Andy Huntington Jones in Cats (Photo by Matthew Murphy)

In hindsight, the slogan ‘now and forever’ looks a bit less like marketing and a bit more like hubris. While it didn’t run forever, on the U.S. side of the Atlantic, the musical Cats maintains a formidable place in the annals of longest-running Broadway shows, surpassed only by The Lion King, the revival of Chicago and The Phantom of the Opera. While those latter three shows are all still chugging along, meaning they’re widening their lead over Cats, it’s going to take another four years or so before Wicked takes over the number four slot on the list – though that looks to be an increasingly likely achievement.

When the revival of Cats opens on Broadway on Sunday, in an open-ended run (in contrast to its recent limited-run engagements in the West End), it finds itself in a very different marketplace to the Broadway of the early 1980s, one that it helped to create through its success. The 1980s were a period when Broadway was in a slump, with theatres being demolished to make way for more lucrative real estate, and one even sold to a church. Now, musicals that run for fewer than five years can in some cases be seen as disappointments; 10-year runs are increasingly commonplace, if not exactly run of the mill.

The arrival of Cats, riding on a crest of acclaim from London back in 1982, was a big cultural event. Tickets for it in its first years were as dear as Hamilton tickets today, even if the secondary market was invisible to the average theatregoer in those pre-internet days. It’s important to remember how celebrated Cats was in its day, because as its 18 year run wore on, the show began to be perceived as a bit less groundbreaking and perhaps somewhat timeworn. For all of its enormous commercial success, its penetration into the popular consciousness and successful tapping of both the family and tourist markets, its then unprecedented run ultimately yielded jokes about the show having outlived its nine lives. The parade of animals that opened Julie Taymor’s production of The Lion King for Disney became the new standard for anthropomorphised animals on Broadway; the two shows overlapped for almost three years in New York.

While Chicago returned to Broadway in a production that echoed the Bob Fosse-directed original, it isn’t the same staging; no doubt the show benefited from a hiatus of some 20 years. Conversely, Les Misérables came back to Broadway for the first time only three years after the original run closed, in the same production, and lasted just 15 months. The Cats revival has the benefit of being gone from Broadway for almost 16 years, but it’s largely the same show (save for some new choreography and lighting). It remains to be seen whether ticket buyers embrace the show that may well have been their very first time at the theatre, seizing an opportunity to take their children to an experience they once loved as children, or whether the iconic production might have needed a full rethink for the digital era, for a generation raised on The Lion King and Wicked.

I have to confess that I am rather uniquely unqualified to hazard a guess as to what the fate of the Cats revival may be. Why? Are you sitting down? Because I’ve never seen it. Despite avid theatregoing that began in the late 1970s, I never did manage to see Cats on Broadway, on tour or even in a high school auditorium. I was already a collegiate theatre snob when the show opened, and, without children of my own nagging me to take them as the run continued, I never felt the feline lure of T.S. Eliot or Andrew Lloyd Webber during the ensuing two decades. When I worked on the US premiere of By Jeeves in the mid-1990s, I always feared Lloyd Webber turning to me and saying, “Do you remember that moment in Cats when…?” I would have been left sputtering for a response.

That’s not to say I don’t have a strong impression of the show, since numbers were performed in full on television back in the day, excerpted for Broadway histories and television ads alike, parodied frequently, and so on. The TV sitcom Caroline in the City featured an actor character who was – fictionally – a member of the Cats menagerie. It was such a cultural touchstone that I remember The New York Times critic Frank Rich panning a show I did press for, about illegal dog fighting (no animals were harmed), with a withering, “Anyone for Cats?”

Come next week at this time, I will no longer be a Cats virgin. Whatever I make of it, inevitably my response cannot be one of youthful wonder nor middle-aged nostalgia. The question for the producers is whether there are enough people out there who want to evoke one or the other of those sentiments, among the already initiated or those born too late to experience the original run. As much as I plan to watch the show at long last, I’ll be keeping an eye on the audience as well, to see who turns out for the reconstituted Cats, if not now and forever, than at least once and again.

