology then corporate acting becomes cinematized. Corporate theater, in actuality, turns into a
simulation of film.
In this media-saturated culture, Philip Auslander bases the power of liveness, the term
used to distinguish between live performance and film or video, on the power of mediatized
culture: the power of one gives power to the other. In his book Liveness, Auslander borrows the
term “mediatized” from Jean Baudrillard to refer to society not just in terms of its media, but in
terms of “a larger socio-political process of bringing all of its discourses under the dominance of
a single code” (5). Auslander reverses our traditional conception of the live preceding the
mediatized: “…whereas mediatized performance derives its authority from its reference to the
live or the real, the live now derives its authority from its reference to the mediatized, which
derives its authority from the live etc.” (39). Thus, the live, now draws its power from
mediatization. But referent does not expunge origin, and referent does not gain authority over
origin just because it is in wider use. Siding with Auslander, if liveness gains its authority from
meditization, and if our society is governed by the power of the media, then liveness has as much
power as the mediatized, and is as important to our society as celluloid. Phelan would agree with
my assertion. I go further with Phelan. Phelan’s assertion is that performance’s “now” contains a
different element, an element that film does not, that only liveness can give to a living audience.
It must be this element that separates the live from the mediatized.
The question of “liveness” verses video/film representation presents a revealing
discourse. Auslander spends a great deal of time equating the power of live theatre with
television and film’s. Auslander claims admiration for the theatre, but he picks television as a
favored child destined to somehow replace it. “The fact that television can ‘go live’ at any
moment…enabled television to colonize liveness…television not only remediates live
performance, it remediates film in a way that film has never remediated television” (13). By the
publication of Liveness in 1999, Auslander has already absorbed liveness in Baudrillard’s world
of simulation. “As the mediatized replaces the live within cultural economy, the live itself
45
incorporates the mediatized, both technologically and epistemologically” (39). Televisions
ability to “go live” erased the liveness of human beings, and the media’s ability to record events
cancelled out the need to experience live theatre. If we follow Auslander’s logic, Phelan’s “now”
no longer exists, because the media can supply the “now” whenever it is convenient.
Auslander also remediates the very usage of the word “live” when applied to theatre as a
product of technology’s ability to record it. To Auslander, theatre’s identity is now inexorably
tied to technology. As a byproduct of corporate theater’s influence on Broadway and the acting
world, I could not agree more. As an epistemological argument, how could any theatre historian
and theorist disagree more? Theater is epistemology, and it is origin. Mediatization is a historical
moment. Theatre defines media’s existence; media does not define theatre’s. As an example of
liveness, on the second anniversary of 9/11, as the children of the victims read the names of the
thousands who were lost, the voices that were raised in song to comfort the families were not
from a CD. They were live. The bagpipes of the firemen were not from a synthesizer, and the
police bell that tolled the time the planes hit the towers was not on tape, and yes, their images
were recorded and sent across the globe. I am not arguing performance’s ability to be recorded,
neither is Peggy Phelan. I am stating that the “now” of that performance was the mythic moment
that only those in its presence received. That moment cannot be repeated. That moment can be
recorded, but its liveness, its essence, its symbolic law, will not be captured in the recording. The
best the recording can do is capture a simulatation of the liveness. This is the separation of
celluloid and flesh. And as that simulation of essence is played over and over, either in tape form
on a TV, or in human form on a stage, like a piece of celluloid the moment will degenerate into
nothingness from overuse and overplay. A recording cannot capture the “now,” neither can
cinematized actors.
In her book Unmarked, Peggy Phelan asserts that performance escapes mediatization and
commodifycation because by nature, performance is nonreproductive. “Performance clogs the
smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital. […]
Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies” (148). Phelan asserts that
once liveness is reproduced in any medium it is no longer alive. Phelan’s argument is squarely
placed in Baudrillard’s own resistance to simulacra. Live performance is the insertion of the
“real.” Live performance is the human element. Auslander, like Baudrillard, asserts that no
“cultural discourse can actually stand outside the ideologies of capital and reproduction that
46
define a mediatized culture. […] It is not realistic to propose that live performance can remain
ontologically pristine or that it operates in a cultural economy separate from that of the mass
media” (40). Phelan is not saying that performance can escape mediatization because there will
always be someone who will want to capture it, but the capture will be unsuccessful because it is
impossible. That is Baudrillard’s own theory. That is the “ontologically pristine” that
mediatization cannot tarnish, because although television claims liveness, the liveness is a
reproduction, a simulation, a generation removed from the live. It is an amplified live. It is
virtual live.
Auslander does not take issue with Phelan’s definition of performance, but takes issue
with performance’s ability to be reproduced. Phelan is not saying that a production cannot be
reproduced, just the moment of origin, the moment of humanity, and the moment of present
“now” which she defines as performance. The “now.” Spontaneous creativity, inspiration, the
“now” are qualities assigned to performance. These qualities remain unnamed by Auslander
because Auslander does not enter into language beyond product in Liveness. Phelan and
Auslander are clearly speaking in two different languages: creativity and production. Auslander
positions himself from inside mediatized society he analyzes; a society that perceives the world
though technology that is perceived to be superior to human beings, a society that has no
language for inspiration.
Auslander qualifies his study of liveness as a “hardheaded, unsentimental approach,” and
the very departure point for his reading is the very starting point for Phelan’s: the human being,
the real. Auslander objects to the binary that exists between live performance and what he refers
to as the “old media” of television, film, and sound recording, and becomes impatient with
“…unreflective assumptions like…’the magic of live theatre,’ the ‘energy’ that supposedly exists
between performers and spectators in a live event, and the ‘community’ that live performance is
often said to create among performers and spectators” (2). Auslander is going to have to argue
with 2,500 hundred years of ontology in order to unseat this binary. Fifty years of technology
cannot replace the epistemology of theatre, and society’s fascination with technology cannot
change its cultural origin. Fascination can affect the future, but it cannot change the past.
Phelan describes performance as “disappearance.” “Without a copy, live performance
plunges into visibility – in a maniacally charged present – and disappears into memory, into the
realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control” (148). Further
47
situating himself within a simulated environment, Auslander counters that there is no difference
between the “disappearance” that Phelan describes as essential to performance and the
deterioration quality inherent to video tape. Auslander posits that Phelan’s “disappearance,
existence only in the present moment, is not [an] ontological quality of live performance that
distinguishes it from modes of technical reproduction […] the television image is produced by an
ongoing process in which scan lines replace one another […] the use of recording causes them to
degenerate” (45). Phelan is talking about human beings, she is not talking about a video
reproduction that when played over and over deteriorates from use. She is talking about a human
performance happening in the “now,” which is the paramount difference between live
performance and that which is technically reproduced: the difference between flesh and
celluloid.
The nature of Auslander’s argument is a mediatized one itself. The comparison of the
qualities of a human being to the qualities of a technological invention is the very core of
mediatization. The argument stems from a binary. Who is more “live”: human or machine? What
is more “now”? The “now” of a human, or the technologically simulated “now?” Auslander’s
reading of our society’s mediatization is true and insightful, yet he supplies us with enough room
within his media maelstrom to resist his view, and he even supplies us with Baudrillard as
theorist who insists that there is a way out of mediatization.
The Long Running Show
…it was a great box office success from the startand then life had me where it wanted me…what the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worthJames Tyrone, Long Days Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill
The most visible tool of corporate theater is the long-running show. Long-running shows
combine mass production and reproduction, and using every theory that Henry Ford made
famous they are assembly lines churning out shows instead of cars. The long-running show is a
theatrical anomaly. The very nature of theatre is ephemeral, and for Phelan, “performance’s only
life is in the present” (146). It is an interesting theory that suggests The Phantom of the Opera
48
has been doing something other than “performance” for the last sixteen years. “To the degree
that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the
promise of its own ontology” (Phelan 147). Phelan is speaking to the experience of an audience,
but her theory is applicable to artists as well.
Theatre artists are taught to play in the “now,” the “moment,” the critical “present.” They
instinctively understand the properties of Phelan’s “disappearance.” Disappearance is what
happens when the present performance becomes the past, and the memory of the audience, or in
this case the performer, stores the event. Moments cannot be repeated onstage, but the memory
of the artist recalls the past performing sensation, and in remembering the sensation and the
director’s instructions, the artist re-configures the moment and attempts to restore the past in the
next performance. In each present tense performance each actor has the memory of the past
performance, however, the present performance is the “now” and it has its own life. The past is
the map, but the “now” governs the play. The present performance will be different from its
origin, it has to be because origin only happens once and human beings change. But the actor’s
job is to get to the relatively same place every night, but it will be different every time. In
traditional American, non-corporately produced theatre the “now” remains. The presence of each
new audience changes each performance to some degree. The presence of each new day changes
the actor’s performance to some degree. The actors remain alive, so liveness remains. The play is
a living entity, so in the simplest of terms, the power of theatre transforms through its own
maintained liveness. This was the tradition of theatre before the corporate producer. The material
condition of the theatre actor is drastically different from the film and television actor of course,
simply because the film and television actor do not face the physical and emotional wear each
time the film shows. I am not saying that film and television do not have a power of
transformation. This thesis is not about the transformative powers of television and film. This
thesis is about live theater, and with the advent of the long running corporately produced shows,
the liveness of theatre has been affected for the worse.
As I am defining the term, “corporate theater” involves forced replication. The more
forced replication is involved in a piece of theatre, the further away from origin it gets. The
forced replication of a moment over a long period of time eventually breaks the moment down
into the physical attributes of the memory with no connection to the memory’s origin. The
moment becomes a simulation of the memory’s effect. In a corporate theater production, if a
49
second performer replaces the first performer, the second performer is forced to replicate the first
performer’s work, and the second performer’s replication becomes the hyperreal. In Broadway’s
terms, the cycle of imitation continues until the show closes, and the hyperreal becomes the
origin. This is the formula of the long run. This is in practice on Broadway. It already exists.
As stated earlier, imitation is a given in theatre, but what corporate theater does is freeze
the now in an attempt to “cinematize” the living. Mass production, the hallmark of corporate
America, depends upon exact duplications. Traditional theatre depends upon a living
interpretation that is governed by the framework of the play and the artist’s ability to expand
within it. Mass production depends upon nothing new, nothing dangerous, nothing risked in the
name of exploration. Traditional theatre depends upon an artist’s commitment to continue to
work towards a living interpretation of the character. What is happening in the “now” onstage is
really happening, and it is a part of the life of the piece. Origin can never be found again, but an
artist’s exploration of a role is on-going, alive, and revelatory. It is a living search. It is watching
an explorer exist on friendly or foreign terrain for two and a half hours. The movie of Chicago is
magnificent, but the experience of a living Chicago is visceral, unpredictable, and alive. It is the
energy of the live meeting the energy of the living. Corporate America must mediatize what they
desire in order to replicate it. The replication of what they want will be perfect, but it is not real.
It is a still-shot, a single frame, a picture of a product. It is a picture with no room for
experimentation, and a picture with no room for the artist who risks everything for a moment of
revelation.
When Phantom of the Opera came to America from London it was directed by Hal
Prince. After its success on Broadway, producer Cameron Macintosh did the unthinkable; he
demanded that it stay the same for these sixteen years and counting. Every subsequent
production had the same blocking, staging, and dictated performances as the Broadway
company. An actor could move seamlessly between any American productions or American
produced European tours, and at one time there were three American tours, three European tours,
a production in Los Angeles, Switzerland, Mexico City, and on Broadway. Cameron Macintosh
was the first of what I’ve termed a corporate producer, replicating his own theatrical success,
mass producing the past, exchanging the creativity of his artists for an assembly line, and thereby
giving birth to the corporate actor.
George Lee Andrews spoke about the skills required in a long running show:
50
[…] it is a physical trial to do something every night for a long, long time. You
get kinks. There is a very definite mental situation in a long running show too.
Your mind plays tricks on you. You get blockages and blanks. Then you start
playing the play three lines ahead, playing scared. I’ve played scared for long
periods of time. No fun. I’ve had to mentally concentrate myself back into the
situation.
The cinematization of the actor is based in the technology of media, of frozen time, but the
frozen time must be replicated eight shows a week for years. Forced replication of frozen time
comes with its side effects mentally and physically.
