“Mr. Roth,” the tweet went, “What kind of system is needed to feed the truly great theatre all over America to Broadway?”

Until I saw that, I had no intention of writing a semi-sequel to my blog post of last week, “This Blog is Prior to Broadway.” But despite the fact that I am not Jordan Roth of Jujamcyn Theatres, for whom the original tweet was intended, I feel compelled to put in my two cents on this topic, since I began working in American not-for-profit theatres in 1983, during my junior year of college, and have spent the past seven years in the Broadway environs as head of the American Theatre Wing.

There’s no question that despite all rational arguments, resident theatres dream of getting a show to Broadway and having it become a big hit. The dream was instilled in the hearts of many when Arena’s Stage’s production of The Great White Hope was, by general assent, the first show to make the journey from a regional production to a Broadway landmark. It is a trip that has been made many times, both successfully and unsuccessfully. In my own experience, I have had the opportunity to see three plays on which I worked and dearly loved (and several others less adored) make the journey to New York (one to Off-Broadway) with varying degrees of success: Our Country’s Good (critical success but commercial failure), Marvin’s Room (critical hit, and I don’t actually know how it did commercially), and Stand-Up Tragedy (critically lambasted and a fast flop).

Since last week I elucidated the reasons why I worry about theatres that dream of and promote shows as prior to Broadway, let me more directly address the idea of regular berths on Broadway (or even in New York) for regional productions.

1. It’s been tried before. Not that prior failure negates future success, but I can think of two efforts that were particularly friendly to shows from resident companies, and neither lasted.

In 1985, the Joyce Theatre Foundation hosted a summer series, the American Theatre Exchange Festival, of regional shows, each with a four-week run: Season’s Greetingsfrom The Alley, Faulkner’s Bicycle from Yale Rep, and In The Belly of the Beast from the Mark Taper Forum. Interestingly, when I mentioned this festival recently to Cora Cahan, who ran the Joyce at the time, her response was one of surprise; I believe she said she’d forgotten about it. But she elucidated on some reasons why it didn’t work, which I’ll fold into my thoughts herein. (You can hear her on this edition of Downstage Center. )

In the early 90s, there was a plan created called The Broadway Alliance, which was designed to reduce the cost threshold which might be keeping certain works from Broadway. Only four shows were ever produced under this plan, which had achieved concessions from all of the unions but also capped a show’s capitalization in order to qualify; to my recollection, the limit was $400,000. The two regional shows that did make it to Broadway under this plan were the aforementioned production of Our Country’s Good, from Hartford Stage, and The Speed of Darkness, from the Goodman. The former ran for 48 regular performances, the latter for 36. Skimping doesn’t make for success on Broadway.

In addition, a stand-alone project seeking a downtown berth, designed to import productions from resident theatres, the American National Theatre, was trumpeted by the New York Times in September 2003 as a $170 million, three-theatre project in lower Manhattan. More than seven years later, there is no such building nor to my knowledge has the organization behind it imported any productions.

2. The theatres are full. Even though we’re just weeks from the annual spate of January closings, which every year is bemoaned as a sign that Broadway is unsound, as if such mass closings had never happened before, those theatres will be filled again by April. If any of those shows opt to not go forward, there’s probably a backup booking for every single theatre, and in some cases, backups to the backups. This is not the 1980s, when we saw the Mark Hellinger sold to become a church, and owning theatres is, in part, a real estate business. No one rents space cheaply when demand is high, and no one is likely to be charitable when there’s money to be made.

3. There are already resident theatres on Broadway. While the term regional doesn’t apply, we now have three not-for-profit companies, operating on LORT contracts, with their own Broadway houses: Roundabout with three and Manhattan Theatre Club and Lincoln Center Theatre with one each (LCT also frequently rents Broadway houses when the Beaumont has a long-runner on its stage, such as South Pacific); Second Stage is slated to join that cohort soon. Combine the output of those three theatres with shows that start Off-Broadway in not-for-profits and then make the move onto the Great White Way (a journey pioneered with great success by The Public Theatre with A Chorus Line and sustained today by a plethora of shows from The Public alone), and the kind of work that regionals/not-for-profits do around the country is hardly alien to Broadway. Further, with short-run, often star-led limited runs of works by such resident staples as Mamet, Williams and Miller, it’s hard to say that there’s a notable distinction between the kind of work seen in major regional productions or on Broadway, save for the big musicals.

