As I said in Part 1 of this series, Matt Trueman’s piece for the Financial Times got me thinking about a variety of issues relating to the exchange of new plays between England and the United States. After focusing on perceived favoritism or bias, and then the common issue of support beyond the box office and its apparent impact on new work, let me circle back to focus more directly on the original issue.

I agree with Trueman, and the people with whom he spoke, that despite a handful of big name plays traversing the pond every year, each country only scratches the surface of the vast number of plays produced by the other. Now, unencumbered as I am by more comprehensive data, what could be the causes for this?

Personally, I don’t really hold with the idea that some of the plays are mired in cultural differences not readily understood. I have certainly seen plays in which cricket plays a role (I don’t understand anything connected with cricket), but the plays aren’t about cricket, and the minutiae of the game is typically irrelevant. We may mention footlong sandwiches in a play, calling them subs, grinders or hoagies, but so long as it’s clear its an item of food, either from other dialogue or stage action, I don’t think English theatergoers would be lost in incomprehension. We may not know the particulars of the National Health Service, or the English may not understand the nuances of city, county, state and national government here, but those are mechanics, not meaning. If we can find common ground in Monty Python and Downton Abbey, I have no worries about plays – even those that require specific regional accents.

I certainly think familiarity and awareness plays a role, and it amplifies a frequent intra-country challenge: if a play is produced in a regional theatre outside of a major media area, how does it get noticed? I don’t doubt that large theatres in both countries have the means and the inclination to look beyond New York and London alone, but how do they look? Literary offices are likely stocked with unread homegrown material, even if they only accept work by agent submission. Media websites may offer reviews of work, but who has the time to scan it all on a daily basis, hunting for a lesser known but worthwhile work. If a play doesn’t get published, or added to the catalogue of a major licensing house, how does it get attention, at home or abroad? Some may like to decry the influence of reviews, but good reviews distributed by theatre or producer may have the most impact, but is there a readily accessible list of artistic directors and literary managers in both countries (and other English-speaking countries) to make the dissemination of that material efficient? To be interested in a play, one first has to hear or read about it.

But let me come back to “homegrown.” In America, we constantly see mission statements that, rightly, talk about theatres serving their community. This can take many forms and be interpreted in a variety of ways, but the fact is that even those not-for-profit companies which also speak of adding to the national and even international theatrical repertoire must first and foremost serve their immediate community, the audience located in a 30 mile radius of their venue, give or take. Many theatres are also making an increased effort to serve the artists in their local community as well, instead of importing talent from one of the coasts. I have no reason to suspect that it is any different in England.

So the question about producing plays from other countries is less one of interest than adherence to mission. If your theatre is the only one of any scale for 30 miles, or the largest even in a crowded field, where should your focus be? Unless your company is specifically dedicated to work from other countries, on balance it’s going to be wise to focus on homegrown plays, especially if your company does new work.

Several months back, the artistic director of a large U.S. theatre and I were discussing a British playwright we both hold in high regard, but the A.D. said he couldn’t make room for that author’s work in a season, even for a U.S. premiere. “If I do that, that’s one less slot I have for a new American play.” With most theatres having perhaps four to seven shows a season, not all necessarily new, it is in fact a tricky political prospect to debut or produce foreign work. Look at the flack Joe Dowling took for his season of Christopher Hampton plays at The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis.

Add to that the necessity of balancing a season for gender and race, plus the desire to show the audience work that may have debuted elsewhere in the U.S., as well as classics and the challenge grows greater for foreign work (though it doesn’t justify our significant blind spot towards our neighbor Canada or the limited awareness of theater from Australia and New Zealand either). I suspect this comes into play in England as well, but I’d need to speak with more English A.D.’s to know.

When I surveyed the Tony nominations it was quickly apparent that if one removed David Hare, Tom Stoppard, Martin McDonagh, Brian Friel and Yasmina Reza, foreign presence on Broadway would drop precipitously; the same would happen at the Oliviers if one excluded Tony Kushner, August Wilson, and David Mamet. Yes, England has premiered work by Katori Hall, Bruce Norris and Tarrell Alvin McCraney, but they are exceptions to the rule, not exemplars of a new trend.

I support the exchange of dramatic literature and artists between countries – all countries –not just the U.S.-English traffic that has been the focus here. Improved communication about that work might help to foster an increase and, as I said originally, a survey of past productions on a larger scale might reveal more than we’re aware of. But when it comes right down to it, English theatres and artistic directors must focus on what’s most important for their audiences, and American theatres and A.D.s must do the same. What that yields in terms of exchange is simply part of balancing so many necessary elements, tastes, styles and budgets; trends may appear when looking from a distance, but up close, it’s a theatre by theatre function.

In the process of debunking the idea that English and American plays experience bias, for or against them , when produced in the their “opposite” theatrical cities of New York and London, I began to notice something extremely interesting about the origin of plays nominated for the Olivier and Tony Awards. Thinking it might be my own bias coming into play as I assembled data, I expanded my charts of nominated plays beyond simply the country of origin for the works, adding the theatres where the plays originated. What I found suggests that the manner of theatrical production in the two countries may be even more alike than many of us realize.

In the U.S., of the 132 plays nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play between 1980 and 2012, 61 of them had begun in not-for-profit theatres in New York and around the country. That’s 46% of the plays (and even more specifically, their productions) having been initiated by non-commercial venues. In England, 99 of the plays came from subsidised companies, a total of 75% of all of the Oliviers nominees.

Together, these numbers make a striking argument for how essential not-for-profit/subsidized companies are to the theatrical ecology of today. And, frankly, my numbers are probably low.

To work out these figures, I identified plays and productions which originated at not-for-profits. That is to say, if a play was originally produced in a not-for-profit setting, but the production that played Broadway was wholly or significantly new, it was not included. As a result, for example, both parts of Angels in America don’t appear in my calculations, because the Broadway production wasn’t a direct transfer from a not-for-profit, even though its development and original productions had been in subsidized companies in both the U.S. and England.

These statistics also don’t include plays that may have been originally produced in their country of origin at an institutional company, but were subsequently seen across the Atlantic under commercial aegis. So while Douglas Carter Beane’s The Little Dog Laughed is credited with NFP roots in the U.S. it has been treated as commercial in London. Regretfully, I don’t know enough about the origin of all nominated West End productions in companies from outside London to have represented them more fully, which is why I have an inkling that the 75% number is low.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that in England, the Oliviers encompass a number of theatres that are wholly within subsidized companies, in some cases relatively small ones, which needn’t transfer to a conventional West End berth to be eligible; examples include the Royal Court and the Donmar Warehouse, as well as Royal Shakespeare Company productions that visit London. While there are currently five stages under not for profit management on Broadway (the Sondheim, American Airlines, Beaumont, Friedman Theatres and Studio 54), imagine if work at such comparable spaces as the Mitzi Newhouse, the Laura Pels, The Public, The Atlantic and Signature were eligible as well.