Forced replication is hardly new to the arts, as the example of ballet illustrates. A routine
of forced replication is consistent with Michel Foucault’s theory of “docile bodies.” For
centuries, the artistic “docile body” has been most evident in the ballet world, characterized by
years of mechanized movement that resulted from hours of self-surveillance in the mirror. The
ballerina body was constantly on display to its own interior panopticon moving vertically,
horizontally, and diagonally around the dancer, offering opportunities of discipline twenty-four
hours a day.i “Ballet draws a certain kind of personality that can accept the mental discipline,”
said Elizabeth Nackley, a classical ballerina for most of her life and a cast member of Phantom
for ten years. “The whole idea in the corps is to move as one, to blend, to be the same as the
person next to you. You do what you are told, without question, and you apply corrections even
if they are not meant for you. I can remember being told that no matter the choreography, if the
leader of the line started to go the wrong way, I was to follow.” In Dancing on my Grave, Gelsey
Kirkland expresses the frustrations of a prima ballerina:
The dancer is trained to watch, to enter the world of the mirror until it is no longer
necessary to even look. To the extent that the dancer becomes the complacent
reflection, he or she does not learn how to test beauty, how to discover its inner
life. In this way the mirror can trap a dancer’s soul, ultimately breaking the
creative spirit. Such a dancer is created, but does not know how to create. At any
moment, with the capricious changes of fashion, a glance to check the mirror may
reveal tragedy – that he or she has been created for nothing. (73)
Like an artistic army, the ballet world was the major inhabitant of this “docile” land until
corporate theater. Ballet is a different landscape, and those who inhabit the corps de ballet, and
51
to an extent even the principle dancers put aside their individuality as part of the formula of
classical dance.ii
However, in the acting world it is your individuality that you train more than anything.
Based in my own long experience, an actor spends their career discovering and utilizing the
things that set them apart, discovering the aspects of their performing self that are unique and
rare. Especially if you work in ensembles. Your individuality becomes your best artistic
expression. Actors are not trained to conform, to replicate, this is not how actors are taught and it
is not how actors expect to live their artistic lives. This chapter is not about the star system, it is
not about those few who ascend to individual agency. Like a CEO, the world is different for
them. This chapter is about the ensemble, the foundation of the acting world. What happens
when a theatre artist, who has been trained in any of the current techniques of acting to
spontaneously create and interpret with every passing second, is called upon to create the same
life in the same set of seconds eight times a week for sixteen years? Does a docile body affect the
creative artist? Does the lack of the creative “now” strip the artist of connection to their art? Is
artistry inexorably connected to the “now”?
When cast in Phantom, the ensemble member is required to extend Foucault’s docility
beyond the body and into the creative brain. The creative brain is required by management to
shut down its natural impulses, concentrating instead on replication and submission. This
replication consists of the re-creation of the same staging, the same vocal inflections, the same
dramatic intention, the same blocking, the same physical bodies, gestures, and choices of
movement that were sculpted on the original performers sixteen years ago. The submission
consists of the attention to the duplication with no creative interpretation involved. It is a
castration of the imagination, kept castrated by a text brought to every rehearsal by
representatives of the producer that is referred to as the “Bible.” This text contains the original
staging, and it is present and referred to at every rehearsal. When a new cast member joins the
company, the stage manager teaches the “Bible” privately onstage to the new arrival. All of the
performers are required to fit into the patterns of staging by following marks on the floor which
are never deviated from. At a “put-in” rehearsal, where the new performer meets the rest of the
cast for the first time, the new arrival slides into the long established moving patterns, never to
leave them again. For a new performer the repetition has smoothed any jagged lines after first
month, and the efforts of the new artist disappear into unified form presenting itself for the five
52
thousandth time. After three more months, the efforts of the artist disappear to himself, and the
integration of artist and machine is complete.
Phantom is not the only victim of the long run. The Disney/ Clear Channel stage manager
has worked on several long running shows.
The people that get there and stay there were certainly collecting a paycheck and
phoning it in. Not every night, but they were, you know riding the wave. And then
the people that come in, if they have a lot of energy or spunk get pulled down by
it all. Sometimes they can pull it up, but it’s a hard thing. Long runs are a hard
thing.
Even if there is an attempt to rise above the machine, it seems be thwarted by a pervasive pull
from below. Is the energetic pull coming from unfulfilled artistic intention, unfulfilled artists, or
artists trapped in a something they cannot define? Perhaps all of the aforementioned. They are
Foucault’s docile performers on Broadway, cooperating fully in their own subjugation, existing
in a world of auto-pilot simulation, for eight shows a week and fifty weeks out of every year.
Foucault’s “self-mastery” that is required to replicate a performance eight times a week
for fifty weeks out of the year for countless years has created a corporate performer that can
achieve the goal of corporate theater. This corporate performer can replicate the past to ensure
present and future success. They can subtract personal artistry from theatre and accept the
assignment of theatrical machinery ever moving through the given and casting a docile brain
towards the possible. These corporate actors have achieved integration into the corporate
producer’s economic control of theater, ensuring that what has successfully come before will
successfully appear again. As Foucault says in Discipline and Punish, this “infinitesimal power
over the active body,” joined with “an uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the
processes of the activity rather than its result, […] assured the constant subjection of its forces
and impose[d] on them a relation of docility-utility”(137). Foucault renamed the “docilityutility” discipline. Theater becomes disciplined exercise, and a new form of performance
emerges, this one with a strong theoretical foundation.
The panopticon’s coercion is ever present in Phantom. There are weekly rehearsals,
sometimes on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, making the workweek for some of the cast from
1pm to 10:40 pm Monday through Saturday. This is a 51-hour work week for some, legal under
the terms of a production contract on Broadway, and a way of life for the Phantom cast.iii The
53
Production Stage Manager takes and deliver notes every performance, the Musical Director and
Dance Captain take and deliver notes every performance, and the Production Supervisor,
Musical Supervisor, and Dance Supervisor come unannounced taking their own notes and report
to the producer. If the English team comes that adds an additional three more note givers. And
then there are Hal Prince’s notes. Note giving and rehearsals are a fact of life in a theatre career,
but, borrowing Foucault’s words, in corporate theater “these small acts of cunning endowed with
great power of diffusion; subtle arrangements, apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious;
mechanisms that obey economics too shameful to be acknowledged” have an extraordinary
effect on the performers (Foucault 139). Constant correction and criticism becomes numbing,
debilitating, and de-moralizing. The performers begin to depend upon outside eyes for their
identity and eventually they give up their sense of self in order to fit into the mold, or worse, just
to keep their job. An anonymous performer, who has chosen to leave after years of acclaimed
artistry in Phantom explained that choice:
I feel I’m finally acknowledging the power that my spirit has, sometimes I denied
it, because when you reveal that, the sense of your spirit, when you reveal onstage
your intimate self, if you do that with your art and your life when you are in a
situation like this one, in the corporate mind set, they look at you as weak, as
weakness. In the corporate world that’s weak. That’s revealing too much. Too
much reality. It’s resented in the lemming mind set. Like, I have no brain. I’m a
yes man. As I feel more powerful in myself, I feel the resentment from those
people. I go “remember when you wanted this?” I just don’t want to feel…the
beauty of singing is taking a breath and feeling so joyous. It’s healing to me, and
maybe to other people. The beauty of taking a breath and singing is about your
spirit. I have go find that, find me again.iv
As Prince said when talking about actors, “they are all vulnerable, madly vulnerable, careening
through their lives on a prayer.” That vulnerability is the “now” of Peggy Phelan. It is what
corporate theater is trying to bottle, trying to freeze, trying to mediatize, yet it is the same thing
that they fear, that they suppress, that they dominate, that they eliminate. It is the power of
performance.
During my first season as an actor with Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, I attended a
company meeting in which the Production Supervisor, an administrative representative of the
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producer, admonished the cast about its performance. He wanted us to make it look like the “first
time, every time.” He did not know how to tell us how to do it, or what it was, but he expected to
see it in that evening’s performance. George Lee Andrews said of the supervisors who are in
charge of the show, who report directly to the producer:
The people who are watching the actors and judging them in terms of whether
they are going to keep their jobs or not, they have to also refresh themselves.
Because we have run into the situation those of us who have been in the show for
a long time where people have watched us and said ‘those people have been in the
show too long. We’ve got to get them out of there and get some new blood.’ They
are not making these decisions according to what we are doing on the stage. They
are making these decisions according to what their perception is which means
they’ve seen us up there too long. They’ve been watching us too long. They’ve
seen everything we do, all our tricks. If you’ve seen someone’s portrayal ten
times you start to think ‘I’ve seen this enough now.’ So we’ve also had to fight
the perception of those people. It’s an interesting problem. An odd situation that
we come up against constantly.v
Not only are the performers in Phantom required to duplicate their performances, but they are
also subjected to threats of replacement if they do not find a way to duplicate their performances
differently. Yet if the “difference” is noticed, a note is given. The stage manager mused on the
problems at Disney when middle management would try to give artistic notes:
He was a number cruncher. He did a few small shows then got sucked into the
giant Disney machine. And has the big office now and thinks he is somebody. He
gets to make the big decisions sort of…up to a point…but he doesn’t know
anything. He’ll come in and say some really obvious thing like ‘well, why is so
and so doing this, and why is so and so wearing that outfit’ just like real obvious
weird stuff. Why do you care? Go back to your calculator. Then the associate
director comes every once and a while to put a star in, and give some notes and
get a paycheck.
The watchers watch and are never satisfied. They direct and re-direct, for their own sets of
reasons, but are never pleased. They break the artists down, evoking their own kind of discipline
until the artist depends totally upon the panopticon for definition and identity. This is as powerful
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a system of domination as any Foucault could ever define, and as with all systems like this, its
greatest power lies in its invisibility.
No one knew in the beginning what it would take to stay with a show for years on end.
Quite a few cast members of Phantom have been with the show for its entire sixteen-year run,
and most of the present company have performed the show for between five and ten years. Hal
Prince, the director of Phantom, spoke of the actors as being afforded “the opportunity to make a
living as an actor. That is one thing this show did for some of them. It’s impossible to make a
living at this, and I’m glad Phantom was there.”vi It is a living, yes, but what is being sacrificed
in the name of a living is more precious than those on the outside of the business, or perhaps
even Prince himself, knows.
“But a few years later my good bad luck made me find the big money maker.
On my solemn oath, Edmund, I’d gladly face not having an acre of land to call my own,
nor a penny in the bank-I’d be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age if I
could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been.”
James Tyrone, Long Days Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill
Mass production began on Broadway seventeen years ago with the advent of Cats,
Phantom, and Les Miz, and the assembly line churning out actors, costumes, scenery, lighting,
props, musicians, productions, and tours of these three major works still exists today. In addition
to these shows, there are tours leaving New York on a monthly basis. Part of the allure of these
shows for the actors and musicians used to be the large paycheck. If you could get hired on a
tour, you got practically double pay from the per diem and the higher tour salary than you did on
Broadway. The unions had a central role in all of these agreements, creating them with the
highest protection and highest salary possible which also assured them income from the
percentage that they removed from each paycheck.vii However, the producers have been selling
the rights to non-union production companies, or bargaining for huge concessions with Equity.
“There are a lot of shows out there, Rent and Oklahoma for example, if you saw the whole list it
would make you cringe, that should still be on a production contract,” said Mary Leigh Stahl of
Actor’s Equity. “Rent isn’t that old, but it is touring non-union.” Equity has come under fire
recently for making special arrangements with producers in an attempt to keep shows from
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touring non-union. Saturday Night Fever and 42nd Street are touring under special concession
contracts which have backfired with the union membership at large. “In retrospect I think the
cuts were too deep,” Alan Eisenberg, the head of Actors Equity said in an interview with Jesse
McKinley of the New York Times, “The first national tour is a particularly sensitive topic.” The
cuts Eisenberg was referring to were “salary cuts for the cast,” reported Stahl. Seussical, a Clear
Channel production, began as a first national union tour, but shut down after ten months, then reopened and is touring the same Clear Channel venues non-union. It is, of course, billed as a
Broadway tour.viii
The assembly line of Broadway and touring can be labeled as Fordism, based upon the
production principles of Henry Ford. In Fordism and Post-Fordism, Robin Murry describes
Fordism as “an industrial era whose secret was to be found in the mass production systems
pioneered by Henry Ford” (38). Standardized workers with standardized tasks were the key
element of Fordism. My job at Phantom of the Opera was called the “swing.” I covered six
ensemble roles and two principal roles. My job was to replace a sick, vacationing, or injured
actor, and play one, or sometimes a combination of roles. Each of the roles and their duties were
fractionalized by management to their smallest staging components. I was taught the roles
individually by the stage manager, who taught me the blocking (stage movements), the dance
captain, who taught me the choreography, and the conductor, who coached the vocal lines. The
roles were tasks that I accomplished. The tasks were part of Henry Ford’s “special purpose
machinery.” I was one of thirty-seven workers who built the standardized product of Phantom of
the Opera every night. My function was to replace a missing worker, accomplish their required
tasks, and assemble the product without missing a beat, interrupting the flow, or disturbing the
rest of the machine. I was highly paid for my ability to keep eight intricate assignments
compartmentalized and available at a moments notice for my employers. Whereas the rest of the
company was responsible for one piece of the machine, I was responsible for eight. My job was
not about my art. It was about efficiency.