Bruce Willis in Misery (Photo by Joan Marcus)

It’s a tad too early to announce the emergence of a new trend, but two recent announcements suggest that there’s something brewing in the theatrical zeitgeist.

The announcements to which I refer are Quentin Tarantino’s repeated references to adapting his newest film The Hateful Eight for the stage, and Warner Bros Theatre Ventures’ announcement that Stephen Adly Guirgis will adapt the 1974 film Dog Day Afternoon for Broadway. I’m more sanguine about the latter than the former, because Guirgis is a proven theatrical talent who is likely to assert his own unique take on the true-life story that fuelled the Sidney Lumet film. While some have noted that The Hateful Eight is, if you strip away the profanity and slurs, the widescreen, and the protracted running time, really a western equivalent of an Agatha Christie locked room mystery.

The potential wave of which I speak is the movie-into-play adaptation, which seems poised to supplant the movie-into-musical and jukebox musical trends of recent years. This isn’t a brand new idea, and has actually been more common on British stages than American ones, with Chariots of Fire, The Shawshank Redemption, Cool Hand Luke and The Ladykillers among the examples. But when British exemplars have crossed the Atlantic, they haven’t set Broadway afire, with Festen and Elling being blink-and-you-missed-them failures. The Graduate ran for a year, but it closed more than 12 years ago.

Misery, now on Broadway in a different version than the UK one in the early 1990s, has held its own in the face of negative notices, buoyed no doubt by the Broadway debut of Bruce Willis, but its fortunes have been declining. Breakfast at Tiffany’s and A Time To Kill both closed particularly fast.

Experts will be quick to note that in many cases, the movie-to-play adaptations are often based on an original book from which the film and play have been adapted separately. But it’s usually the movie’s success and familiarity that prompts the theatrical version. The same impulse that has driven the trend for musical adaptations of movies seems to be behind these play efforts, with movie companies eager to exploit even properties that perhaps don’t lend themselves to musicalisation.

The problem is that drama into drama efforts often aren’t transformative enough to make the new stage versions compelling. When assembling songs into a story (like Mamma Mia!) or adding songs to one (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), there is inevitably a change in the source material. But the play into play paradigm doesn’t necessarily undergo the same kind of revision and rethinking – even though it’s essential to making great theatre. And of course without fundamental change, the inevitable comparisons are easier to make.

The best film into stage adaptations (The Lion King, Once) create something that is an altogether new way of looking at the preceding work. If film companies’ only goal is to generate more income from existing material, and to trade on our affection for it, then this incipient genre may well prove an unsatisfying one, as so many jukebox musicals and movie-to-musical adaptations have been before.

Having also produced Misery, Warner Bros’ choice of Guirgis is a heartening one, particularly if they give him room to let his own imagination and language truly create a new work for the stage, rather than a photocopy. While I never want to see them lured away for long from original work, I can only imagine what artists like Annie Baker, Anne Washburn, Stephen Karam, Suzan-Lori Parks, Mike Lew, and Tarrell Alvin McCraney could do with some classic and – better still – not-so-classic films. But only if it interests them creatively – not just for the money.

This essay originally appeared in The Stage, under a slightly different title.

Ian McKellen as King Lear (Photo by Simon Farrell)

Oh, British theatre, you’ve bested your American counterparts again, and you likely don’t even know about it. I should explain.

In late October, a new streaming service called BroadwayHD came online, to a flurry of press attention, likening the offering to Netflix or Hulu for the stage. As the holiday season often affords the opportunity to seek out online entertainment, I finally had the opportunity to peruse the offerings on the nascent BroadwayHD. To my surprise, I found remarkably little US theatre, let alone material from the Great White Way.

As of now, the relatively limited repertory of the service is comprised overwhelmingly of BBC offerings, tilted towards Shakespeare. Now, there’s no question that the selection is choice, featuring esteemed actors such as Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, Juliet Stevenson, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins and others, but the fact is, few of the shows on offer ever played Broadway.

Rifling through the categories of comedy, classics, drama and musicals yields a decidedly anglicised view of theatre. The category of musicals, which one would expect to be a strong suit, is the most American of sections, but also particularly thin, with only nine offerings, the most recent being Memphis and the oldest being Tintypes from 1980. One of the titles is the Bette Midler made-for-television Gypsy, which was never performed on stage.