Why am I so quickly demonstrating the flaws in my method? Simply to show that even by conservative measure, it is the institutional companies, which rely on grants, donations and government support to function, which are producing the majority of the plays deemed to be the most important of those that play the major venues in each city.

Since we must constantly make the case for the value of institutional, not-for-profit, subsidized theatre, in the U.S. and in England (let alone Scotland, Ireland, Canada and so many other countries), I say tear apart my process and build your own, locally, regional and certainly nationally. I think you’ll find your numbers to be even stronger than mine and, hopefully, even more persuasive. While it may seem counterintuitive for companies outside London and New York to use those cities’ awards processes to make their case, the influence is undeniable.

The conventional wisdom in theatrical circles is that America is stunningly Anglophilic, that we readily embrace works from England on our stages. Supposedly we do this to the detriment of American writers, and our affection is reputedly one-sided, as the British pay much less attention to our work. So they say.

This past weekend, British arts journalist Matt Trueman began a worthwhile conversation in an article for the Financial Times, in which he suggested that most American plays rarely reach England, and vice-versa. While a few of the assertions in the piece may not be wholly accurate, I think the central argument holds true: only a handful of plays from each country get significant exposure in the other. His piece set me thinking.

Much of America’s vision of British theatre is dominated by the fare on Broadway and, I suspect, it’s the same case in the West End for America. Now we can argue that these two theatrical centers don’t accurately represent the totality or even the majority of theatre in each country (and I have done so), but the high exposure in these arenas does have a significant impact on the profile and life-span of new plays, fairly or not. Consequently, our view of the dramatic repertoire from each country to the other is a result of a relative handful of productions in very specific circumstances.

Given the resources and data, one could perhaps build a database of play production in both countries and extract the most accurate picture. But in an effort to work with a manageable data set in exploring this issue, I took the admittedly subjective universe of the Best New Play nominations for the Tony and Olivier Awards, from 1980 to today. While significantly more work is produced than is nominated, this universe at least afforded me the opportunity to examine whether there is cultural bias among select theatrical arbiters. Although each has its own rules and methodology (I explain key variables in my addendum below), they are a microcosm of top-flight production in these “theatre capitals.”

So as not to keep you in suspense, here’s the gist: new English and American plays are nominated for Tony and Oliviers at roughly the same rate in the opposite country, running between 20 and 25% of the nominees when produced overseas.

In the past 33 years of Tony Awards, 32 English plays were nominated for Tonys out of a universe of 132, or 24% of the total. At the Oliviers, 20% of the Best New Play nominees were American. In my eyes, that 4% difference is irrelevant; though there’s no margin for error since this isn’t a poll, the total numbers worked with are small enough so that a few points means only a few plays, in this case, only five.

Now, let’s take a step back and look at this with larger world view. While Americans at large may have a tendency to blur distinctions between English, Welsh, Irish and Scottish, I’m aware that these national distinctions are extremely important. Blending these countries in our view of theatrical production may be contributing to the false American perception of English imperialism on our stages.

Factoring in all productions by foreign authors (the aforementioned Ireland, Wales and Scotland, as well as France, Canada, Israel and South Africa), we find that 44 plays from outside the U.S. received Tony nominations in 33 years, for 33% of the total nominees, while in England, foreign plays garnered 52 Olivier nods, for 39% of the total. So while the gap here is slightly wider, it shows that English plays actually are nominated less in their own country than American plays are at the Oliviers.

When it comes to the recognition of plays that travel between these two major theatrical ports of call, I think it’s fair to say that, so far as each city’s major theatrical award is concerned, there is no bias, no favoritism. Even if the number of plays being produced are out of balance, the recognition is proportional. Perhaps we can put that old saw to rest.

P.S. For those of you feeling petty, wondering whether there’s an imbalance in winners? American plays  have won the Olivier nine times since 1980, while English authors have won the Best Play Tony seven times. So there.

*     *     *     *     *

Notes on methodology:

• Musicals were not studied, only plays.
• There is one key difference between the Best Play categories at the Tonys and The Oliviers, specifically that the Oliviers also have a category for Best Comedy in many of the years studied. While it is not included in this comparison, it should be noted that, with a few exceptions, American plays were rarely nominated in the Best Comedy category. Whether this is a result of U.S. comedies not traveling to England at all, or cultural differences causing U.S. comedies to be poorly received when they did travel, was not examined.
• To some degree, nationality or origin of the plays required a judgment call. There are Americans who have resided in England for many years (Martin Sherman, Timberlake Wertenbaker), in addition to authors of South African and Irish birth who also make their home there (Nicholas Wright, Martin McDonagh). I have categorized these authors and their plays by the country with which they are most associated, as I do not have access to their citizenship records. In all cases, I have identified nationality to the best of my ability.

“What is the best that Broadway can be?” was the central question of the second TEDx Broadway conference, which continued to explore the query that fueled last year’s inaugural conference.

Presented, perhaps ironically, at off-Broadway’s New World Stages in Manhattan on Monday, the six-hour array of speakers struck similar notes: A better Broadway can be achieved through access for, engagement with and connection to the audience.

The conference mixed seasoned producers like Daryl Roth and Disney Theatrical Group’s Thomas Schumacher, artists such as playwright Kristoffer Diaz, actor George Takei and designer Christine Jones, and experts in other fields including Ellen Isaacs, the principal scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center; tech and media entrepreneur Randi Zuckerberg, and Susan Salgado, the founder with restaurateur Danny Meyer of Hospitality Quotient, consultants on the customer’s experience.

A capacity audience of 450 turned out to hear 17 speakers, watch thematically related videos from official TED Talks, and hear a performance by the all-female cello-driven band Rasputina. (TEDx conferences are independently organized events sanctioned by the official TED organization.)

Mixing pragmatism with imagination, Wall Street Journal critic and columnist Terry Teachout, who made his debut as a playwright in 2012, cited the oft-repeated figure that 75% of all Broadway shows fail financially. Then “why do people produce on Broadway?” Teachout asked. “Because it’s fun.”

He urged the attendees to take a chance on Broadway, “to do something that’s never been done … let the fact that most Broadway shows fail liberate you.”