Mass production presumed mass consumption, so mass marketing was born. (39) One of
the more interesting aspects of Fordism is what Murray calls the “purpose-built machinery,”
which was machinery developed to accomplish special tasks from the assembly-line. In the case
of Broadway, the massive theatres were already built, with their high tech machinery installed,
so the initial investment to set up the assembly-line and its machinery, usually the most costly
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part of the Fordist investment, was already in place for the corporate producers, so the touring
venues and the interest in all things on Broadway only needed to be advertised and maintained.
The corporate producers stepped into an already working system, an already moving assembly
line of a sort, but an assembly line that had been changing shows and people, and an assemblyline that had been running on union contracts with union actors, technicians, and musicians.
Fordism is a concept described by theorists, and in Post-Fordism and Social Reform,
Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway describe it as a capitalistic system that began in the late
1960s and early 1970s, characterized by assembly line principles, rising wages, mass production
and mass consumption, and a central role of the “trade unions in both institutionalizing collective
bargaining and in the formation of state policies.” This view of the past power of the trade
unions, the high salaries of the actors amidst the early corporate production can be attributed to
Fordist theory of the 1990s. Bonefeld, Holloway, and Murray agree that the United States has
now entered a new pattern best described as Post-Fordist, which is characterized by Murray as
“the promotion of the instruments of post-Fordist control – systems, software, corporate culture
and cash” (47). Bonefeld and Holloway are more specific in speaking about “a much reduced
role for trade unions,” and as if living up to Post-Fordism’s promise, since 9/11 corporate
producers have begun to chip away at the power of the unions demanding greater concessions
and even creating their own non-union touring companies to eliminate union negotiations
completely (Bonefeld, Holloway 1).ix
The corporate producers are reducing live music and touring with reduced scenery and
reduced casts.x Maury Yeston, composer of Titanic and his own Phantom, wrote to the New York
Times that “with the coming of virtual orchestras, the sluice gates have opened and producers are
beginning to ask, how few live musicians can we get away with hiring” (1). The producers
answer with fewer musicians, fewer actors, less scenery, and higher ticket prices. “Big cities like
Denver, Los Angeles and Chicago have seen their ticket prices rise, with musicals regularly
charging $75 a seat” (McKinley 2). The producers are charging more and giving less. Actors
Equity reports that the producers continue to cry poverty yet refuse to open their books to prove
it. Also, they are “padding their budget, by adding expensive fees, paid to the producers
themselves, for everything from booking the show to copying the script, there’s been an
enormous increase in the last 5 or 10 years in theses kinds of fees. And they always come to us
first for cuts” (McKinley 1). Capital must seek capital, no matter what it has to do to get it.
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Big business is “big business” in America. Clear Channel owns 1240 radio stations, 104
live theatre venues, 56 touring houses, 19 television stations, national and international outdoor
advertising display faces, not to mention its holding in advertising, public relations, and the
Internet, and now it has the power to tactically maneuver itself into the purchasing, redefining,
and restructuring of the American theatre. All Clear Channel has to do is decide to tour Rent as a
non-union show. They sell it to the tour presenter, Clear Channel, who sells it to the owners of
the tour houses, Clear Channel. They present it in 56 theaters across the country and call it
Broadway. That’s all it takes. The show will be orchestrated by a computer, its artists will be
young, inexperienced, have no health and welfare benefits or livable wage, it will toured with
half as many people as on Broadway, with half the set at half the producing price, and wherever
it goes it will be Broadway to the audience because its marketed as “Broadway Across America”
and they will pay $75 to $100 a seat. The most curious aspect of Clear Channel’s artistic
invasion is that it was never their intention to have any affect on art whatsoever. It was never
about art. They just want to make money. The price for their money is art.
Clear Channel’s money costs the future of American musical theatre. Theatre will
become disciplined exercise on an assembly line peopled by docile corporate actors forever
stepping on and off of a treadmill under the watchful eye of the panopticon. Baudrillard’s
simulation, Fordism’s assembly line, and Foucault’s discipline and docile bodies lead us here,
but what is lost is the very essence of live performance, and ironically, the very thing that
corporate producers are looking for. Performance will cease to exist because performance exists
in the “now,” the live. The “exercise” that has been bought and forced has become a march of the
cinematized: dead interpretations, dead moments, and dead exercise based upon the past. But the
corporate producers cannot recognize that it is missing, because they are part of the
mediatization all around them. Corporate producers are replacing Broadway with a simulation,
and are taking the hyperreal on the road. They have produced what they know. It is their
function.
“Why do they want to do this,” says the stage manager, “why do they want to take the art
from the artists? It doesn’t make any sense. Is it really all about the money?”
The “now” is what corporate producers want, but by mediatizing it, it is lost. The “now”
is the element that draws people to the theatre, but the inability to control the “now” in their
workers makes their workers unpredictable and dangerous. Capital must drive the “now” from
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the art form to control it, because the “now” is indefinable, incalculable, and the essence of the
human spirit. It is an unknown and there can be no financial gain where the unknown exists. The
unknown separates art from economics, and economics depends upon the past. The unknown is
theatre’s essence and it depends upon the “now.” “Now” is in a war of time, and theatre’s
identity within it is the battleground and theatre’s artists are the casualties. Art will survive. Art
always survives, but not the artists. Artists are human beings, they need to eat and have decent
places to live and work, with decent people to work for, people that want more for their society
than they want for themselves. Acting was never intended to be about standardized workers
doing standardized tasks in mass produced works for the mass marketed millions. Our artistic
heritage is worth more than that. Our symbol of artistic excellence deserves better than that.
Theatre is miraculous. Of course corporate America wants it. It inspires and elevates.
What better way to sell products? Prince said of corporate theatre “it will take some catastrophe,
some devastating thing that will put us all back in place. The corporate guys will see that it’s not
so easy to do this, and they’ll go away. Just like the French Revolution, the wigs and the dresses
and the decadence…it doesn’t last. We do. We will go on.” But the price we are paying until the
surge away from economic domination is one that threatens to wrench art away from the artists
and turn it over to a machine. The simulacra that will “collapse the real with the imaginary, the
true with the false” will continue until the cycle is broken on a cognitive level (Baudrillard 109).
Art has always survived, not artists themselves, but art. The vast landscape of imagination that
opens itself to artists never disappears for long. It can be hidden by greed, tarnished by avarice,
and dismantled by post-modernists, but it restores itself eventually through the dreams of an
unblemished artist, and rises again to show humanity the spirit and essence of what is Real.
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i
The panopticon “is a tower from which warder, doctor, teacher or foreman can spy on and penetrate behavior. The
subjects under surveillance never quite know when they are being watched, and so effectively police themselves”
(Horrocks, Jevtic 118).
ii
In A Chorus Line the character of Cassie is the perfect example of an individual giving up her agency to dance in
the chorus. The line repeated to her as discipline is “Don’t pop the hip, Cassie.” That line is standard in the dance
world for “blend in if you want the job.”
iii
There can be no rehearsals on Monday.
iv
All quotes from this anonymous source come from a telephone conversation on 4/13/03.
v
All quotes from George Lee Andrews come from a telephone interview on 3/16/03.
vi
All quotes form Hal Prince come from a telephone interview on October 16, 2002.
vii
Actors Equity states that production tours are the most lucrative jobs a performer can have. And AEA takes 2%
out of each paycheck for their coffers.
viii
This was reported by a cast member from the original touring company who was let go after the ten month union
contract. The cast member wished to remain anonymous.
ix
Mary Leigh Stahl reports that Actors Equity is in the process of filing a Fair Labor Practice Suit against Big
League Productions claiming that it is owned by The Dodgers. The Dodgers is a corporate production company
currently producing 42nd Street, who has denied any connection to Big League, but refuses to turn over its financial
statements. It is called “doubled breasting” if a union company owns a non-union company, and it is considered a
monopoly and not allowed by the League of American Theatre and Producers, and the three major unions.
x
Disney, still not a member of the League of American Theaters and Producers, negotiates its own contracts with
the unions. The unions give in to keep the shows. Clear Channel is a recent member of the League but still
negotiates its own contracts.
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CHAPTER THREE
PROFITS FROM PAIN
Acting or writing, it makes no difference—the main thing isn’t
being famous, it’s not the sound of applause, it’s not what I dreamed it was. All it
is, is the strength to keep going, no matter what happens.
__Anton Chekhov, The Seagull
Theories and ethics are only concepts until they are experienced. In the aftermath of the
9/11 tragedy, a series of events took place that can cast an open eye on the ethics behind the
corporate theater machines dominating Broadway today. This open eye can stare into 9/11’s past,
observe the present, and either prepare itself for the future or take steps to insure a different one.
As an example of the corporate leadership in place on Broadway today, I will explore the
acts of valor and the acts of greed that occurred within an eight-week time frame immediately
following 9/11. As a company member of The Phantom of the Opera, I will report the events that
brought about the re-opening of Broadway from inside the maelstrom and from an artist’s point
of view. I will explain how the re-opening of Broadway was financed by its artists and
technicians, and how Broadway’s producers, who had made billions through the talents of these
artists, then forced them to decide between substantial and extended pay cuts or the closing their
shows. I will explain how the elected president of the actor’s union, Actors Equity Association,
lied to his membership in order to secure a consenting vote of a 25% salary cut for the producers.
I will explain how this 25% salary cut was brokered between City Hall and one of the union
leaders and was never voted on by the membership of two of the three principle unions. How this
25% agreement, in true post-Fordist fashion, may have effectively broken the unions for good.
Like true assembly-line workers, Broadway returned full-force, its actors undeterred and
dedicated to re-opening New York to the world. The actors worked ceaselessly, in forced,
cinematized, simulacras of live theatre, bomb scares in the theatres every night, dogs sniffing in
the theatre seats before the shows, making free commercials, doing free ads and TV spots, while
behind their backs the producers were asking for and receiving millions of dollars in aid and free
62
advertising from the city and state of New York and then submitting claims to their insurance
companies to recoup their losses on top of the 25% pay cut they were getting from the cast and
crews of their shows. It was the artists who financed the re-opening of Broadway, not the
producers, and nobody knows it. Broadway was back on its feet within two weeks, yet the pay
cut extended for four weeks, the producers refused to give the actors a repayment on the lost
three days when the other unions did, and the producers ran the print ads and television spots for
weeks, and the commercial donated by Broadway’s artists for a year. Who knows how long it ran
in Europe.
The final cost is always a human one. 9/11 taught the world about the temporary nature
of all things, and as I remember those horrible days, I recall the extraordinary human grace above
anything else. There was an art of life in New York City, and I was proud of the artists in those
weeks after the attack. I look back on the actions of the producers and I feel sorry for them that
they chose to experience post 9/11 the way they did, because surely it reveals the way they see
the world. The world I see is filled with artists. The world they see is filled with expendable line
workers who do no matter in the scheme of thing. The producers do not understand that in the
long run, art is the scheme of things; it is they who are not. Art defines the world. The world does
not define art.
He never believed in the theater, he laughed at all my dreams,
and little by little, I stopped believing in it to.
__Anton Chekhov, The Seagull
The Aftermath
By 11 am on September 11, 2001, the impossible had occurred. The Twin Towers had
come crashing to the ground taking thousands of people with them. Those of us who lived in
mid-town only had to look south to know the tragedy was real. You could see the smoke, hear
the sirens, and worst of all smell the destruction. The smell was acrid and unfamiliar, and an
appropriate metaphor for the New World we found ourselves in.
At 3 pm I received a call from Craig Jacobs, the Production Stage Manager of Phantom
of the Opera, making sure that I was safe, and telling me that there would be no show that
63
evening. This was only the second time Phantom’s history that the show had been cancelled. The
first was during the blizzard of 1996 that brought all of New York to its knees, and even
Phantom succumbed to Mother Nature for one performance. After hours in front of the
television, I ventured out onto the streets at dusk of September 11, just to make sure my city was
still there.
The next day New York City awakened to the nightmare and the wheels of government
started turning. On top of the vast effort at ground zero, Mayor Giuliani began to get the city
back on its feet. He publicly made Broadway the symbol of New York City’s recovery. Robin
Pogrebin of The New York Times quoted Deputy Mayor Anthony Coles, “we thought
[Broadway] was an important symbol, we wanted to send the message we were open for
business” (E1). i The Mayor sent word to Jed Bernstein, the president of the League of American
Theaters and Producers that he expected Broadway to reopen by Thursday, September 13. The
Mayor’s office and the League made use of a jointly created story line: “as long as Broadway’s
stages were dark, the city itself would look dark to all the world” (E1). City Hall, the Stock
Exchange, and Broadway were the icons of New York, and as they stood strong, so did the city.