That’s not to say there’s no value in the service, because I’m eager to explore some of these pieces – Daniel Craig in Copenhagen, anyone? But for now, it remains largely a US subscription-based version of BBC’s iPlayer with a cache of older titles. It also points out, once again, how behind US theatre is in adapting to the newly pervasive video reality, whether broadcast into movie theatres like NT Live is, or available on a mobile device.

I will always say that filmed theatre is not true theatre because it alters according to what the video camera finds. The live experience is unparalleled. But until all of the parties concerned – producers, writers, directors, actors, designers, craftspeople and crew – get together to hammer out an agreement that makes it possible for more US theatre to be recorded and distributed electronically, us Americans will be runners-up to our British colleagues (and soon our Canadian ones as well). Without that commitment, access to theatre will remain out of the reach of swathes of our population, for geographic and financial reasons.

Meanwhile, less attentive users of BroadwayHD will be left wondering why all of these ‘Broadway’ shows were performed with British accents.

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.

An artist’s impression of how the new St Ann’s Warehouse venue will look after its October opening

When the latest incarnation of St Ann’s Warehouse opens in the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge in New York, a theatre that already has a reputation of staging cutting edge UK plays will be in prime position to attract new audiences. Howard Sherman meets its leading lights

There has long been a reciprocity between Broadway and the West End, dating back perhaps a century, with shows and artists travelling back and forth with regularity and acclaim.

For a steady diet of many of the UK’s most acclaimed companies and artists, New Yorkers can turn not only to Times Square but also to an area of Brooklyn called Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). This is where St Ann’s Warehouse has been a leader not only in presenting provocative, inventive and often thrilling work from the UK, as well as from across Europe, South Africa and Asia, but also at the forefront of the reclamation of an industrial neighbourhood as a community asset.

A wide variety of UK work has played at St Ann’s in recent years, including Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter, The Red Shoes, The Wild Bride and Tristan and Yseult, the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch, several pieces by Daniel Kitson and now Let the Right One In.

Founded by Susan Feldman as Arts at St Ann’s in 1980, the company began with a dual purpose: establishing a creative centre for its Brooklyn Heights neighbourhood while also working to rehabilitate and preserve the historic church building that served as its home. In those days, the company was focused on shortrun concerts and musical events, but its move into the rough and tumble Dumbo neighbourhood in 2001 brought very different opportunities and challenges. From October, it begins work in its fourth venue when it moves into the former Tobacco Warehouse, a short distance from its current interim space, which has been in use since 2012.

Susan Feldman and Andrew Hamingson (Photo by Howard Sherman)

Recalling the early years at the church, Feldman explains how it “lent itself to music and fantastic spectacle”. But, in a move to a Water Street warehouse that was supposed to provide a home for only nine months but lasted for 12 years, theatre moved to the forefront of the programming, somewhat unexpectedly.

“We didn’t build a theatre,” Feldman says. “We used what was there, which was a very interesting grid, plus it had heat, electricity and an alarm system. We just built these temporary structures, so we could be flexible and move the space around. We kept that as we moved from place to place, so that temporary vibe and state of being became permanent.”

With the new building, the company’s executive director, Andrew Hamingson, speaks about only two “revolutionary” changes in store: “For the first time in St Ann’s history, there will be air conditioning, which means we can programme year-round if we want to. The second is a permanent dressing room.”

Hamingson also cites the opportunity for the offices and the theatre to be all under one roof and the increased potential of reaching out to even broader audiences, because the new venue is in Brooklyn Bridge Park, which he says draws 120,000 people each weekend.

While Feldman says St Ann’s audiences have been pretty much split between Manhattan and Brooklyn residents, she and Hamingson say the balance is shifting towards the continually gentrifying Brooklyn. Hamingson notes that they do not have the kind of tourist audience that one finds in Manhattan, but there is a serious international audience that makes its way to Brooklyn. Feldman attributes that to greater awareness of the neighbourhood itself – and to the success of Black Watch in its first of three visits, in 2007, which she calls a “crucial turning point”.