He advised, “Don’t start settling for safe, gamble on great. If you’re not going to make money, make something beautiful, something that makes you proud. Who knows, you may even get rich.”

Takei, who plans to make his Broadway debut next season in the musical “Allegiance,” (which was produced at the Old Globe in San Diego last fall)  talked up the power of social media. He acknowledged that he has a base of “geeks and nerds” thank to his “Star Trek” days, but he didn’t address how less famous figures, or shows, might achieve similar success.

Schumacher related his ideal vision of Broadway and how it ran counter to what he felt one night sitting at a show, responses that he believes many in the business must conquer.

“Who are these jackasses?” he wondered of his fellow patrons. “My loathing for the people I was surrounded with was insurmountable.” He then talked about countering such “pretentious” instincts, saying, “Populism has its own manifest destiny and we must embrace that.”

Jones, the designer, is also artistic director of Theatre for One, which creates intimate theatrical experiences between a single artist and a single audience member in a retooled peep-show booth. She spoke of her desire to “distill the space” between performer and artist. She then explained her efforts to connect every audience member in every seat with the work on a Broadway stage.

“I wish we all had the same ability to make choices about how the audience is seated as I do with what’s on stage,” she said.

Jones alluded to Lewis Hyde’s book “The Gift,” which was also taken up by Adam Thurman, marketing director of Chicago’s Court Theatre, who proposed, “Marketing, fully realized, is a gift. I am in the gift-giving business and so are all of you.”

But he cautioned about preaching only to the converted, those who already attend the arts, saying, “We need more people who love us.”

Diaz and Zuckerberg offered lists of ideas for Broadway. Diaz’s random yet passionate litany included a contrary notion to many.

“Having playwrights working in television is a good thing,” Diaz said. “But we need to get them back and bring with them everything they learned and evolve the stories we tell.”

He enthused over the works of Lynn Nottage, described the theater community as being made up of “nerds and misfits who didn’t fit in,” and declared, “We’re living in a post-“Book of Mormon” society.”

Zuckerberg spoke of her original plans to pursue a career in theater, then shifted to a list of “10 Ideas to Open Broadway to the World,” including open auditions on YouTube, crowd-sourcing costume designs, creating online viewing options and offering social media walk-on roles.

“Instead of having a small sliver of the world come to Broadway,” she asked, “why not bring Broadway to the entire world?”

Other speakers included “The Millionaire’s Magician,” Steve Cohen; David Sabel, head of digital media for the National Theatre of Great Britain, and Seth Pinsky, president of New York City’s Economic Development Corp.

The TEDx Broadway conference was organized by Damian Bazadona, president of Situation Interactive; theatrical producer Ken Davenport; and Jim McCarthy, CEO of Goldstar Events.

See the story as it appeared at the Los Angeles Times here.

As I write late in the evening prior to the second TEDx Broadway conference, I find myself wondering how much the presentations tomorrow will focus on plays, which have become the poor stepchild of The Great White Way.

Over the summer, I wrote about Narrow Chances For New Broadway Musicals and considered Do Revivals Inhibit Broadway Musicals? I counted the most produced playwrights in recent years in The Broadway Scorecard: Two Decades of Drama and, responding to what I saw at a glance as some misguided copy in the promotion of tomorrow’s event, I spoke out strongly with the declaration False Equivalency: Broadway Is Not The American Theatre.  Embedded in these posts were data, analysis — and my opinion — depicting Broadway as it is, not as some might perhaps wish it would be. As I noted in these posts, musicals dominate Broadway, both new and revivals, with roughly 80% of all Broadway grosses coming from musicals, even if the number of plays produced in most seasons outnumber new musical productions. Plays are admired, but when it comes to defining Broadway, the musicals by and large grab the lion’s share of money and attention.

That said, there’s one more, rather simple, data set that’s worth having in mind as tweets, blogs and news reports slice and dice tomorrow’s event (and I’ll be among those doing so). Here’s a listing of the Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and the Tony Award winners for Best Play, from 1984 to the present. I’m not suggesting that these awards are the final word on plays of quality, and awards success hardly guarantees box office success, but the two prizes provide a manageable universe for study. Why 1984? It’s an arbitrary choice, to be sure; it’s also the year I graduated college and went to work in the professional theatre, a microcosm of the celebrated plays of my theatrical career.

The honored plays above, shorn of duplicates as well as the years the Pulitzers honored musicals, make up a total of 43 different works that were recognized for achievements in playwriting in 29 years. Only nine works appear on both lists and The Pulitzers are only for American plays, which helps to reduce duplication.

Now here’s the key question: how many of those works actually had their world premieres on Broadway? The answer: only five. Those plays were Rabbit Hole, Lost In Yonkers, The Goat, The Last Night Of Ballyhoo and M. Butterfly. The others all began in not for profit U.S. venues, as close as Off-Broadway or as far as Seattle, or in subsidized or commercial venues in Ireland, England, and Europe. That’s not to say that there weren’t worthy plays that weren’t recognized which may have been produced directly on Broadway, but the ones that reaped the conventionally accepted big awards didn’t begin there. In the Pulitzer list, there are many that never played Broadway, at least in their original incarnations, as I discussed in At Long Last Broadway.

So as the future of Broadway is a subject on many minds in the next 24 to 36 hours, it’s worth remembering that strikingly few new plays debut there, as they commonly did in the days before the resident theatre movement really bloomed. If plays are to make their marks in Broadway history under the existing models of production, they need to be discovered, birthed and nourished elsewhere. National and international recognition may still be New York-centric, but the most honored works start overwhelmingly just about everywhere other than Broadway. Could that ever change? Should it? And if the answer is yes, then how?

Many people, and I count myself among them, often find themselves trying to quantify the totality of theatre activity in the United States and, within that, to delineate differences between the various sectors: commercial, not for profit, educational, amateur and so on.  While absolute figures may prove elusive, there are a handful of studies that provide a reasonably good picture of professional production, lending perspective to any discussion about the reach of theatre in America.

The Broadway League, the professional association of theatre producers in the commercial sector, both Broadway and touring, generates multiple reports annually; its recent release of its annual demographic figures last week focused a lot of attention on Broadway and who’s attending those productions. The Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national service organization of the country’s not-for-profit theatres (NFPs), produces its annual Theatre Facts report, the most comprehensive picture of activity across a variety of NFP companies based on an comprehensive fiscal survey.

While the methodologies may vary, and the TCG report isn’t 100% inclusive and includes extrapolation, looking at the two is very informative as a means of comparing and contrasting these two sectors, which inexplicably to me seem to be always addressed discretely, rather than as parts of a whole.