The Executive Council of Actors Equity began a series of emergency meetings trying to
foresee what this disaster meant to its membership nationwide. Broadway is a relatively small
community of performers, but whatever occurs in New York filters throughout the country. If a
deal is struck in Manhattan, it affects contracts in Peoria. The League of American Theaters and
Producers swung into action as well, and emergency measures were the topic of every meeting.
Because of the very specific problems facing theatrical producers, actors, musicians, and
technicians in New York City, four organizations had evolved over the years to address the
concerns of these individual groups. To restate the traditional structure of Broadway, the League
of American Theaters and Producers represented a unified negotiating voice for the producers on
Broadway and had been the most powerful producing organization in the country for the past
twenty-five years. IA (IATSE, the stagehands’ union), Local 802 (the Musician’s Union) and
Actors Equity became the theatre community’s governing bodies. These three organizations
looked out for the best interests of their individual memberships, and negotiated with the League
for what they believed were the best answers to many difficult questions.
For decades, IA, Local 802, and Actors Equity had been the last word in all disputes with
the League about fair labor practices, but now there was a new face at the negotiating table, a
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new force at work inside the League, and outside of all the organizations. This new voice was the
voice of corporate theater. This new voice had gained strength within the League, influencing
contract negotiations, and reversing age-old concessions to the unions, but the greatest influence
of this voice would eventually be heard from outside the League. The strongest corporate
producers outside the League were Disney, Clear Channel, Pace Productions (a producer and
presenter), and the Dodger Organization (The Music Man, Urinetown, 42nd Street.) In the
aftermath of 9/11, Disney aligned itself with the League and the unions; Clear Channel, Pace and
Dodger did not.
The League called a meeting on September 14. Union heads, theater owners, ad agencies
like NYC & Co. (the city’s convention and visitor’s bureau), charities, and theater support
groups met in a conference room on West 47th (Pogrebin E1). The League immediately asked for
concessions from the unions.ii There was no frame of reference for what had happen within the
City. There were no basic services south of Canal Street, and phone service was sporadic all
through Manhattan. The bridges on and off the island were closed to traffic, and there were no
deliveries of any kind coming into the city. The grocery stores were emptying and there were
calls for food and water for the rescue workers downtown. The general population was in shock,
and the tourist population was standing on the edges of Manhattan trying to get out. The fears of
another attack were ever present, and the producers feared these conditions would depress ticket
sales and mean the end of their livelihood. This was understandable, but the unions assumed that
the producers had backup plans, or at least money in reserve in case of emergencies. These were
business people, after all, and Broadway’s business had been living in Boomtown.
The unions were in for a rude awakening. “The company managers, and the general
managers, they’re all sort of playing it by ear,” says Mary Leigh Stahl, who attended the 9/14
meeting, and every meeting with the League after 9/11 as a member of the AEA Executive
Council. “They don’t have a long term plan. And that was a shock to people. That the
community that was so healthy, that had done such incredible business…all of the sudden we are
so poor we can’t make the payroll. They never think beyond the next week. ” There was no
money saved, no special accounts for emergencies, and nothing to draw money, or nothing that
they were willing to draw money from except the artists and technicians of Broadway.
65
The Reality
With no knowledge of the meetings going on, and no thought given to the possibility of
our shows closing, all of Broadway re-opened on the evening of Thursday, September 13, 2001.
We had been dark for three performances, and as I returned to work that night, my co-workers
were gathered at the sign-in sheet to make sure everyone was there. Thirty-seven people
crammed in a ten-foot by four-foot hallway, clinging to each other and hugging everyone who
came through the door. No one left that hallway until everybody had signed in. We had no
absences; however, there were two empty seats in the pit. We found out later that the missing
orchestra members lived in Battery Park City and simply could not get uptown for the show, but
those two seats stared back us for two and a half hours.
Oblivious to the decisions already made about our future, we had returned to work for the
good of our city. Mayor Giuliani had told us how important we were to New York’s recovery,
and we were going to do our best to make it happen. The emotions of the cast were high, and
management was responsible for trying to make the show happen amidst such chaos. Craig
Jacobs, who is in charge of all of the aspects of Phantom on a daily basis, told us all to meet on
stage at 7:30 because our director wanted to talk to us. We went to our dressing rooms, tried to
put on some makeup, and made our way back to the stage. Hal Prince and Carol Burnett were
already there. She stood against the proscenium wall, silent and supportive. When I asked him
what he remembered about that evening he spoke softly:
It was as traumatic an experience as anyone of us had shared. Clearly two days
later was pretty soon to have to go back and perform for people. Whenever you
went back to work it would be very, very difficult. The inevitability of going back
to work is real; the need to go back to work is real. You need to restore order and
start living. We’re all in it together. We know what we’re going through, now
back on the horse and let’s start living our lives. I’m not a long-term mourner. It’s
not how I think. I guess I wouldn’t be in theater if I were.
The casts and crews on Broadway are theatre people, and we had returned to work for reasons
that, as Jacobs put it, “the corporates just don’t get. Theatre people are…well… we do things for
different reasons then they do. Why we’re here, y’know. I just don’t think they understand us.”
Prince said “good show,” and sent us to work.
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After Prince spoke to us that Thursday, he and Burnett went to our local fire station. The
men of Ladder 4, Engine 54 are called the “Broadway Boys.” These were our friends whom we
saw on weekly inspections at the Majestic Theater. We knew them by name. These firefighters
waved to us from their fire trucks when they saw us on the street, and they let our children and
relatives sit in a real fire truck if we came by the firehouse for a visit. These men, who saved my
apartment building once in 2000, and twice in 2001, and who kept our theater safe every day,
were missing fifteen firefighters. “Two little girls came up to us,” Prince went on to say, “and
said they were sisters of one of the fallen fighters, and then pointed to a photo they had put up on
the bulletin board that night, and they said ‘see the Cutie?’ That’s our brother.’ The Broadway
community had lost members of its family that day, and their faces are not forgotten.
Howard McGillin, who plays the Phantom, reflected most of the discernable feelings of
the cast:
Everybody was feeling…terribly shocked and terribly displaced. The event was
so catastrophic and so traumatic to everybody. Normal life seemed kind of
impossible to return to. And here we were going back to do a musical. It felt kind
of surreal. But we knew we had to. In some ways, it was comforting, in some
ways it seemed like we were finding a new show. Suddenly every lyric in the
piece had a new context. Suddenly everything was starting to be viewed in a new
context.iii
As the Phantom, McGillin portrays a character that terrorizes people within his own world.
I felt especially vulnerable to the audience’s discomfort, almost responsible for it.
I play a character who is threatening people, who is actually killing people in
order to achieve his obsession to have Christine. Suddenly the context was ripped
wide open, and I thought “Oh my God, we’ve made a terrible mistake.” My worst
fear was that the audience was going to get up and walk out; it felt too…it sounds,
in retrospect, absurd because after all, it’s just a play.
McGillin was right. The truth was, the show started, we did the play, the audience applauded,
and then we all discovered why we had come to the theater that night.
Right before the show started, Jacobs handed out copies of “God Bless America,” and we
were told to sing it after curtain call. We were also told that Cameron Mackintosh’s London
office disapproved, forbidding us to sing anything after the show. “They’ve always wanted their
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product to be separate and divorced from everything else.” Mary Leigh Stahl mused, “They are
all about their product, their product. It seems to me that that sort of notion is a little bit selfaggrandizing [. . .] and petty on their part.” Our stage managers agreed. They made sure we all
had a copy, and made sure they told everyone that London nixed the idea. Jacobs said to me,
“London does not want anybody singing anything after the show, but if everybody started to
sing, I couldn’t possibly get to a headset and cut the lights in time.” I kissed him and waited for
curtain call.
After the bows, McGillin came to the footlights and shattered producer Cameron
Mackintosh’s fourth wall to pieces. There he was, the man behind the Phantom’s mask, telling
the audience of around 200 (the Majestic seats 1,600) that we were all in this together, that we
would be able to return to normalcy, and that we would be able to get on with our lives. Then,
without any music from the pit, he started to sing “God Bless America.” The rest of the cast
joined him, and management and crew came onstage as well. The people in the audience started
to stand one by one and sing along. In the ensuing weeks, there would be back alley and
sweetheart deals, lies, and betrayals, but that night and that moment will live on as the single
most important thing I have ever done as an artist, and one of the most important things I have
ever done as a human being.
All of Broadway sang “God Bless America” on September 13, 2002. It became New
York City’s anthem of hope. “I think there was something so perfect about it,” said McGillin.
“It’s such a simple melody, and the words are so simple, and it just felt so right.”
Even the hardest nuts to crack were lifted above the horror for just a moment. Jay
Nordlinger of the National Review wrote on September 16:
My wife and I went to a show on Friday night. We were dreading what might
transpire. Broadway types are surely the left-most, most New Agey people in the
nation. After the show the cast lined up, and this man asked the audience to join
them in singing ‘God Bless America.’ I sang so hard, my throat hurt. I saw no
difference Friday night between Broadway and the Elks Lodge in Boise.
But there was a difference. The Elks Lodge could trust their leadership, and they could trust that
the decisions being made behind closed doors were in the best interests of the other Elks. Most
importantly, the other Elks were not going to lose their jobs if they did not do what the head of
the Lodge said.
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The great day for the theater will come when we decide that henceforth
our intentions shall be honorable.
__Arthur Hopkins, How’s your second Act?
The Deal
The week ending Friday, September 21 was the most dismal week in Broadway’s history.
Four shows closed, and six other long-running productions were teetering on the edge of the
abyss. Over a hundred actors had suddenly lost their jobs, and dozens of crew members,
musicians, ushers, vendors, and the people that keep a theater running that nobody sees were out
of work. The numbers released to the public were a shocking 3 to 5 million dollars lost in a week
and a half (Pogrebin 1).
In anticipation of the worst, the League of Producers, with the support of the Mayor’s
office, announced on September 20 that a comprehensive plan to promote Broadway and support
the relief effort had begun under the watch of NYC & Co, the city’s convention and visitor’s
bureau. It would be called “Stronger Than Ever” and would include donated TV spots, print ads,
radio spots, publicity events, and fundraisers. Also, they announced that the producers would
donate $5 to the city’s Twin Towers Fund for every ticket sold from September 30th through
Halloween. Jayson Blair of The New York Times said, “The campaign, valued at $1.16 million
was being provided free by advertising and design firms, and ad space is being donated by
houses like Conde Nast, which is running the ads in 17 of its magazines”. NYC & Co. is a nonprofit organization with 48% of its financing provided by the City. (Blair 1) The Mayor and his
organizations were rolling, and his personal friend Jed Bernstein at the League had a lot to feel
better about. The publicity release failed to mention the donated time of the actors and
technicians.
The tourism industry employs 280,000 people, and results in $25 billion in annual
revenue. Hotels and business were down 80%, and if New York City’s economy did not recover
quickly, thousands of jobs would be lost (Blair 1). It was up to Broadway to get the message out.
Broadway is NYC’s calling card and its shining light, but Broadway is also people. The ad
campaign needed the actors of Broadway more than anything else, but the League had to have a
few small things in place before the recovery campaign could begin. They had to have
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Broadway’s actors ratify the League’s salary cuts so the League’s producers would stop losing
money.
A day prior to the campaign’s announcement, Wednesday, September 19, 2001, a
meeting was held between shows at the Shubert Theater for the actors in the Shubert shows
Phantom and Les Miz, plus Chicago, Rent, and The Full Monty. Our names were on lists at the
door, and a heavy security presence checked us in. Our lives had changed, and now we had to
have identification cards to get into our own theaters. I knew that something was going to
happen, so I brought my notebook with me to record the event.
Patrick Quinn, the president of Actors Equity, made his way to center stage, and
everybody gave him a round of applause. He gestured to the wings and the “suits” came out.
Barry Weisler, a co-producer with Clear Channel of Chicago, Kevin McCollum, a co-producer
with Clear Channel of Rent, and Alan Wasser, the general manager of Phantom made their way
to a table center stage with several chairs. Alan Eisenberg, the legal counsel and Executive
Director of Actors Equity, joined them.
Some opening remarks were made as well as a spirited speech from a representative of
the Mayor’s Office. Quinn then said that there was an agreement on the table between the
League, IA, Actors Equity, and Local 802. It amounted to a 25% pay cut for four weeks, with an
option to extend the cut indefinitely. In addition, instead of a two- week closing notice, it would
now be 48 hours, and the 48-hour notice would continue indefinitely. The creative teams of the
shows were waiving royalties, the theater owners were waiving rent, and the lighting and stage
equipment companies were cutting their fees, all in an effort to reduce production costs in each
show by two thirds. If this agreement was not ratified now, our producers would close our shows
immediately after the meeting.