National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch

“Black Watch was a very special case,” she says. “There was a big New York Times story about how audiences didn’t want to talk about the war in Afghanistan. Then we did Black Watch and we found people absolutely did want to know about the war. The emotional responses of the audience and the press were so huge that it was more than just a cultural phenomenon. There was a need to wrap your arms around people and that’s what this play was doing and inviting.”

NTS’s executive producer Neil Murray says the show’s run at St Ann’s was significant for NTS as well. “The original run of Black Watch at St Ann’s and Ben Brantley’s New York Times review have been a huge driver not just for that show, but the company’s success in the US. While we have subsequently brought something like another seven shows to the US, including the 2015 runs of Let the Right One In and Dunsinane, that initial Black Watch run was a big springboard.”

The process of bringing a foreign show to the US puts St Ann’s in the position of being a presenter, but also a producing partner. “You can take a show from Europe and it really has to adapt to come over, it has to adapt to come into our space,” says Feldman.

Citing shows like Brief Encounter and Misterman, she speaks of having to shrink the productions. “Recapitalisation has to happen, so that becomes very much like producing. We have to raise money together to close the gap between the presentation costs and the box office. There’s always a period of risk assessment that we go through because we don’t have a single budget every year. We have to develop funding that’s going to go for each project and we put that together the way a producer would for every single presentation.”

St Ann’s does not typically participate financially in the future lives of productions it brings to the US, only doing so in cases where it has commissioned and plans to premiere the work.

Tristan Sturrock in Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter

Kneehigh’s executive producer Paul Crewe says he enjoys Feldman’s risk taking approach, and describes the connection between the companies as one that is “based on the work and a mutual respect”. He adds: “For Kneehigh, St Ann’s was a shop window into the US, because other programmers would often see the work. St Ann’s is one of the reasons we have had opportunities to play other cities and venues in America.”

As for how she finds work, Feldman says she visits three or four festivals each summer and makes trips to London regularly. She says that she also gets recommendations from others in the field.

Hamingson and Feldman say that bringing international work to the US has got harder. There used to be a lot more government funding for cultural exchanges, says Hamingson, adding: “Those pools, because of the downturn, have closed up a bit, so we’ve had to find other partners to take smaller pieces and do more of the fundraising on our own.”

“In fact, we are concerned,” says Feldman, “because there’s a lot of talk in Europe about how they’re going to follow the US model. When they say things like that they mean they’re going to start with philanthropy, but what they’re missing, the one reason that so many people go to Europe to see work is because of the core support that European companies get in their towns and in their cities.

“That support sustains the development of work on a regular basis. If it goes away, because they want to go on the US model, there is going to be an even worse drying up of original work. To me, it’s not a great sign. On the other hand, for European companies to be able to make use of philanthropy, and the desire of patrons to support, is a good thing for sure.”

As for the distinction between Brooklyn and Manhattan, neither Crewe nor Murray place much emphasis on it back home. “People in the UK are certainly aware of St Ann’s particular kind of programming,” says Murray. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that companies we really admire, like Kneehigh and Druid, are also frequent visitors there. I’m not sure a Scottish audience makes that distinction between Manhattan and Brooklyn, but in deference to Susan Feldman, we are always very careful to differentiate.”

“We have had, and continue to have, an interest in Manhattan,” says Crewe. “But the fact that St Ann’s is slightly outside the Broadway and Off-Broadway aesthetic gives us a sense of being part of a maverick world – an outsider that is a little rebellious. This fits well with us.” St Ann’s move into the new Tobacco Warehouse facility this year will be followed by the openings of several new performing arts venues, including the Ground Zero Arts Center, the Culture Shed, and Pier55. So is Feldman concerned about market saturation? Not really: “You know, the more culture there is, the more culture there is.

“What’s really going to determine what goes into those buildings as well as what goes into our building is going to be the financial relationships of whatever’s going in there. They’re not going to be the Metropolitan Opera suddenly that’s got an unlimited budget to make art. Five spaces the size of St Ann’s, which is what the Shed is supposed to be? I don’t know. But they’re talking about Fashion Week, they’re not talking about Mark Rylance and Measure for Measure. Some people say we’re all competing for the same money and it’s going to be a very competitive. I don’t think we’ve ever competed on that level, so I’m not sure. We’ve always been a niche.”