Here’s the main snapshot:

I was surprised to find that in terms of revenue, the two sectors are quite close; the NFPs edge commercial production by $36 million (for the purpose of this summary, I have merged earned and contributed income in the NFPs). Attendance between the two shows the NFPs ahead by a bit over $8 million, which is almost 33%. But the real difference is in the number of productions, which demonstrate that the production pace in NFP theatre is vast compared to the commercial arena, and the total number of performances almost eight times greater.

Obviously caveats quickly arise: most of the NFP production is in houses of 500 seats or less, while that’s the minimum size in the commercial world, where theatres can reach over 3,000 seats. It takes only a handful of productions in commercial to generate nearly equal revenue to the entire NFP sector; that’s because a single production might play throughout the season, either on Broadway or on tour, while each NFP might produce a half-dozen shows in a year. Though production figures aren’t available, the budget of a single commercial musical might fund a mid-sized LORT theatre for two seasons, let alone countless storefront or LOA companies for years.

But what’s perhaps most interesting is that, operating under the reasonable assumption that each show has one director, one set designer, on lighting designer, one costume designer and one sound designer, those working in those fields are employed almost entirely by the NFP companies, since there are so very few opportunities in commercial theatre. Indeed, its not uncommon for the same designer in the select group that secure Broadway shows to do two or three in a season, and for those same designs to go out on tour, so when it comes to individuals, that count of 118 grows even smaller.

In terms of the aggregate economic force of Broadway, the League’s numbers show that Broadway and commercial touring generates significant income from a relatively small amount of shows. The TCG numbers show a more granular reach, with thousands of productions just edging the commercial world to reach a similar figure. But it’s the NFPs that are providing the vast majority of theatrical employment.

Let’s look at another measure of employment, specifically when it comes to actors. I think it’s a safe assumption to say that with musicals dominating commercial production, the cast size of an average show must surely outpace those found in resident theatre. Drawing upon employment data from Actors Equity for the same 2010-11 season, here’s the snapshot:

There’s obviously a staggering difference in compensation for performers in the two sectors, since with 40,000 fewer work weeks, the commercial productions yielded almost three times the earnings for its actors as the NFP companies provided. While certainly star salaries may have had something to do with this, it’s more likely because production contract minimum typically exceeds the top salary at any of our not-for-profit companies.

So what have we found? Resident, not for profit theatres provide the foundation for the vast amount of theatrical activity in the United States, employing the lion’s share of the artists and presumably staffs as well, and playing to about 30% more patrons. When it comes to overall sector income, the two are extremely close (although the inclusion of more of Equity’s smaller contracts might tip this slightly further). But for those fortunate enough to secure employment as actors or stage managers in commercial productions, the compensation far outstrips what’s paid by resident companies.

Next time you want to make a generalization about the difference between commercial and not-for-profit theatre, here’s your broad-based data to draw from. But there’s lots more where this came from, and I urge everyone in the field to review it, to understand both the divergences and similarities, and to better understand American theatre not as an array of silos, but as a whole.

*   *   *

Notes:

• Data from the Broadway League is drawn from their Broadway Season Statistics summary and their Touring Broadway Statistics summary, as well as information taken from their IBDB and provided by their press office.
• As previously indicated, revenue for NFP companies is inclusive of both box office and contributed income, since both are required to achieve the level of production represented within; commercial theatre may have some amount of sponsorship income, but it wasn’t broken out in the Broadway League survey, nor did I treat capitalization as income.
• There are almost two dozen AEA contracts not represented in the actor workweek summary, because I am not familiar enough with each contract to properly categorize it. The contracts included represent almost 2/3 of all AEA employment. It’s worth noting, by the way, that the Disney World-AEA contract covers 5% of all AEA annual work weeks, but does not factor in here.
• While the Broadway League has assembled its numbers for 2011-12, and as I was writing, AEA indicated that their figures for that period would be released imminently, 2010-2011 remained the period of comparison because that is the most recent TCG data available. It should be noted that once every seven years, the League has to compile its data into a 53, instead of 52, week season; 2010-11 was such a year, so the comparison of the data is imprecise, giving a quantitative edge to the commercial numbers.

It’s hardly surprising to learn about a hit Off-Broadway show moving to Broadway. It’s been happening for years, both with shows that began at not-for-profit companies or as commercial ventures. Open small, get great reviews and sales, move beyond the confines of a much smaller theatre to reap the recognition and rewards of a Broadway berth, which then secures a long life for the show in regional, international and amateur and school markets.

In most cases, the Off-Broadway to Broadway transfers happen pretty quickly, to seize upon momentum. If they don’t happen in the same theatrical season (vaguely defined by awards timelines), then they turn up the following year. The lag-time between the Playwrights Horizons production of Clybourne Park and its Broadway run was longer than the norm (with numerous regional productions blooming in the gap).

But when Beth Henley’s The Miss Firecracker Contest was announced for Broadway this spring, it joined a subset of shows that took protracted paths to the Great White Way. In the case of Miss Firecracker, it took more than 25 years – and it also marks Henley’s Broadway return after a hiatus of 30 years, ashocking gap for a major author.

This ultra-late path to Broadway is a slow-building trend to be sure, but in the past dozen or so years, some 20 shows that met with acclaim and countless productions after their Off-Broadway success have turned up on Broadway for the first time. In most cases, by the time they get there, they’re considered part of the theatrical repertoire to the extent that they’re revivals making their Broadway debut. In many cases, the Off-Broadway hits spawned movie versions, without a Broadway imprimatur.

Some of the examples: Margaret Edson’s Wit, Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca, David Mamet’s Oleanna, Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories, Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune, Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias, Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain and Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio. Even the musical Little Shop of Horrors finally made its way from downtown to uptown, but after a hiatus of more than two decades.

What’s driving this stealth trendlet? There are several factors. One is simply that over time, even without Broadway status, the shows have grown so much in recognition that they’re not necessarily the risky prospects they once were (Wit, for example, sought a Broadway house back in the day, but no one would book it). Though most weren’t star vehicles in days gone by, a number were star-makers; Miss Firecracker launched Holly Hunter to stardom, just as Daisy did for Morgan Freeman; now that they’re recognized as having roles stars covet, which explains Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones in the recent Daisy run. And with the aforementioned recognition that has built up, especially after film adaptations, the titles are simply more “marketable,” meaning producers don’t have the same uphill climb that they might with a wholly new work – although the fact that the movies are so indelibly etched that shows compete with those, rather than original productions.