We were stunned. There was no mention of any concessions coming from the producers.
Before a question could be raised, Quinn told us that the producers were donating $5 to the Twin
Towers Fund for every seat sold until Halloween, and that was their contribution to the recovery
effort. It felt more like a quid pro quo between the League and the City than a working
arrangement between the League and the unions. The producers were telling the unions that if we
succeeded in bringing down their costs by two thirds we could keep our jobs.
A question and answer period began. A company member of Chicago asked Barry
Weisler how he could in good conscience come to his actors for money. Weisler was notorious
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for underpaying his performers and working them beyond their contracted hours and
responsibilities. Previously, he had personally designed an excruciating workweek based upon
audience attendance surveys. Weissler decided that Chicago would have their day off on
Wednesdays to capitalize on the weekend ticket sales. This put the actors at only twenty-four
hours off in an eight-show week, instead of the usual forty-eight to fifty hours. He responded to
the question in a fit of pique: “Do you expect me to go to my investors and ask them for more
money?” Weissler stood and boomed, “Do you expect me to go to Bernadette Peters and Bebe
Neuwirth and ask them to keep the show open?”
The answer “yes” was murmured throughout the theater. These people had been making
money every week for eight years based upon the company’s work, and their initial investment
had been repaid by the end of the first year. A company member of Phantom asked Alan Wasser
how Cameron Mackintosh could come to us for funding when he had procured billions for
himself and his investors based upon our work. Wasser is the General Manager of Phantom, so
he could say nothing except Mackintosh was willing to make a deal.
“This meeting was good for the actors, “says Stahl, “in that they came for a certain
reason, and they got to see how this business operates.” Stahl, in her capacity as an Actors Equity
Council member, had been up for two days straight, trying to keep the producers, who had the
Office of Mayor behind them, from taking more from the actors. There had been higher
percentages of salary cuts and longer time frame proposed by the League, and Equity had fought
them off. There were wheels within wheels and as Robin Pogrebin explained in “How Broadway
Bounced Back After 9/11”:
The League had more than a passing acquaintance with Mayor Guiliani and others
in government, backed up in the case of at least one of major theater operator with
a record of campaign contributions to the Mayor; an industry federation with a
director, Jed Bernstein, who had well established lines to City Hall; and lobbyists
whose credibility with local officials spanned decades (E 1).
Pogrebin’s comments put things in a perspective that no one would have believed possible at that
moment, because our Mayor had called on us to bring New York City back from the horror. He
had said that we were the beating hearts of New York and that we could put the city back on its
feet. Little did we know that we were expected to put on a brave face for the public while our
producers financed Broadway’s re-opening with our salaries.
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We stayed at the Shubert Theater for two hours trying to make sense out of an impossible
situation. Quinn kept telling us we had to vote, but we could not bring ourselves to do it. Perhaps
the most shattering moment came from Kevin McCollum, one of the producers of Rent. This
show had not lost one dime since it opened. It, too, had the same vicious performance schedule
as Chicago, not surprising since it also had a Clear Channel relationship, and the cast changes
were legendary for such a relatively new show. One of his company members asked McCollum
how he could ask for voluntary pay cuts from his actors when he had never lost a cent.
“I don’t care,” replied McCollum, “I would rather close you down and open a new show
then put more money into this one. I’d make more money that way.”
There it was. One of them had actually said it. There was no love or mission in producing
these plays, just money. And as actress Anita Gillette said to me right after that, “there are no
ethics where money is concerned.” Something had evolved right in front of our eyes, and we
never saw it. It was powerful, and it did not care about what the artists were creating, or how
many lives depended on the productions, or how many lives the production had changed. It cared
only about how much money it could make. I’ll never forget the silence that followed. The
company member did mange to speak again.
“How dare you,” he said, “I have a wife and three children, and I have given you three
years of my life. How dare you say that to me? I would rather quit right now than let you make
one more penny off of my talent.” The applause that followed shook the theater, and McCollum
just sat there, legs and arms crossed, smiling. I do not know if that actor followed through with a
resignation or not. I do not even know his name, but I wrote his words in my notebook because
he had spoken for us all.
I did notice that Alan Wasser hung his head after McCollum spoke. That gave me hope. I
thought that perhaps McCollum did not speak for my producer. Little did I know that Cameron
Mackintosh was attending the meeting by phone from London, and was holding out for a 30%
pay cut. “We all sat there for so long because of Cameron,” Stahl said “he was on the phone the
whole time holding out for more. He kept us all there waiting. He was ready to pull out. He
would have closed Phantom and Les Miz that day.”
Quinn said it was time to go and eat some supper before the evening performance, so we
had to vote. A cast member from The Full Monty stood up. “This will be the end of us all,” he
said. “If we let them do this, there will be no turning back. If we let them do this, we will never
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recover and they will have a precedent, and they will use it. Please, we have fought so long to be
where we are now. Don’t give it all away.” His words rang true, but we were all too scared to see
anything beyond the immediate threat of losing our jobs. There were children in college, there
were babies on the way, there were mortgages, there was health coverage, and all of it seemed to
be slipping away.
Quinn left the stage, and returned moments later. He told us that IA, the stagehands
union, and Local 802, the Musician’s Union had just ratified this contract, so the whole deal
rested on our shoulders. A cast member from Les Miz stood holding hands with other cast
members, “Les Miz can’t end like this. I can’t bear to watch this show that has changed my life
end like this. It doesn’t deserve to die like this. I don’t want to vote yes, but I can’t see us all go
down like this.”
Yelling, tears, somebody had to leave because she was going to be sick; it was worse than
anyone outside the Equity Council had thought. We were the holdouts: we could keep the shows
open, or we could shut them down. Finally, fear of losing our jobs and taking the other two
unions down with us prevailed, and we ratified the contract. It was two hundred and some aye, to
one nay.
The next day Liz Smith went on the warpath from her column in the New York Post,
saying:
Producer Cameron Mackintosh seems to be using the World Trade center horror
as an exercise to crunch costs and impose across-the-board salary cuts of up to
70% for all shows. These ‘drastic measures’ never include reducing ticket prices.
But forced renegotiating downward with the unions at this awful moment is
despicable. And actors always seem to cave in to producers (23).
As if she thought the deal was not already made, she appealed to “Actors Equity to stand tall on
this issue for the sake of the long tragic labor battles fought by American workers so that they
might be strong enough to negotiate. I appeal to my many friends who own theaters and work as
producers to do the right thing.” But it was too late, and the rest of the shows on Broadway
followed suit, except for The Producers, Urinetown, 42nd Street, and The Music Man produced
by Clear Channel and the Dodgers. They eventually dealt directly with their own company
members.
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The news of the deal hit the papers on Friday, along with the formal announcement of the
publicity campaign. A two-page press release from Mackintosh appeared in The Post on
Saturday, September 21 calling Liz Smith’s article “erroneous and irresponsible” and “highly
damaging,” adding that Smith’s accusation of a 70% salary reduction was incorrect. Smith had
misunderstood the breakdown, thinking that Mackintosh wanted to take 70% of our salary and
leave us with 30%, when it was just the opposite (McKinley 3). The Post made the correction the
next day. The membership that read the article thought the percentage was wrong anyway since
we had ratified a 25% salary cut and I only found out about Mackintosh’s hold out for 30% from
Stahl while writing this thesis.
The Betrayals
We went back to work and received our salary cut. NYC & Co., the city’s convention and
visitor’s bureau, approached the actors of Broadway, asking us to make a television commercial
showing the nation that we were back in business. Actors have short memories, and we all
thought it was a marvelous idea. The ad would make history, help the relief effort, and help our
City. Actors from all the shows agreed, as actors always will, and 500 performers from all the
shows on Broadway, plus stars from TV and film that were in town, showed up on Friday,
September 28, 2001, to make the now famous “Commercial from Times Square.”
Countless TV stations, magazines, newspapers, and radio stations from around the world
covered the shoot and began to air the 30-second spot immediately. The one-minute version
played on prime time TV, and movie theaters were given a three-minute cut. The spot ran in
twenty countries (Blair 1).
We were glad to do it. We were glad to feel needed. It was a day that I will never forget.
It was cold, we were in full costumes and makeup, and we stood in Duffy Square for four hours.
Every time a fire truck went by, the shooting would stop and we would clap and wave. Camera
trucks were everywhere, people lined the streets, stars handed out bottles of water to actors, but
every time a fire truck went by, everything stopped and we would clap and wave. The
firefighters and police were our heroes, and nothing was more important than them. All of the
crews from all of the shows, all of the SAG, AFTRA, AEA, IATSE, 802, and SDC (Stage
Directors and Choreographers union) unions came together that day with one motive: to help
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New York recover. And we came together without a thought of being paid. We made our
commercial, we went back to work, and Broadway recovered.
The facts slowly trickled in and as heart-breaking as we thought things were in the
present tense, when we found out later that we had been double-crossed, the betrayals hurt even
more. Patrick Quinn lied to his brothers and sisters, because IA and 802 had not ratified the
concessions when he told us they had, 802 had not even called for the vote. A member of the IA
crew on Phantom spoke to me in early October of 2001. The member must remain anonymous.
The member reported that all three unions were meeting at the same time, and Local 802 was
told in their meeting that IA and Actors Equity had ratified their contract, so it was up to 802.
Equity was played off against 802, and the League got their deal. It was further reported that the
IA membership was told that the deal was already made and that their vote was a formality. IA
membership never even voted. This would come back to haunt the League and head of IA. iv
The repercussions throughout IA were felt within weeks. The membership of IA is not
used to being bullied, and when the Dodger Organization, who is not a member of the League,
asked for concessions from the unions to keep The Music Man open, the IA membership refused
to ratify anything. IA closed the show to punish Dodger and show strength to the League and to
their leader Thomas Short, but they only punished the actors because Dodger did not care. They
had a non-union tour of The Music Man out on the road so they were making plenty of money. v
Thomas Short, the head of IA was the deal’s author according to Mark Riedel of The New
York Post (1). He was the one who wrote the agreement, and taking into consideration the
“strong relationship between Phillip Smith, president of the Shubert Organization, and Thomas
C. Short,” perhaps he had some help deciding who did what and for how long (Pogrebin E1).
The Shubert Organization is one of the larger producing and presenting organizations in New
York and on the road after Clear Channel. Short never intended to negotiate with Equity and the
Musician’s Union. The deal that the unions were going to be forced into had already been
negotiated between City Hall, Short, and the League (where the Shubert Organization has a large
influential voice) before the meetings with Equity and the Musicians Union even began. The deal
was already set before the first meeting on September 14th. Stahl, who was present at all of the
meetings and privy to the entire negotiation process, said “IA sandbagged everybody else. They
did that. It prevented the other unions from trying to get anything more.” The negotiations from
9/14-9/18/01 were, at best, not in good faith, and at worst, a ruse to keep the union reps busy
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while the wheels of commerce were set in motion. With Short’s hotline to City Hall, it can be
imagined that Short was standing in the center with Jed Bernstein and the Mayor from day one.vi
A couple of weeks after the commercial, one of our stage managers casually mentioned
that NYC & Co. had been trying to get that commercial made for ten years, but Actors Equity
told them that they would have to pay the actors and the crews the standard union daily rate.
They consistently refused, so they did not get their commercial, that is, until 9/28/01. We were
told it was for the one campaign immediately after 9/11 to bring the tourists back to New York.
It was taken off of the air in New York City after the campaign, but I saw it twice in the fall of
2002 in Tallahassee, Florida on Channel 6.
The Recovery
By the week ending September 30, 2001, Broadway showed a steady increase in
attendance (Bohlen 1). At Phantom the attendance numbers were posted from Variety every
Monday. Variety is an industry magazine that posts all of the financial and attendance numbers
for all of the Broadway shows. Since the producers were playing a numbers game, we wanted to
know the numbers that they were looking at. “Almost every Broadway show moved closer to its
figure before the disaster,” reported Judd Hollander from The Stage Newspaper, “with many
making $100,000 more than the previous week” (1). When polls were taken at the shows for the
weeks of September 23 through October 7, Celestine Bohlen of The New York Times reported
that “26% of the audiences were from New York City, 26% from the surrounding suburbs, 44%
from the US, and 4% from abroad. A year prior the number reflected 17% from New York, 22%
from the suburbs, 50% from the US, and 11% from abroad” (2). New Yorkers had responded to
the Mayor, and his appeals to help the City by seeing a show. “We have been seeing the effects
of the marketing promotions, the new ads, and of course, the Mayor,” said Karen Hauser,
director of research at the League. “The Mayor has been great. He’s our best P.R. person”
(Bohlen 1). The people of New York were re-investing in Broadway, and in those first critical
weeks after 9/11, the numbers were turning around.