*   *   *

5 things you need to know about St Ann’s

* Founded 1980 in a historic landmark church by the New York Landmarks Conservancy to provide a complementary public use for the building and to preserve the first stained glass windows made in America.

* It has never had a permanent home. This will only come with the opening at the Tobacco Warehouse in October 2015.

* St Ann’s Warehouse has been the New York base and often national launching point for multiple theatre pieces by the National Theatre

of Scotland (Black Watch and Let the Right One In); Enda Walsh (four productions including Misterman); Kneehigh (four productions including Brief Encounter and The Wild Bride; and Daniel Kitson (including the world premiere of Analog.ue), among others.

* St Ann’s activated the first warehouse at 38 Water Street in DUMBO in November 2001, one month after 9/11, with a sold-out concert hosted by Martin Scorsese.

* American rockers who have also found an artistic home at St Ann’s include Lou Reed and Jeff Buckley.

*   *   *

This article reflects British spelling and the copyediting style of The Stage, where it first appeared.

Macbeth. Twelfth Night. Richard III. Romeo and Juliet. No Man’s Land. Waiting For Godot. Betrayal. The Winslow Boy.

The syllabus for a university survey course in drama? No. Instead, it’s the roster of eight of the 16 titles scheduled to open on Broadway between now and the end of 2013.

To be sure, British plays, artists and productions haven’t ever been strangers to Broadway, but this preponderance of works – featuring actors such as Jude Law, Mark Rylance, Rachel Weisz, Daniel Craig, Anne-Marie Duff, Stephen Fry, Orlando Bloom, Roger Rees, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart – in the 40 theatres that comprise Broadway, all at the same time, is an embarrassment of riches. Add in concurrent Off-Broadway productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with David Harewood and Kathryn Hunter (opening the new Theatre for a New Audience space in Brooklyn) and Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins in All That Fall, and it appears that Anglophilia is running rampant in the playhouses of New York.

Much of this is coincidence, since it’s not as if producers conspire on themes. Indeed, from a marketing standpoint, it’s not necessarily even a good idea, since the theatregoers most drawn to this work may have to face some tough buying decisions unless they have unlimited resources and time. Cultural tourists won’t even be able to fit all of these terrific sounding shows in, should they fly to the city for merely a long weekend.

But whether the productions are transfers from the UK or newly minted in America, as is the case with No Man’s Land, Romeo and Juliet, and Betrayal, the British imprimatur seems as if it’s a requirement this year, even if only in part. UK director David Leveaux is staging Romeo and Juliet with a North American cast capped by Bloom. US director Julie Taymor tapped Harewood and Hunter for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, her first project since the highly-publicised and contentious Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark (a tell-all book by her collaborator Glen Berger will be released just as Midsummer performances begin). Even the US classic The Glass Menagerie is being helmed by John Doyle. Only Classic Stage Company’s Romeo and Juliet, with Elizabeth Olsen and TR Knight, is wholly comprised of American artists, though their Romeo is Japan-born.

The English theatre can certainly take pride in this abundance of talent exported to American shores, and I look forward to each and every one of these shows enthusiastically. Indeed, I’ll pass on my annual autumn trip to London since I’ll need only take the subway and not British Airways.

But it does beg the question of whether classical work can succeed on Broadway without a UK connection. Are producers giving up on our best American actors and directors taking on British and Irish pieces without at least some of that heritage in the shows’ DNA? To be sure, not-for-profit companies may lean American overall (LCT’s Macbeth is Ethan Hawke), but has public television conditioned us to desire the “genuine” article? Great American plays appear on British stages frequently, ranging from A View From The Bridge to Fences to Clybourne Park, without the perpetual need to import Americans, let alone the cream of American talent, to make them work. Yet the power of UK casting appears to be such that even multiple Macbeths are deemed economically viable, with Alan Cumming having played virtually all of the roles on Broadway only months ago and Kenneth Branagh due at the Park Avenue Armory in June 2014.