Another key factor is that the environment that enabled shows like these to run for several years commercially Off-Broadway has largely evaporated. That’s not to say there are no commercial play productions Off-Broadway, but the prevailing wisdom is now that you can only succeed financially by taking a hit from The Atlantic or The Public to Broadway; that the economics simply don’t favor an intra-Off move.

I don’t have any particular reservations about this practice, since it’s typically one or two shows a year at most. It is worth noting that the majority of these plays had very small casts and required minimal scenery; by enlarging them to the scale of a Broadway house, there’s always the risk that the intimacy which may have helped them become hits in the past may be lost along the way.

What would prove truly exciting would be if producers looked beyond the iconic Off-Broadway successes and explored works which, for one reason or other, didn’t have long runs and didn’t move anywhere, despite being praised in their day.  I bet a quick read of Theatre Worlds (or my Playbill collection) from the 80s and 90s could turn up a number of forgotten gems. It’s worth remembering that John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, originally produced Off-Broadway, only found its place in the canon of major works after the Lincoln Center Theater revival in the 80s; Sam Shepard’s True West suffered from a troubled production at The Public in its New York debut, only to be a hit less than 10 years later when the Steppenwolf production came to town, though in that case, again Off-Broadway.

When Miss Firecracker was announced yesterday, I spotted several comments in my Twitter feed from those who were pleased for the opportunity to see the play on stage for the first time, and indeed it’s less of a known quantity than most of the shows I’ve cited. Their comments reminded me that I’ve been around long enough that these are, for me, unquestionably revivals, as I saw many of the original productions. I recall going into Miss Firecracker unaware of Holly Hunter and walking out with a serious crush; when I saw Rosemary Harris in The Road To Mecca last year, I often confused people by mentioning having seen Julie Harris in the same role in a regional production almost 20 years ago.

So today’s Broadway is now, on occasion, a home for yesterday’s Off-Broadway hits. There’s a certain irony baked into that, as well as a longing for the bygone Off-Broadway environment, but I’ll look on the bright side: these plays are proof that you don’t always need Broadway to be a success. But that opens up new questions as well: what other shows might be rediscovered, and 20 years from now, will today’s Off-Broadway prove to have been comparably fertile?

P.S. Cloud Nine, anyone?

Every January, the media run features on how to lose those holiday pounds. As schools let out for the summer, the media share warnings about damage from the sun and showcase the newest sunscreens. In Thanksgiving, turkey tips abound.

For theatre, September reveals two variants of its seasonal press staple, either “Stars Bring Their Glamour To The Stage,” or, alternately, “Shortage of Star Names Spells Soft Season Start.” Indeed, the same theme may reappear for the spring season and, depending upon summer theatre programming, it may manage a third appearance. But whether stars are present or not, they’re the lede, and the headline.

The arrival of these perennial stories is invariably accompanied by grousing in the theatre community about the impact of stars on theatre, Broadway in particular, except from those who’ve managed to secure their services. But this isn’t solely a Broadway issue, because as theatres — commercial and not-for-profit, touring and resident — struggle for attention alongside movies, TV, music, and videogames, stardom is currency. Sadly, a great play, a remarkable actor or a promising playwright is often insufficient to draw the media’s gaze; in the culture of celebrity, fame is all.

But as celebrity culture has metastasized, with the Snookis and Kardashians of the world getting as much ink as Denzel and Meryl, and vastly more than Donna Murphy or Raul Esparza, to name but two, the theatre’s struggle with the stardom issue is ever more pronounced. Despite that, I do not have a reflexive opposition to stars from other performing fields working in theatre.

Before I go on, I’d like to make a distinction: in the current world of entertainment, I see three classifiers. They are “actor,” “celebrity,” and “star.” They are not mutually exclusive, nor are they fixed for life. George Clooney toiled for years as a minor actor in TV, before his role on ER made him actor, celebrity and star all in one. Kristin Chenoweth has been a talented actor and a star in theatre for years, but it took her television work to make her a multi-media star and a celebrity. The old studio system of Hollywood declared George Hamilton a star years ago, but he now lingers as a celebrity, though still drawing interest as he tours. Chris Cooper has an Oscar, but he remains an actor, not a star, seemingly by design. And so on.

So when an actor best known for film or TV does stage work, it’s not fair to be discounting their presence simply because of stardom. True stardom from acting is rarely achieved with an absence of talent, even if stardom is achieved via TV and movies. Many stars of TV or film have theatre backgrounds, either in schooling or at the beginning of their career: Bruce Willis appeared (as a replacement) in the original Off-Broadway run of Fool For Love before he did Moonlighting or Die Hard; I saw Bronson Pinchot play George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? while he was a Yale undergraduate (the Nick was David Hyde Pierce); Marcia Cross may have been a crazed denizen of Melrose Place and a Desperate Housewife, but she’s a Juilliard grad who did Shakespeare before achieving fame. But when Henry Winkler is announced in a new play, three decades after his signature television show ended, despite his Yale School of Drama education and prior stage work, all we hear is that “The Fonz” will be on Broadway.

The trope of “stars bringing their luster to the theatre” is insulting all around: it implies that the person under discussion is more celebrity than actor and it also suggests that there is insufficient radiance in theatre when no one in the cast has ever been featured in People or Us. By the same token, there’s media that won’t cover theatre at all unless there’s a name performer involved, so ingrained is celebrity culture, so theatre sometimes has to look to stars if it wishes to achieve any broad-based awareness. But the presence of stars on stage is nothing new, be it Broadway or summer stock; we may regret that theatre alone can rarely create a star, as it could 50 years ago, but we must get over that, because the ship has sailed.

There’s certainly a healthy skepticism when a star comes to the theatre with no stage background, and it’s not unwarranted. But I think that there are very few directors, artistic directors or producers who intentionally cast someone obviously unable to play a role solely to capitalize upon their familiarity or fame. In a commercial setting, casting Julia Roberts proved to be box office gold, even if she was somewhat overmatched by the material, but she was not a ludicrous choice; at the not-for-profit Roundabout, also on Broadway, Anne Heche proved herself a superb stage comedienne with Twentieth Century, following her very credible turn in Proof, before which her prior stage experience was in high school. Perhaps they might have tested the waters in smaller venues, but once they’re stars, its almost impossible to escape media glare no matter where they go.