Since there was so much media attention being paid to Broadway and to Phantom in
particular, Mackintosh responded to the late September recovery during the first week of
October. He reduced our 25% salary cut to 12.5%, and most of the other shows either followed
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suit, or ended the salary cut all together. Within a month Mackintosh ended the 12.5% cut, and
the Phantom company was given back all of the money that we had invested in our show. This
quick recovery was enough to suggest “that producers may have panicked in the first days after
the attack,” Jesse McKinley of The New York Times reported. Stahl was privy to all of the
numbers being supplied to the producers, and she added:
After the first couple of the weeks I think all of the shows were able to keep
going. I think that there was a sense of panic from the producers, which I can
understand, but then after that I really get this feeling that there was opportunism.
That commercial was part of it. Have they taken advantage of it? You bet they
have. Are they being duplicitous? I think so, yes. They saw the future value in it,
and I think they saw it early on.
The Theater Development Fund’s chairman John Breglio agreed that the producers had panicked
saying, “this moment could be an opportunity for a large-scale reassessment of how the business
of Broadway might work better. Maybe now it will force all of us to start looking at the basic
principles of how we operate. It will never be business as usual. Hopefully it will be business.
But it has to be business in a different way” (Pogrebin 2). As if he were proving McKinley and
Breglio’s point, in Cameron Mackintosh’s two-page response to Liz Smith’s 9/19/01 diatribe,
Mackintosh defended his position on salary cuts by saying:
If a show has been prudently managed it will have built up a reserve fund to help
it through a difficult period. This is an abnormal time and without the cuts the
union has granted us, I could not make the case that my shows would be able to
come back.
“Phantom has grossed more money than any show in history,” say Craig Jacobs, “more than
even ET, the movie. It has made more money for more people than anything in history.” Was it
mismanagement or bad faith? Simply put by Stahl, “It was good for the membership to see that
the emperor has no clothes. The people we trust to know what they are doing, don’t know what
they are doing.” These were hard lessons for what was becoming a hard business to a lot of very
experienced, yet naïve actors.
Mary Leigh Stahl went to City Hall in early October of 2001, representing a group of
Broadway performers who wanted to set up a Stage Door Canteen for the rescue workers. Stahl
told me she could not even get in the door because:
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The City of New York was no longer interested in us. Suddenly we were in their
way. They didn’t need us anymore. The entertainment industry is the backbone of
New York, but they don’t like to recognize that unless they need us. And they had
needed us. They had needed us to be gung-ho and over the top for ‘the boys’
because they needed that publicity angle of it, that we were all in this together.
The actors had gotten New York through the immediate crisis, but the fall season was upon
Broadway, so drastic measures had to be taken by the League, and they were.
The Money
Although the shows were getting back on their feet, on October 4, 2001, the League went
to the New York State Capital in Albany, and came away with $3.5 million. It was remarkable
that in the aftermath of 9/11, and with the guarantee of massive budget deficits, “the city bought
50,000 theater tickets for $2.5 million, and the state invested $1 million more in a promotional
campaign for Broadway.” (Pogrebin E1) But the League knew what it was doing. The fall is the
worst time of the year for Broadway, with the starting of school and the end of summer, the
tourist season wanes until Thanksgiving. If a show can make it from Labor Day to Thanksgiving,
it can recoup its fall losses during the Thanksgiving to New Year holidays. Producers always
take advantage of the holiday boom and add shows and raise ticket prices by $10.vii On
November 1, 2001, the City of New York paid the League $50 a piece for the 50,000 tickets, and
gave 35,000 of the tickets to NYC & Co. for a campaign called “Spend my Regards to
Broadway.” If you spent $500 in New York City, you presented your receipts at the NYC &
Co.’s Time Square office and got a pair of tickets to a Broadway show. The unclaimed tickets
went to restaurants, selected groups, radio stations, and 15,000 went to the Twin Towers Fund
for firefighters, police officers, rescue workers, and victim’s families.
In a grand gesture at the beginning of 2002, the League gave New York City back $1
million of unused ticket money, but only after the numbers were in for 2001, and only after
watchdogs in the press kept a spotlight on them. The new Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, sent some
of the money to Off Broadway theaters, and to nonprofit arts organizations that serve theaters
across the country (Pogrebin E 1). Broadway had recovered by the early months of 2002, and the
League was in business again.
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Life on Broadway returned to normal after several months, and eventually IA and Local
802 received paychecks for the three cancelled shows on September 11 and 12th. It was up to the
producers to decide whether the actors were docked, because there is no “Acts Against the State”
clause in an Actors Equity production contract. The producers decided not to pay the actors. The
producers, however, paid themselves for their lost shows. The producers have insurance on their
productions. The insurance covers lost income due to unforeseen circumstances. Across the
board, the producers filed for insurance to cover their losses. A source in Actors Equity said that
the Dodger organization admitted it had recouped its losses from 42nd Street through its
insurance coverage, and this piece of information became valuable to Equity. In the next contract
negotiations with Dodger for its national tour of 42nd Street, Equity demanded that Dodger pay
the Broadway company for their three lost performances or else they would not negotiate the
tour contract.viii Dodger did, but the tour went out with more union concessions to a producer
than in the history of an Actors Equity touring contract.
I am an actress. That is all.
__Anton Chekhov, The Seagull
During the Blitzkrieg of London in World War ll, Churchill appealed to the people of the
tortured city to keep the theaters open. He charged the people of London with the responsibility
of feeding the actors, housing the actors, and attending the performances. The theaters had to
stay alive because it was their cultural identity. Churchill believed that theater showed humanity
at its highest potential, and that theater artists endowed their audiences with the moral codes of
humanity. He knew that the power of art transcended mankind’s inhumanity, and he knew that
theater offered one way out of the madness.
What happened to Broadway after 9/11 is about more than facts and numbers; it is about
ethics and morality. Broadway’s artists and technicians represent a tangible heart of Broadway, a
heart that is altruistic and noble. We went to work every night, knowing that there had been
bomb threats called in, and knowing that the only thing we could be sure of was that we would
do our part to heal the city. We deserved better. On October 1, 2001 Nancy Franklin of The New
Yorker wrote:
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Many things that were begun on the tenth were on the morning of the eleventh
irretrievable and irrelevant. Metaphors, our powers of description, our ability to
interpret reality-sense itself-vanished for a time. Those of us who happened to be
in New York on September 11th and the days that followed, however, and those of
us who have been able to bring ourselves to go back to the theatres since then,
have seen proof that we have not lost the ability to hear each other, and to bear
witness. It is why we have always gone to the theater, and it is why we always
will.
It is not too late to reclaim our hearts, but the reclamation has a time frame. The more control
that is relinquished, the more money that is poured into Broadway, the more America is courted
and duped by capital, the stronger and more irresistible its hold will become. What happens in
New York filters throughout the country, and Broadway is only the beginning. Capital’s hold of
Broadway is real, and capital’s effects on art and artists are real as well. Art and artists are being
driven down under the weight of simulation. Art is disappearing under spectacle, and people are
disappearing behind assembly-lines. Perhaps it is up to the artists to resist the machinery, but
artists are always hopeful and the symbolism of New York is strong. With each new show that
auditions, hope springs eternal that the show will be something new, something original, and that
the new show will stem the tide of corporate simulacra and discipline.
In retrospect, what if 9/11 had brought about a different way of producing theatre in New
York? TDF’s John Breglio sensed that something was not quite right, but there was so much
more to worry about, there always is. Nobody really worries very much about actors anyway.
Actors suffer from a basic misunderstanding of the talents involved in the craft, especially in this
mediatized society, where film and television are valued as the higher forms of art, and sports are
valued as the highest. Artists are uncontained in their “now”, in the very symbolic law of
performance. Actors are embodiments of Baudrilliard’s human essence, the laws with which
humans instinctively, spiritually live their lives outside of the influence of capital. Capital resists
theses symbolic laws, and must contain theses laws in order to make more capital. Capital must
subjugate, discipline, and dominate the actor on Broadway to make money in corporate theater,
so, the show must become a movie. The show must be stripped of its liveness. Broadway’s
corporate producers are training audiences to expect a movie. The corporate producers are
stripping Broadway shows of liveness and replacing it with perfected spectacle. The more
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audiences see perfected spectacle on stage, the more audiences will come to expect it. In a
meditized society where liveness is not valued it is not hard to take something from audiences
who do not recognize origin. The hyperreal exists already, and it is a question now of re-inserting
the real. The human cost of the hypereal is the endless stream of disciplined, dominated, and
unimportant faces forever stepping up on those massive stairs of 42nd Street, while behind the
scenes the Dodger Corporation quietly fires members of the original company, hires young,
inexperienced, cheaper line workers to take their place, and “dodges” a Fair Labor Suit from
Actor Equity for two years and counting simply by making it difficult for Equity to obtain
Dodger’s financial records.ix But no one knows that. And what better way to prepare the future
audience for 42nd Streets’s spectacle, then to take spectacle to them first? That is what Clear
Channel is doing with its Broadway Across America tours. 42nd Street has been seen in Clear
Channel’s 56 markets for two years. Capital must make more capital no matter the cost.
There is so little concrete definition that surrounds performance, and the word
“performance” is so convoluted in our language that the general public perceives acting as an
easy profession. The job on Broadway has become standardized and it has careened into a theory
of its own, so that those watching can only stare at a spectacle, and those doing can only show up
and step on a treadmill. “On Broadway you get two shows,” says Elizabeth Nackley, “your first
and your last. I see that now. The machine gets the rest.” Nackley left Phantom of the Opera
after ten years in the corps de ballet. Ford built a better car, but he de-humanized his workers.
Art is about humanizing society. Capital does not want society to be humanized. Capital is a
“monstrous unprincipled enterprise, nothing more” (Baudrilliard 15). Baudrilliard say there is a
way out, but it requires individual agency. Agency is hard, but it was agency that got the artists
back on stage, and got New Yorkers back on their feet after 9/11. The world gave the Broadway
producers all the press, but walking onstage on 9/14 took agency. I think the artists of Broadway
have agency. I think the audiences of the United States have agency. All they need is
information.
i
For more information about Broadway and the aftermath of 9/11, see newspaper articles by Blair, Bohlen,
Brantley, Dominguez, Franklin, Hoffman, Kaison, O’Haire, McKinley, Pogrebin, and Riedel.
ii
The meeting and its content was confirmed by Mary Leigh Stahl.
iii
All quotes from Howard McGillin come from a telephone interview on October 14, 2002.
iv
The conversation with the IA member was recorded as a series of facts instead of quotes.
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v
Dodger, like Clear Channel is a presenter as well as a producer. They also have their own non-union production
company. Dodger owns non-union Big League Productions to whom it sold the rights to the first national tours of
The Music Man and 42nd Street. Since these are non-union shows, Dodger sets the pay scale and per diem, and hires
the actors that are willing to work for it. They provide no health coverage and no pension and welfare benefits.
Actors Equity is filing a fair labor practices suit against Dodger, and every attempt to obtain Dodger’s financial
records and corporate holdings have been met with refusals to cooperate. Also, Both IA and Local 802 have job
placement services, unlike Actors Equity, so closing Music Man just put IA and 802 members on the job placement
rosters of their union, but put actors out of work and back on the audition trail. Eventually IA approved the
concessions for Music Man, but I only union members know what the membership asked for in return. That
information is not available to those outside IA.
vi
There was a long-standing relationship between the Mayor and the theater owners (like the Shubert Organization)
as seen in the 1998 City Council approval for theater owners to “sell lucrative air rights to developers through a
swath of the West Side.” Jed Bernstein president of the League, and Gerald Schoenfeld, the chairman of the Shubert
Organization worked together to convince the state of New York to give $1 million to the League’s marketing effort.
In addition, the Leagues utilized its own lobbying firm of Wilson, Elser, Moskowitz, Edelman & Dicker, whose
partner in charge of the New York City office, Peter Piscitelli, had worked in Edward Koch’s administration. And
Piscitelli’s son Anthony was Mayor Guiliani’s Albany lobbyist. (Pogrebin E1+)
vii
This is a common practice on Broadway.
viii
The source within Equity requested anonymity because they are also a working actor.
ix
The firing of actors was reported to me by a backstage technician who must remain anonymous.
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CONCLUSION
On Wednesday, January 17, 2001, at 4pm, Phantom of the Opera slipped a gear. The
principal playing Carlotta, the most demanding vocal role in the show, announced that she was
not doing the evening performance due to illness. There were usually three covers for Carlotta,
but the third had recently left, and a new one had been hired but not fully rehearsed or costumed.