4. Press and Producers Rarely Travel. To get a regional show to Broadway, one must find a producer who wants to champion the show and take it on as a major commitment. Unfortunately, producers aren’t flying to theatres around the country constantly checking out every possible new play and revival for their next Broadway success. And unless you’re in a major city and you have a preponderance of positive reviews by long established critics (whose numbers are in decline), your own entreaties aren’t likely to cause anyone to jump on a plane unless you already have a relationship with them.

As for “national press” discovering your work and bringing it to the attention of New York bound producers, your only real option is luring The Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout to see your show (and Terry regularly publishes his guidelines for what he’s likely to be interested in). While The New York Times ventures out of town on occasion (though most frequently to the Berkshires, Chicago or London, it seems), it’s rare even for the country’s largest newspaper, USA Today, to see work outside of New York; attention from television and radio is even rarer. There are many reasons for this, but as old-line mass media is fighting for its own place in the American consciousness, covering regional theatre is not a key point in their strategy, and thus a one-time tool is blunted. Internet-based writing has yet to achieve the same level of influence.

5. Broadway is really expensive. With plays costing between $2 and $3 million dollars to produce, and musicals typically ranging from $6 to $18 million (Spider-Man is an outlier), quality is not enough. There are indeed great plays, new and classic, produced around the country, but do they have enough inherent appeal to draw between six thousand and twelve thousand theatergoers on a consistent weekly basis long enough to recoup the investment that goes into bringing them to Broadway? A smash hit resident run in a large house might drawn 20 to 30 thousand audience members; that equals roughly three weeks on Broadway.

6. Planning for a regional hit is really hard. Frankly, we rarely (if ever) know what will be a hit on our own stages, let alone on Broadway. Until productions are up and running, there can be no judgment, and since Broadway theatres aren’t sitting idle, and even a New York not-for-profit can’t afford to hold slots open while waiting for a regional success to crop up, planning a New York stage schedule around what may come to pass is problematic, under commercial or non-commercial producing guidelines. In addition, runs are fairly short at resident companies, so there’s very little time to get the word out once you’re sure you do have something particularly noteworthy on your stage.

I could go on, with my brutal tough love for you all. And no one should misconstrue anything I’ve said as being anti-Broadway. I’ve repeatedly confessed to the thrill it has given me in the past, and I have seen extraordinary work there. It continues to be a magnet for major talent, who like many of you, have been seduced by the Lullaby of Broadway. And on occasion, it has provided windfalls of publicity, pride and money for not-for-profit resident companies whose work has made the trip there successfully.

So if Broadway is still your desire, let me speak to things you might consider, and explore, in order to make the trip.

A. Are you on mission? Many theatres around the country include in their mission statements phrases like “create theatre of a national stature” or “contribute to the national repertoire.” These are admirable, but presumably they are preceded, both in order of appearance and priority by a phrase about “serving their local community” or some defined constituency therein. So before you set your sights on Broadway, make sure your board of directors or trustees are truly behind any effort in that direction but with measured expectations of success, lest you find that your Broadway dreams undermine your relationship with your core audience, which must sustain you whether you produce the next Rent or the next Bobbi Boland.

B. Is the show likely to engage the hearts and minds of the New York press and theatre cognoscenti? There are plenty of shows that are brilliantly suited to regional theatres, and please audiences enormously, but simply don’t have the style or subject that’s likely to get past the gatekeepers of opinion in The Big Apple. That’s no insult to the work, your company or your audience, and their success on your stages are a testament to the perceptiveness of your artistic staff. But be brutal about whether the piece can compete in the crowded and often elitist New York marketplace, even though work on Broadway has to appeal to the largest possible audience. Yes, it’s a paradox, and it’s hard to judge your own work dispassionately, but it’s a necessity.

Also, in the case of revivals, check to see when the show you’re hoping to move was last on Broadway. It’s been roughly 25 years since Broadway last saw The Merchant of Venice, but the current one has Al Pacino and the last one had Dustin Hoffman. You’re not likely to land your Merchant on Broadway anytime soon, since America, unlike England, seems to think we can only have great plays in our commercial venues (or even in New York) every 10 to 20 years, instead of annually.