The spikier members of the media also like to suggest, or declare, that when a famous actor works on stage after a long hiatus, or for the first time, it’s an attempt at career rehabilitation. This is yet another insult. Ask any actor, famous or not, and they can attest to theatre being hard work; ask a stage novice, well-known or otherwise, and they are almost reverent when they talk about the skill and stamina required to tell a story from beginning to end night after night after night. Theatre is work, and what success onstage can do is reestablish the public’s – and the press’s –recognition of fundamental talent. Judith Light may have become a household name from the sitcom Who’s The Boss, but it’s Wit, Lombardi and Other Desert Cities that have shown people how fearless and versatile she is. That’s not rehabilitation, it’s affirmation.

I should note that there’s a chicken-and-egg issue here: are producers putting stars in shows in order to get press attention, or is the media writing about stars because that’s who producers are putting in shows? There’s no doubt that famous names help a show’s sales, particularly the pre-sale, so in the commercial world, they’re a form of (not entirely reliable) insurance. And Broadway is, with a few exceptions, meant to achieve a profit. But it’s also worth noting that star casting, which most associate with Broadway, has a trickle down effect: in New York, we certainly see stars, often younger, hipper ones, in Off-Broadway gigs, and it’s not so unusual for big names to appear regionally as well, cast for their skills, but helping the theatres who cast them to draw more attention. Star casting is now embedded in theatre – which is all the more reason why it shouldn’t be treated as something remarkable, even as we may regret its encroachment upon the not-for-profit portion of the field. But they have tickets to sell too.

Look, it’s not as if any star needs me to defend them. The proof is ultimately found onstage; it is the run-up to those appearances that I find so condescending and snide. It shouldn’t be news that famous people might wish to work on stage, nor should any such appearance be viewed as crass commercialism unless it enters the realm of the absurd, say Lady Gaga as St. Joan. If stars get on stage, they should be judged for their work, and reviewed however positively or negatively as their performance may warrant.

I’m not naive enough to think attention won’t be paid to famous people who tread the boards, and I wish it needn’t come at the expense of work for the extraordinary talents who haven’t, for one reason or another, achieved comparable fame. I don’t need a star to lure me to a show, but I’m not your average audience member. Perhaps if the media didn’t kowtow to the cult of celebrity, if they realized how theatre is a launch pad for many, a homecoming for others, and a career for vastly more, theatre might be valued more as both a springboard for fame and a home for those with the special gift of performing live. So when the famous appear in the theatre, let’s try to forget their celebrity or stardom, stop trying to parse their motives, and try, if only for a few hours, to appreciate them solely, for good or ill, as actors.

A map that includes most of the Broadway theaters, but it isn’t quite large enough and not completely up to date.

Having previously taken a quantitative look at new Broadway musicals and musical revivals, it was inevitable that I would look at play production on Broadway as well. So as not to bury my lede, let me begin with the list of playwrights who have had five or more productions on Broadway in the last 20 years, new or revival.

William Shakespeare (13)

Arthur Miller (12)

Tennessee Williams (11)

Eugene O’Neill (9)

Noel Coward, David Mamet, Neil Simon, Tom Stoppard (8)

August Wilson (7)

Anton Chekhov, David Hare, Terrence McNally, George Bernard Shaw (6)

Brian Friel, Richard Greenberg, Donald Margulies, Martin McDonagh (5)

What is immediately noticeable among these 17 playwrights? They’re all male. There is but a single playwright of color. Eight are not American. Six were dead during the 20 years examined. If anyone is looking for hard and fast data about the lack of diversity among the playwrights getting work on Broadway, this would be Exhibit A.

Now let’s get detailed. As indicated, I studied the past 20 years on Broadway, from the 1992-93 season through the just completed 2011-12 season; my study of musicals had covered 37 seasons, going back to the year that Chicago and A Chorus Line debuted. The 20 year mark for plays begins with the season that saw Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches premiere, arguably a work as significant a landmark in playwriting as A Chorus Line was to musicals.

The 20 year mark also encompasses significant shifts in production by not-for-profits on Broadway: Roundabout started out at the Criterion Center and by last year had three Broadway venues (American Airlines, Stephen Sondheim, Studio 54); Manhattan Theatre Club rehabilitated the Biltmore and began using it as their mainstage (later renaming it the Samuel G. Friedman); and Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre grew and withered, as the more firmly established Circle in the Square evolved from producing company to commercial venue. Throughout, Lincoln Center Theatre produced in the Vivian Beaumont, considered a Broadway theatre virtually since it opened in the 60s, and continued its practice of renting commercial houses when a big hit monopolized the Beaumont. Commercial productions continued throughout this time in more than 30 other theatres, as did some productions by other not-for-profit producers without a regular home or policy of producing on Broadway.

So what is the scorecard of play production, both commercial and not for profit on Broadway over these last 20 years? 397 productions by 228 playwrights, with more than a quarter of the plays produced written by the 17 men listed above.

What of women? There were 43 women whose work appeared on Broadway in these two decades, but none saw more than three plays produced. The two women with three plays were Yasmina Reza and Elaine May (the latter’s count includes a one-act); four women each had two plays on the boards (Edna Ferber, Pam Gems, Theresa Rebeck and Wendy Wasserstein). Collectively, they make up slightly under 1/5 of the playwrights produced.

Because I have often been party to debates about whether or not not-for-profit companies should be considered part of Broadway, I ran the numbers without the productions of the five companies singled out above (RTC, MTC, LCT, NAT and CITS). Had they not been producing, and had no one taken their place, Broadway would have seen only 253 plays produced in those 20 years, nearly 1/3 less than the actual number, a significant reduction in activity.

And what of the balance between new plays and revivals? The 20 year breakdown of all productions showed 179 new plays and 218 revivals, but with the five not-for-profits are removed, it’s 140 new plays and 113 revivals. That shift is quite notable: the not-for-profit theatres on Broadway have only been responsible for 39 new works on Broadway over 20 years, but they’re the source of 105 revivals. That’s not so shocking, when you consider that NAT and CITS were focused on classics and that Roundabout’s original mission was solely classical work as well. But it certainly shows that without the not-for-profits, fewer vintage shows, whether from the recent or distant past, would have worn the banner of Broadway.

Now let’s go back to the list of playwrights with five or more plays on Broadway in the past 20 years, taking out the not-for-profit work. The results are:

David Mamet, Arthur Miller, William Shakespeare (8)

Neil Simon (7)

August Wilson (6)

Noel Coward, Martin McDonagh, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams (5)

We drop from 17 playwrights making the cut to only 9, but its interesting to note that playwrights like Miller, O’Neill, Shakespeare, Williams and Wilson remain well represented, even in my theoretical scenario. As for women, the number produced drops to 31, roughly a quarter of the full count.