The first cover was on vacation, the second cover had the flu, and I was the new cover. I was
backstage waiting for a cue when Craig Jacobs called over the intercom (which rarely happened
during the show except in emergencies) and asked me to see him after curtain call. Everyone
knew the Carlotta was sick, so the rumors started flying. After the curtain call, I went to see
Jacobs. He said, “So, shall we do this?” It was not how I had planned my Carlotta debut, but I
said “why not.” I had no costumes, no wigs; I had never rehearsed with the principle company or
the rest of the cast. I had walked the blocking a few times in understudy rehearsals, but never
sung it full out and never miked or with the orchestra, so the sound crew would be adjusting as I
sang. Everyone in The Majestic Theatre went to work, and three hours later Philip Auslander
would have been a believer in the power of liveness. When the machinery slips a gear, it takes
human beings being human to put it back together. Human beings did what human beings do: the
impossible. Human beings hand sewed costumes, built three wigs, and then I walked in what I
had never walked in, where I had seldom walked, with whom I had never walked, singing
something I had never sung in front of anybody in front of 1,600 people, trusting that my artistry
would pull me through and that my friends would support me. My friends then walked where
they had always walked, but along side someone with whom they had never walked and never
sung or talked in the context of the play. What happened was Peggy Phelan’s “manically charged
present,” which plunged Phantom into the now (148). It was a night for the artists.
When it was announced that I was going on, the company went into ritual, and while I
was being fitted in the costumes of the other covers, the cast was running out for flowers and
candy and cards to put in the Carlotta dressing room. By the time I was through with my costume
fittings at 6:30, the dressing room was filled with gifts. The air was charged with the
"uncorporate" unpredictable, because no one knew what was going to happen. I was an unknown
factor. By the time I made it onstage for my first entrance, there were stage hands hanging over
the rails behind me blowing me kisses, and cast members dancing with joy in the opposite wings
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during the overture to send me off. It was an opening. It was a beginning. It was a ritual of the
“now”. When the show left the hands of the producers and returned to the hearts of the actors,
everyone remembered who they were, and all it took was the presence of something in the now.
This was the Broadway I had heard about in my youth. I had finally found it, and it was not
where I had thought it would be. It was in an event, not in a show, but I had found it. Once I was
joined onstage by the rest of the company, the delight in their eyes, not just with me, but in their
own joy charged the evening. We were all a part of the living and mythic theatre, and that myth
fueled an extraordinary collective performance. It was an evening of liveness. The principle
company, some of whom had been in the show since the first day, forgot their standardized
selves and lived within a different context. It was art. And it was not about the money. The
audience did not know the inner workings of the evening, but they knew they were seeing a
wonderful show, and they showed their appreciation at the end. The audiences always knows
when they are seeing something in the present, that is why they love to see mistakes, because the
show shifts into the present tense, into real-time.
These are the performances that make humans the irreplaceable artists they are. These are
the performances that corporate theater does not understand because these performances define
performance, define the nature of human experience and define that which is undeniably
unrepeatable. In corporate theater these performances have become what the actors wait for. The
“now” has become what is holy ground to the corporate actors, and its “disappearance” is as holy
to the actors as its appearance (Phelan 148). The performances, not the performers per se, but
their impact on the other actors lives on in the company long after the performance is over. The
myth of the night I went on has joined the myth of “the night Larry forgot his line,” which joined
the myth of “the night Sallie threw up onstage,” which are stories about liveness and its impact
on actors who are longing for it again. Corporate theater has stripped Broadway of the now, and
left the actors watching in the wings for something new to walk on to bring it back.
After I completed the performance, I was congratulated by the cast, the crew, and stage
management. I went on again the next night as Carlotta, and the notes and the discipline began.
Not merely the discipline of correcting missed blocking, but the discipline of stripping me of my
individual interpretation of the role, forcing me to replicate the performance of another performer
who interpreted the role in 1987. And, of course, since the original artist is not there, neither is
the original director, inevitably some of the gestures and their meanings are lost in the past.
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When management is questioned about the nonsensical moves or gestures all they can do is refer
to the “Bible” and say “that’s how it’s done.” I heard that many times. This discipline continued
for the next year, leaving me feeling demoralized, humiliated, confused, frustrated, and heartsick.
I lost my identity as an artist, and my identity as an individual. But I was very efficient. And I
was very good at my job. Corporate theater has rules. It has Bibles. And corporate theater is not
concerned with the “now.” Corporate theater is concerned with cinematzation.
When questioned about the falling sales of The Producers, which has been selling to 61%
houses for the past several months, producer Rocco Landesman “of Jujamcyn Theatres which
owns the St. James,” said to Jesse McKinley of The New York Times, “We felt that the show was
such a good piece of machinery that any good actor could step in and still sell at the same level”
(AR 12). Landesman expressed the corporate view beautifully: put the machine up and shove the
humans in, whatever humans, it does not matter much. Beyond the simulacra, beyond the capital,
the marketing, the precious bottom line, lays the core of my thesis: the actor. Why do actors
matter to society? Who are the actors? In the Greek culture the actors were part of a long oral
tradition. They embodied “the ideals and values of the society, as well as concern for the basic
problems of both the community and the individual, and how to solve them or to become
reconciled with those that are insoluble. These are embodied in the myths with which, epics,
including Homer’s and others in ancient Greece originated” (Lord 12). The actors were the links
between the Greeks and their gods, their consciences, their duties, their dreams, their hopes and
their fears. The actors were more than entertainers, more than people in front of spectacle: they
moved the Greeks from the temporal into the eternal.
This mythic function of the actor does exist in the world today. Ron Jenkins of The New
York Times reports that in Bali “almost every village temple ceremony includes some form of
theatrical event, with clown narrators serving as mediators between the invisible world of gods
and ancestors and the tangible one of current events. In improvised dialogue, the clowns grapple
with issues like globalization and overdevelopment that endanger the island’s Hindu-animist
traditions” (AR 5). On October 12, 2002, over 200 people were killed by a terrorist bombing in
Bali, and during the past twelve months the primary source of action has not come in the form of
military or vigilantly anti-Islamic violence, but in the form of artistic expression. The tradition of
Balinese theatre has embraced terrorism and sought to heal its country and its people. “On Nov.
15, 2002, purification ceremonies, accompanied by theatre, dance, and music performances were
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staged in every village across the island” (AR 5). The purification extended across the ocean to
the World Trade Center where American family members of Balinese victims participated in the
event. The family members joined a Balinese masked performer “playing a character from a 15th
century story, but he was also speaking of contemporary events as he connected the terror
victims of the two islands – Bali and Manhattan – by turning them into inhabitants of one town.”
The performer looked at the ruins of the World Trade Center and spoke the lines from a 15th
century play: “People are trying to destroy our world, our country, our village.” He then
completed an ancient Hindu ritual of releasing souls to heaven by throwing flowers into the
Hudson River. (AR 5) By speaking these words, he linked the past with the present, art with life,
actor with humanity, and humanity with the gods. The actor could have been in ancient Greece
because he was mythic story made flesh. He was the “now” and 5th century B.C. E. He was
performance, and he was two miles south of Broadway.
We have our present tense myths and mythic storytellers in TriBeca too. On December 4,
2001, twelve weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center, The Guys, by Anne Nelson,
opened at the Flea Theatre. The play is mythic in its creation and its production, based upon an
impossible task, an improbable meeting, and a miraculous creation. Anne Nelson, who is the
director of the International Program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism,
volunteered to help a fire captain write eulogies for his fallen fire fighters after 9/11. The task
escalated to eulogies for 343 fire fighters over the course of their short relationship. After
completing the eulogies, Nelson attended a business dinner with her husband, and sat next to Jim
Simpson, artistic director of the Flea Theatre. Their conversation turned to 9/11, and he spoke of
how his theatre, which was seven blocks from World Trade, was playing to empty houses, and
how businesses all around him were dying. He expressed the wishes of his young actors to do a
play about the current situation. Nelson brought up the eulogies, Simpson suggested a twoperson play, Nelson contacted the captain who gave his blessing, and one week later The Guys
was in first draft form. Nelson submitted it to Simpson, who asked for two minor changes, and
two weeks later the show went into rehearsal with Simpson’s wife Sigourney Weaver playing
one role and Bill Murray playing the captain. Nelson had never written a play. She spoke of the
undeniable power of what had happened to her through the experience:
This is a very religious play. To me it is. I had spent a lot of the last months inside
the Irish Catholic culture that has not only the Catholicism but the Celtic
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spirituality. It is this incredible sense that the dead are very much among us […]
the firefighter culture is very specific, it has something very specific to say to this.
First of all, this society is really lousy in talking about death. We don’t know what
to do about it, ignore it and it will go away. In terms of 9/11, it was death in a
different message then we were used to, and I think that there were people who
had become totally secular and didn’t know where to put it. They just had no way
to talk about it. So this is where the theatre has utterly surprised me. Because
when I was doing it in my early twenties, it was art for arts sake. How good a
production of The Tempest can you do, y’know? And this is, you put people in a
room and you reach a place that they don’t reach anywhere else. I didn’t know
theatre could do that before this. That’s power. That’s why money confuses it so
much. Because of the subject and the people I was not going to sell this down the
river. In any form. I’ve happily said no to anything that wasn’t right for it. I
reserve the right to write drivel, I don’t have anything against it, but for this, no. i
The Guys ran at the Flea Theatre for over a year, and took donations at the door for both the fire
fighters and for the theatre. This was art addressing a need in real-time. This was the magic that
Auslander cannot see anymore because of mediatization. A movie has been made, yet the
immediacy of the play could never be captured. It disappeared into the hearts of those who saw
it. The healing that this piece of theatre has brought to the country at large continues today.
In stark contrast to this spontaneous creative response to a unique circumstance,
corporate producers choose to affect art on Broadway and in the United States based upon a
central business plan of concise and generic replications of past successes. The producers are
also changing art by demanding an assembly-line work place, which results in mechanized
actors. The actors gradually lose all sense of creativity as it is stripped from them by forced
repetition. The work place is maintained by various hands-on corporate middle management
figureheads with no theatrical experience, concerned only with maintaining a fiscal bottom line
through disciplined control of the workers. The touring aspect of the Broadway shows are downsized, synthesized, non-unionized, but still charge Broadway ticket prices to the public. The
public viewing the scaled down, non-professional version of the Broadway show perceive the
show as “Broadway,” and the perception of theatrical excellence and success in this country is
diminished and replaced by a simulation. The simulation becomes the reality, and then the new
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“reality” eventually appears on Broadway, is much less expensive, much more spectacle, and
becomes the symbol of theatrical excellence. However, since capital must continue to
consolidate, the “new” reality will downsize, synthesize, non-unionize, until it will eventually be
nothing that anyone can recognize. Perhaps it will resemble one of the rides as Disneyland.
It is the function of an assembly-line to standardize. It is the function of Clear Channel to
downsize, to make its product short, concise, and generic. And it is the function of Disney to
make money. That is what they know. They do not know about art. They do not know about
artists. They do not know about theatre. They do not care about theatre artists. They have shown
this in their actions, and they have told us in their words.
Once the theories have been put aside, once the docile bodies, the discipline and liveness
and simulacra are opened to view, and everyone shakes their head and mutters what a shame,
what is left? The material condition of the actor. The bottom line is a living person. Theatre is
literature without an actor. Literature lives in the mind. Theatre lives in tangible space and on
literal bodies. Theatre connects the living with the living, and sometimes with the dead. Theatre
precedes literature. Liveness precedes, remediates all things because liveness is where everything
begins, and liveness begins with the interaction between people. The breath: the intake that
begins the process of creation that begins the interaction. The actor lives in that inexplicable
moment which Auslander cannot name, but he knows it exists because it gave him the idea to
argue about its existence. The actor embodies this moment, and the act of creating, even the
words that define the process are assigned to the giver of the gift, Actor, and the creative moment
that the actor lives for, Acting. It is a living process. It is movement and action, not cinema. And
it is a gift. The rarest opportunities in life are to be among those who can elevate us to that which
we truly are. Those are the moments that capital fears the most, because those are the moments
we forget capital exists. Those are the moments that we stand beside an artist who is in the
present, in the now, breathing for us and with us, hurling us together into our own unlimited
possibilities.
i
All quotes from Anne Nelson come from a telephone conversation on 3/16/02.
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AFTER THOUGHT
With the expectation of scholarly achievement the primary function of a Masters Thesis,
what can act as the fulcrum between action and thought? A thesis is a scholarly work that poses
and defends theory. Theory comes from the Latin word theoria which means “to observe.”