I don’t like calling attention to national divisions when it comes to art, but the fall theatre season in New York simply can’t be overlooked. Despite the luxury of all of the great theatre on tap, the timing sends the message to US actors, theatre students, critics and audiences that when it comes to staging foreign classics, the talent exchange flows more strongly from west to east than in the other direction.

But looking on the bright side, perhaps this means we’ll soon enjoy one more benefit of the English stage, and be able to buy ice cream at the interval.

While the arts are often notoriously slow adopters of new technology, the rapid rise of social media would seem to dictate that commercial theatre jump on the bandwagon and hold on tight.

But social media may be best suited for use by subsidised companies, rather than the shows that populate the West End and Broadway.

Certainly, every show has the basics in place, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed and so on, in addition to the now de rigeur website. But producers and their marketing teams seem to view most social media as an extension of advertising or PR, feeding out casting announcements, special ticket offers and ‘exclusive’ photos and video all directed at driving sales.

The problem is that for most productions, especially early in their runs, there aren’t necessarily enough people who have followed or liked the show to read what’s on offer, and the content is often repurposed for other uses, diluting the impact that ‘exclusivity’ might still carry.

Shows appear drawn to the media portion of this new manner of communications, when it is the social aspect that is most innovative and compelling. Social platforms offer rapid and direct communications with individuals, but the fact is that people engage most with those who actually engage with, or entertain, them. It may take place on an overwhelming scale when it comes to major celebrities, but in the theatre, it’s quite easy for fans to strike up conversations with stars, writers, designers, directors and even critics – something virtually unimaginable a decade ago. So, if shows don’t actually engage with their audiences beyond tarted-up press announcements, they’re dropping the ball.

Of course, the challenge is how creative on an ongoing basis any one show can be, since they’re a relatively fixed offering (people, on the other hand, can have remarkably varied day-to-day lives) and how much  they’re willing to invest to be socially rather than sales-oriented, focusing on the long game rather than immediate gain. Except for a very small portion of the audience,  attendance at a commercial show is a one-off event, not an ongoing commitment, seemingly at odds with the basis of social media. The building of relationships afforded by social media can create a stronger bond for an ongoing company producing an array of works over months or years.

In 2009, when social media was still working its way into public consciousness, the Broadway production of Next to Normal garnered great attention and achieved a remarkable million followers through two initiatives. It offered one night “live-tweeting” the plot of the entire show for anyone who cared to follow. Shorn of songs and even most dialogue, they were serialising an outline in real time, but it was a distinctive effort that marked the show as creative and tantalised people with the framework of a show they might then choose to see in real life.

Next to Normal also ran a campaign in which Twitter followers were encouraged to make suggestions for a new song for the show, creating a connection directly with the authors, who did indeed write a song based on suggestions. While it wasn’t added to the finished work, fans could hear it online. It’s a shame that, since the account still has 946,000 following (though it is closed), it hasn’t tweeted since April of last year, leaving a huge untapped base of potential ticket buyers for other productions.

Despite the efforts and success of Next to Normal, social media still seems an afterthought for most Broadway shows. In a survey of Broadway theatres in early May, prompts to interact with the show through social media activity (primarily Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) were on display at 15 theatres – yet a nearly equal number (14) had no such reminders in their front of theatre or box office lobby displays (a number of theatres had no tenants at the time). A few showed real initiative in advocating social media use (a photo backdrop outside the Lunt-Fontanne for Motown; a ‘photo stop’ in the upper lobby of the Gershwin for Wicked).

Unfortunately, others simply displayed social platform logos without the specific names used by the shows in those arenas, so one would have to seek them out; it’s akin to posting ‘we have a website’ instead of giving a URL.

If productions don’t feel that social media gives them sufficient bang for their buck, perhaps they shouldn’t establish a presence only to give it short shrift. On the other hand, as some shows are demonstrating, with a little thought, a show can build its profile at a proportionately low cost, amplifying the power of the ever essential word of mouth, so long as they’re willing to commit to subtly promoting their presence by offering intriguing content and damping down the urge to shout “BUY NOW”.