So what does this tell us, besides being fodder for trivia quizzes and feeding the current affinity for facts via list? It shows us that commercial producers are not all trendy money grubbers without interest in our theatrical past, since a number of classic works were produced under their aegis. That said, without the not-for-profits, the number of revivals overall would have been cut in half, showing how essential they are in maintaining Broadway’s heritage. For new work, the not-for-profits of Broadway play a smaller role to be sure, but its worth noting that a number of major playwrights wouldn’t have had any plays on Broadway in the past two decades without the not for profits, including Philip Barry, Caryl Churchill, William Inge, Warren Leight, Craig Lucas, Moliere, Sarah Ruhl, George Bernard Shaw, Regina Taylor and Wendy Wasserstein. In a startling irony, Sophocles and Euripides both were produced only commercially.

By its methodology, this glimpse at the past two decades inevitably shortchanges the influence of the not-for-profit theatre. It does not consider how many of the plays were commissioned by, developed by and first produced in not-for-profit companies in New York, nationally, or abroad, but many of the new plays in this period have those roots (and unlike musicals, plays are more typically produced without commercial enhancement in not-for-profits, with producers coming in later once a show has begun to achieve recognition). Because I didn’t have reliable resources to parse the partnership and capitalization of each Broadway production, shows from theatres like The Atlantic, New York Theatre Workshop and The Public, or even MTC pre-Biltmore, haven’t been categorized under not-for-profit, though they rightly might be; I believe based on anecdotal observance that (with sufficient time resources and manpower) we would see not-for-profits directly responsible for originating even more new plays.

It would be easy to argue that this study is at best intriguing but limited. After all, on a financial level, plays account for a marginal percentage of Broadway revenues, with musicals yielding the lion’s share of the grosses. One can also argue that Broadway, particularly when it comes to plays, is hardly representative of the full quantity and variety of new work being done in America, an opinion I hold myself.

But so long as Broadway remains a beacon for tourists, for theatre buffs and for the mainstream media, so long as it holds a fabled spot in the national and international imagination, plays on Broadway remain important, even if they are marginalized or unrepresentative. With all of the challenges that face producers, commercial or not-for-profit, who wish to mount plays, the public perception of American drama is still weighted towards Broadway, even if its mix of new plays and classics is but the tip of the iceberg, financially and creatively.  We can debate whether Broadway is deserving of its still-iconic status, but so long as it exists, understanding exactly where plays fit in the equation can only serve to help them hold their ground, in the best interest of shows which don’t sing or dance, and the writers who are so committed to them.

*   *   *

Notes on methodology, beyond what’s explained in the text:

1. Although I have not provided the spreadsheets I constructed in order to work out my statistics, which list every play and playwright produced in the past 20 years, I feel it is incumbent upon me to name the female writers who have been produced on Broadway, with the hope that in the next 20 years, this list will make up a much greater percentage of writers produced: Jane Bowles, Carol Burnett, Caryl Churchill, Lydia R. Diamond, Joan Didion, Helen Edmundson, Margaret Edson, Eve Ensler, Nora Ephron, Edna Ferber, Pam Gems, Alexandra Gersten, Ruth Goetz, Frances Goodrich, Katori Hall, Carrie Hamilton, Lorraine Hansberry, Lillian Hellman, Marie Jones, Sarah Jones, Lisa Kron, Bryony Lavory, Michele Lowe, Clare Booth Luce, Emily Mann, Elaine May, Heather McDonald, Joanna Murray-Smith, Marsha Norman, Suzan-Lori Parks, Lucy Prebble, Theresa Rebeck, Yasmina Reza, Joan Rivers, Sarah Ruhl, Diane Shaffer, Claudia Shear, Anna Deavere Smith, Regina Taylor, Trish Vradenburg, Jane Wagner, Wendy Wasserstein, and Mary Zimmerman.

2. In the case of shows with multiple parts (Angels In America, The Norman Conquests, The Coast of Utopia), I have classified each as a single work.

3. Translations, adaptations, new versions – these are a particular challenge, since the contribution of the translator or adapter requires a value judgment on each and every effort. Consequently, I have chosen consistency, not artistry; for this study, only the original author received credit. Consequently, while David Ives is credited as the author of Venus in Fur, which is adapted from a book, only Mark Twain gets credit for Is He Dead?, even though I happen to know David’s contributions were significant on making the latter play stageworthy. Christopher Hampton is not recognized for his translations of Yasmina Reza’s plays, however elegant they may be, and I have ceded The Blue Room to Schnitzler, since it is firmly rooted in La Ronde. And so on.

4. Special events and one-person shows were judged according to whether, in my subjective opinion, they could reasonably and sensibly be performed by someone other than the author/performer. As a result, Billy Crystal’s 700 Sundays is not included in my figures, while Chazz Palmintieri’s A Bronx Tale makes the cut.

5. The number of plays produced annually on Broadway consistently outnumbers the  musicals, despite, as already noted, musicals accounting for the lion’s share of Broadway revenues. I suspect, but haven’t the resources to confirm, that the number of overall performances of plays is also vastly less than the number of musical performances in a given year; numerous limited runs of 14 to 16 weeks for plays, even if there are more of them, are surely overwhelmed by the ongoing juggernauts of The Book of Mormon, Wicked, and others.

6. A handful of plays were written by writing teams: Kaufman and Ferber, Lawrence and Lee, etc. Each playwright was recognized in their own right. The same was true for the rare omnibus productions by separate authors, such as Relatively Speaking from Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen.

7. I would have liked to break out the racial diversity of Broadway playwrights over the past two decades, but I had no reliable source for determining the heritage of every author, or how they may self-identify, therefore I felt it best not to guess.

8. It should go without saying that there are a number of playwrights who also work on musicals; if there is any barrier between the forms, it is highly permeable. My studies have by their nature been bifurcated between plays and musicals, but there is more fluidity than these articles might suggest.

9. When classifying plays as new or revival, in cases where they play had not been previously produced on Broadway but had prior life from years or decades earlier, I opted for the Tony Awards’ guidelines of new work being that which has not entered the standard repertory. So Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen, produced with great success Off-Broadway and regionally over much of the period studied, was considered a revival.

10. I have drawn my data from the well-organized Playbill Vault, which expedited my research immeasurably. My thanks to those who assembled it.