Scholarly achievement is based upon observations and collected thoughts pertaining to them.
Praxis is a controversial word, but one of its meanings is bringing together practice and thought.
But scholarly participation in praxis is primarily deterred once dialogue enters into practicing or
attempting to bring into form a language beyond the visible. One would expect this to be the case
for those theorists outside of Physics and Theater Studies; however within Theater Studies it
seems to be normative as well. Words like essence and soul are not considered scholarly, yet
rituals and ceremonies and their surrounding energies are established and respected avenues of
research. The vessel is fit for scholarly study, but not that which it contains.
One of the first lessons an MA student learns is to temper passionate language in
scholarly work. In times of artistic crises such as our postmodern society has wrought, I wonder
how useful this approach to scholarship is. Scholarship has the option to reflect the disconnection
and disunity of society or to embrace the transcendent, transformational, passionate power of art
itself. Even if scholars find it hard to enter into serious dialogue concerning energies beyond the
visible, this discussion should be a part of the conversation in some form. It is the unspoken
reality of the artist, and the very thing that corporate America is trading upon. Businesspeople
see the effect of performance on audiences and feel the energy themselves, but since it has no
name, no theory, and no definition attached to it, this event is freely mediatized to make money.
The art is stolen from the artists by those who do not understand its worth or its essence, and
then the artists are asked to do the impossible: to freeze transformational energy and repeat it
eight times a week to fill the coffers of the unappreciative so they can keep the assembly line
rolling to make more. Performance is appropriated and lost, and nobody is the wiser because
nobody knows the difference anymore.
Theatre historians understand the power of definition. Any discussion of the origins of
theatre must involve an agreement between parties on where performativity leaves off and
Performance Studies begin. The inherent desire of humanity to search for origin begins with a
search for what is real. In defining what is real in the case of the actor, this is imperative because
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it will give validity to the skills of the real so that it can be separated from those who practice it
as an avocation, or those who put it on an assembly line for reproduction. The art of acting takes
training. Once skill is understood, once training and experience is appreciated then the artist is
separated from the entertainer, and the re-insertion of the real takes place. As the artist is
understood, the art can be appreciated. Simulacra is ended by origin, by definition of skills, by
difference. Not that artists are not going to be involved in entertainment, but the lines will be
drawn and corporate theater can have its commodity.
The idea of commodified art is not new. In Long Days Journey Into Night, James Tyrone
weaves through his alcoholic dementia lamenting his lost artistry, and furious because he “can’t
remember what it was I wanted to buy,” proving that actors have grappled with money and art
for at least a hundred years, and I’m sure more (O’Neill 150). The play, written in 1955, was
about O’Neill and his father, so the issues of repetition and producing plays for profit existed at
the turn of the century. I do not think for one minute that theatre for profit has not always
existed. The pursuit of capital has always been a way of life in the United States, for artists
included. The long running play has been a lure for the business person in the actor, and the
business person looking to invest in the arts. Performance attracts investment, yet investment
demands repetition and repetition kills performance, but the evolution of the long running show
continued. Mass consumerism created the mass musical, and when the mass musical met the
long run, society met an interesting reflection. Theatre historians call this reflection the “empty
shell.” It signifies a mythic or a ritual ceremony that had spiritual meaning in its origin, but the
population lost the meaning, and what they are left with is the shell of the ceremony which they
consider nothing more than spectacle.
Society proves the “empty shell” syndrome to artists by the ease in which society allowed
media giants to assume the distribution of representational culture. It no longer is a question of
economics, but a question of public trust, of what the public chooses to see. In classic
postmodern terms of nostalgia, society desires to returns to its age of innocence, its first glimpse
of a Prince or of Sleeping Beauty. There is so much revolution in the world, why foster it in our
culture, our children, why suffer diatribes about change when culture should comfort? If theatre
had a definition, a purpose, perhaps it could be defended, but instead society assimilates its
words and uses them to sell war and radial tires. In the case of theatre studies, is has been much
more interesting to continue to deconstruct the meaning of performance than to watch the
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destruction of the performing world around us. Perhaps the mirror can be turned around on all of
us as well. I know for years it was more comfortable to take my large paycheck than to admit
that I was part of a machine that was eating away at the fabric of the acting community. The long
running shows on Broadway are referred to by those of us who get the jobs as “golden
handcuffs.” One of the cast members told me that on my first day of work on Broadway in 1998.
I thought about it everyday until I left in 2002.
If theatre’s origin was celebration, ritual, religion, myth, storytelling, or any of the
choices presented by historians, one measure of human thought links them all: connection
between human beings and each other, and connection between human beings and energy
beyond the visible. If theatre’s nature lies in repetition, then how can repetition be a part of its
code of connection? Perhaps theatre is like the “Ohm” of Eastern religion. The reenactment of a
piece of theatre is a beginning, a middle, and an end of a calling forth. It is begun in the silence
of creation, and it is an Alpha and Omega bringing together the visible and the invisible. Its
repetition is contemplation on the mysteries, it is meditation on the invisible, and it is
communion for the actor with the unseen energy that is performance. If, as Joseph Campbell
asserts, artists are “shamans” to the human tribe, the act of performance itself is a ritual, a sacred
return to origin, and a re-insertion of what is real. Theatre is a moment of humanity; it is absolute
resistance to mediatization.
In this postmodern society, the mythology of the artist is almost nonexistent. Theorists
like Philip Auslander are themselves trapped within the bell jar of mediatization, hardly able, or
willing in the case of Liveness, to see the myth anymore. It is understandable, because we are
living in a society where myths and rituals are things of the past. Joseph Campbell writes in The
Power of Myth about a world where humanity serves society rather than society serving
humanity. When the great thinkers and novelists of the past, “Plato, Confucius, the Buddha,
Goethe, and others who speak of the eternal values that have to do with the centering of our
lives, [writers like] James Joyce and Thomas Mann,” when these writers, who were once the
backbone of traditional education, along with Greek and Latin and biblical literature were
dropped “a whole tradition of Occidental mythological information was lost” (2). These are the
stories and the themes that built civilizations, and the problems of those times are relative to the
problems of today. These stories have been written and performed for centuries, and their
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messages of the passage of humanity through time and space and lineage and relationships that
are just that same as they are today are what we lack in postmodern society.
Humanity has not changed at all, just technology. Einstein said that the atom bomb
changed everything about man except the way we think, and has anything ever been so simple,
or so true? Myths, storytelling, theatre, family dinner time, family reunions, these are all
opportunities of perspective, of ways to enter into worlds that offer visions and ways of being
that tie a person to the history of humanity, and these are the very rituals that our society has
devalued and discarded. We are a country of so many cultural influences, which serves as a
strength and a weakness. It provides us with a rich tapestry of history to begin to pull from, but it
also reveals a deep challenge. Campbell speaks of a country with no “ethos,” no homogenous
understanding of itself that can create a standard of morality that can normalize itself over time.
Not in terms of irrational controls, but in terms of rituals of civility in which people can agree to
accept and abide by. The Greeks used theatre to teach morality, to show consequence, to forward
schools of thought. MTV, the movies, and television do that now. In the case of young people,
“society has provided them no rituals by which they become a member of the tribe, of the
community. All children need to be born twice, to learn to function rationally in the present
world, to leave childhood behind” (9). Instead young people make their own rituals, their own
initiations, and have their own morality based upon money and the media.
All humans have the libido, the Eros, the desire to engage life, but without rituals of
passage, or sign posts that offer directions, young people are left to create their own rituals and
myths on the streets or in computers. There are mythic heroes alive in the cinema in movies like
Star Wars and Matrix, however in consistently replacing liveness with celluloid, the laws of
simulacra remain intact, and the hyperreal continues to assert its dominance in the culture. Luke
Skywalker is a hero of mythic stature, as is a living Prior in Angels in America. Myths show
where people can go, what they can accomplish, and they show the art of humanity. Myths show
community. Myths show the undeniable unity of the human experience and the beauty and
danger of what lies ahead. Actors are mythic storytellers, and the function of theatre is to pose
the great questions, and offer the potential for an answer. The function of live theatre is to bring
people together in a space where energy of the living can be exchanged. Theorists may debate
whether energy of the living is better than energy of the media, so I will leave that to them while
I defer to history.
92
What do we turn to in moments of uncertainty? Humanity turns to art, to those who can
peer through the visible and offer words or mediums of communication that will perhaps signal a
pathway for the rest to follow. In ancient ceremonies and rituals and in modern ceremonies and
rituals there are those moments that are given over to the collective unconscious that unites
humanity in a common bond of understanding. This unconscious is where artistry lives. This
level is communicated to the conscious world through poetry, music, visual art, dance, and
theatre, all aspects of performance that shake the literal mind from its limits and into the part of
itself where reason has no voice.
Art is not of the rational mind. It throws you out of the literal and into the symbolic
where meaning has universal properties. This is the “epiphany” of James Joyce and the
“catharsis” of the Greek theatre. Why not ask theatre scholarship to theorize this power of
artistry in order to endow art and artists at this time of civil and human crisis? If the word theory
comes from the Latin root “theoria” which means “to observe,” scholars have been observing
and writing about the transformative qualities of art for centuries. Theatre scholars can re-insert
the real by identifying the power of performance, giving it definition, and perhaps wresting it’s
appropriated identity from those who have attempting to mass market it for profit. Humanity has
always turned to artists to look through the impenetrable to find the answers, so why not put the
artist back in the place of society’s mythic explorer? It is one of the places where society turns
when answers cannot be found, so give society an explanation for it’s behavior and the behavior
will have a function. When this behavior has a function in society, it may be accepted as
normative. Can you imagine a society where the transformative power of live theatre is a part of
every person’s life? We have models from the past. It can be accomplished again.
If the function of theatre is to show humanity at its highest potential, than the function of
the artist is to show humanity it’s human-ness in all of it’s variables and potentiality. The
longing, the soul, the artistic fire, the exquisite successes and the desolate failures reflect each
individual’s life on earth. The artistic trance of performance is the same trance of the shaman
which is the same religious fire of creation felt by all people to some degree. But the artist is
driven by longing, driven by sensation, by the unseen and the invisible to fulfill an intangible
destiny. There is nothing different about the artist except the degree of openness and the degree
of willingness to fling themselves into the unknown.
93
Art has always driven humanity forward. The sheer magnitude of Broadway is an
example of the ever expanding field of expression. The field has turned outward towards
spectacle, but the symbolism is there. The productions are so big, so expensive, and so massive
that they cannot be afforded except by huge corporations. This is a reflection of the United
States. We are so big that the trappings of our dreams have escaped an individual’s ability to
afford them. Hal Prince said that it would take going as far as the “decadence of the French
Revolution, all the powdered wigs and such” to bring everything on Broadway back to the
center, and this is a good metaphor for our country as well. The center of Broadway is the actor,
and the center of our country is the people. Once spectacle implodes, once it turns in on itself,
the only thing left standing will be the actors. Everything is destined to come full circle, and the
only things left in the end are the people.
Actors are some of our country’s bravest explorers, hurling themselves over and over into
humanity’s darkest recesses then climbing out victorious, or not, ready to do it again. This is the
artistic soul: no matter how much the artist is abused, denigrated, ignored, or denied, they rise
again to push humanity through the visible, through what you see just with your eyes, and into
the possible, into what you know with your art. That is the power of performance.
94
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Susan Russell received her Master of Arts degree from Florida State University’s School
of Theatre in December of 2003 and her BA in Theatre from St. Andrews Presbyterian College
in Laurinburg, NC in May of 1979. Between her education pursuits, she experienced a twenty
year career as a professional actor in regional theatre and on Broadway, maintaining a career as a
professional acting, voice, and musical theatre coach as well. She was an artist/teacher for New
York Offstage where she created, developed, and implemented workshops in musical theatre
performance for students ages 9-18, and an artist/teacher and curriculum creator for New York
City Opera where she created and developed an arts based education program designed to meet
the specific needs of selected elementary, middle, and high schools. She was the founder and
director of education for Seaside Music Theatre in Daytona Beach, Fl, where she created,
developed, and implemented educational programs for the resident apprentice and professional
companies, as well as interdisciplinary educational programs for local high schools and acting
and music teachers and students. She was founder and director of Seaside Music Theatre School
of the Arts, creating class structures and imperatives for students ages 3-18 years, in conjunction
with a level based training program in acting, voice, dance, and music theatre. She created,
developed, and implemented award winning programs in interdisciplinary educational programs
for behaviorally challenged and special needs students, offering theatre as a means of expression
and a tool for learning. As a playwright, her works Olympia and Present Perfect have been seen
off-off Broadway at the Shurin Theatre and the HERE Theatre.
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