Data doesn’t lie, they say, which is why I decided to take a data-based look at Broadway musicals. In the first part of my inquiry, I was trying to see whether musicals based on movies and “jukebox” musicals using scores created for other media were crowding out new, wholly original musicals. My conclusions were essentially that: movie material and even, within reason, existing music, are not scourges of Broadway, but the limited number of new musicals produced in any year pose the greater threat to sustaining the form with original books, music and lyrics. Logically, the next step was to look at revivals and their role in the ecosystem.

The conventional wisdom is that we’re overrun with revivals. Many feel that the musical theatre past is constantly being dredged up on Broadway: three Gypsy revivals in less than 20 years; two Sweeney Todd revivals in the barely 30 years since the show’s debut, with a current London production eyeing New York; three Guys and Dolls in just over a 30 year span. This is the sort of evidence that’s given of Broadway going back to the same musical well over and over. But those are the exceptions, not the rule.

Once again looking at the period from 1975-76 through the 2011-2012 Broadway season, a span of 37 years, I found 138 revivals. This includes return visits by Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly  and Yul Brynner in The King and I (twice each in 20 seasons, with Pearl Bailey and Lou Diamond Phillips toplining third incarnations), though recurring Broadway stands like those of Channing and Brynner  are now rare. My count of 143 also includes the new trend for returning holiday entertainments (for this study, the second runs of How The Grinch Stole Christmas and White Christmas are revivals). But still, that yields only 138 revivals, for an average of only four per season (3.73 to be precise).  And in fact, of those 37 years, only five of them ever saw seasons with more than five revivals, balanced against two seasons with no revival musicals and four with but a single one.

Has there been a huge jump in musical revivals of late? While 2011-12 and 2009-10 each saw seven revivals, the year in between saw only two. The years with seven  are the anomalies, not a trend, at least not yet.  And while there was a marked lull in the mid-80s, revivals were always part of the landscape; in the three earliest years that I examined, the revival count was four, eight, and five. So everything is hunky-dory, right?

In recent years, there’s been a remarkable consistency to the number of new musical productions, be it new work or revival: since 2002-03, there have never been less than 12 new musical productions on Broadway, nor more than 15; the 37-year average is 12.5. What has happened is a seemingly natural homeostasis: in years with lots of new musicals, there have been fewer revivals, and vice versa. While it’s impossible to know which book houses first, new shows or revivals, and surely it varies show to show, year to year, it does demonstrate that the limited number of Broadway venues, narrowed by long-running hits and further reduced by the number of musical-optimal theatres, has created a limit on overall musical production. Chicken (new musicals) or egg (revivals)? I can’t say whether one controls the other. But together, they seem to have found their level. And it doesn’t add up to an enormous amount of new musical productions of either kind.

Since new Broadway musical theatres are unlikely to be built, advocates seeking to raise the level of new musicals above the nine-per-season average might hope that theatre owners would exercise artistic control and favor new works, but that’s a naive position.  Theatre owners will book the shows with the best prospect of running, whatever their vintage. There might also be a desire to lobby producers to focus on new work, but given the ever increasing costs of Broadway, reviving proven work can seem even safer than new shows with familiar titles drawn from films or scores assembled from the work of road tested composers. In either case, the deciding factor will often be money: those who actually assemble a production and manage to assemble the financing as well will book the few available theatres. And as for success? Once again, a key element is whether they are actually done at all well.

Personally, I would not like to see revivals vanish from Broadway and, finding that they rarely exceed four a season (perhaps 10% of an entire Broadway season), think they’re at a level which doesn’t do any damage. Broadway does have the ability to play a single production for a very large audience  and, as a draw for New Yorkers and tourists alike, it seems proper that our musical theatre heritage maintain a place where it first made its mark. My concern is that with an average of only nine new musicals a year, and of course fewer that which succeed, the pool of musicals worthy of being revived is growing awfully slowly – especially since the biggest hits now seem to run for a generation in their first appearance. Since the producing and critical community tend to express the sentiment that we should only see a work revived once in a generation, especially if the prior incarnation was a hit, the options narrow.

I think revivals actually create a greater problem outside of New York for the overall health of the form. Let me explain. In the mid-70s, when my survey starts, musicals were primarily the purview of Broadway, a range of civic light opera companies, summer stock, and the rare regional theatre like Goodspeed (where I once worked). Since that time, the regional theatres that emerged beginning in the 60s as dramatic companies have discovered the lure of the musical, and it is now rare to find the large regional theatre that doesn’t program one musical a year (at least). But I will hazard a guess (I’m not backed by data now) that the tendency is for more of the regional companies to do known commodities than to undertake wholly new shows. In their seasons, the musical slot is the budget balancer, the show that pays for new plays and large classic; new musicals primarily appear when a commercial producer wants a low-cost try-out and dangles enhancement funds as a lure, or when the new tuner is so small in scale that it remains affordable. When it comes to new musicals, are our largest not-for-profit theatres risk averse?

As before, that is not to suggest that there are not worthy organizations dedicated to the development and growth of the new musical repertoire. The question is how much of that material finds ongoing life, and begins to be recognized as a work considered part of the popular musical repertoire?

So to come back to the concern I expressed at the end of my last post: how will new musicals find audiences and how will their creators make lives in this business? If Broadway has but nine slots a year, if not-for-profit companies primarily seek the tried and true, how will new musicals develop creatively and develop a public profile? There needs to be a new model for musical production, one which doesn’t rely solely on Broadway for artistic or commercial success and affirmation. America needs more places to do new musicals, in a variety of styles, in which Broadway is simply one alternative, not the pinnacle from which all success derives. To achieve this would require a major reinvention of the ecosystem I referred to at the top of this post.

But musical revivals are in no way hogging the Broadway spotlight, and as with Shakespeare, each generation’s great performers should get the chance to play great roles. And perhaps those classics should be celebrated, because they can often show the current generation what craft and talent in the form has looked like in the past, in order to inform the future.

*   *   *

Notes on process: as noted at the end of my first blog on the subject of new Broadway musicals, I am working with information drawn from multiple sources. To reduce inconsistencies, I completely re-charted the seasons, relying solely on the Playbill Vault. As a result, my number of new musicals crept up; what I originally counted as 309 became 322, as I worked through such fine distinctions as “musical vs. play with music” and discovered that a forgotten work such as Censored Scenes from King Kong should have been called a musical.  Consequently, the annual average number of new musicals shifted from a bit over eight to closer to nine, which is why there’s not a precise match with the prior post. I have no doubt that were someone else to undertake this review, or even were I to go over it another time, the counts might shift slightly yet again. But as I said in the notes to the first piece, the ratios and trends remain consistent. And those are what tell the tale.