C. Take on commercial partners. I wrote last week about the double-edged sword of producing shows at your theatre that already have been optioned commercially, so I won’t rehash it, except to say that there are plenty of commercial producers seeking berths on resident stages in order to try out work or get it on its feet more economically. I refer you first back to item A above, and then, if the work itself (not the prospect of Broadway glory or the hope of enhancement money) truly appeals, make your decision accordingly. But don’t rent your stage to the highest bidder, and be sure you do full due diligence on the background of any prospective partner before you figuratively get into bed with them.

D. Find a New York or tri-state area not-for-profit with whom you can partner.Unless you are going to self-produce, the challenge outlined above in item 4 is significantly mitigated if you get the show closer to New York so it becomes easier for “the right people” to see it. Shows frequently play Off-Broadway or even Off-Off-Broadway and then are moved to Broadway when the New York press embrace them.Avenue Q didn’t leap from the barn at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center to Broadway; it came to New York first as a co-production of The Vineyard Theatre and The New Group (though in that case, there were commercial producers behind it all along).Marvin’s Room had been acclaimed in Chicago, but had no legs until the New York Times saw it at Hartford, after which it went to Playwrights Horizons and then to a commercial Off-Broadway run; Wit had a comparable experience as it went from South Coast Rep to a wholly separate production at Long Wharf, which in turn went to MCC Theatre and then to the Union Square and a Pulitzer Prize.

Don’t be afraid to share your show with other not-for-profits to give it a chance at a New York berth. You’ll get reviews to bring back home regardless of the ultimate outcome, and your risk will be vastly less.

E. Do it yourself. I’m personally not keen on this, but if you live in a large enough community, you might just be able to stir up enough local pride and money to raise funds to produce a show in New York on your own. Let’s remember, there may be plenty of folks who loved the show on your stage who believe it should reach a wider audience, and may pull out money to support such an effort that they might not have donated to you, since with a commercial production, there’s at least the prospect of financial gain. After all, these are the people who saw the effect the show had in your theatre. But if you choose this route, be very careful that you make no promises of success or return, and indeed are bluntly honest about the prospect of financial success for any Broadway show; that should commit to future donations even if the commercial effort fails. You don’t want these people abandoning you altogether if the trip to Broadway goes sour.

In addition, unless you have key staff with prior Broadway experience of note, hire highly recommended people to run the production for you in New York. A not-for-profit artistic or managing director may be brilliant in that context, but if they aren’t experienced commercial hands, this is not the time to afford them on-the-job training.

Broadway is our Field of Dreams; there’s no denying it, and it’s great to have an icon that makes the idea of American theatre an international beacon. But Broadway cannot, and never really has, represented every type of theatre, and in a country as large as ours, why should we restrict our imaginations to 40 theatres in Manhattan? We are a very large country geographically, politically, economically and aesthetically. Our literally hundreds of theatre companies and thousands upon thousands of theatre artists do themselves a disservice if they measure success by a single metric.

There are periodic calls for a National Theatre for the United States, but to make (or to allow) a single venue to carry that imprimatur is even narrower than Broadway dreams. All theatre in America, commercial or not-for-profit, is our national theatre and success on Broadway should be no more or less legitimate an achievement than success on any stage. I am as proud to have been part of shows that never reached Broadway and played to perhaps 18,000 people in Hartford CT as I am of shows that went to New York and died a quick death, or those that made the same trip and have subsequently been produced across the country.

But please, make theatre for your audience first and foremost, support the work of artists less known than those who intermittently reach Broadway; that’s what resident theatre, and presumably your company, was founded to do. And if your work makes it to Broadway (or Los Angeles or Seattle or Chicago or…), I hope I get the opportunity to see it, and I look forward to applauding it.

This post originally appeared on the American Theatre Wing website.

If you are an inveterate consumer of theatre news, scanner of theatrical advertising in any U.S. market other than New York, or theatrical journalist bombarded by press releases, you have invariably run across the phrase “prior to Broadway,” probably many times. Indeed, I nominate the phrase “prior to Broadway” as perhaps the most flagrantly and falsely used – and accepted – promotional phrase in theatre hucksterism. I would also say it is perhaps the most damaging.

Now I am not suggesting that every invocation of the phrase is intrinsically false. It originated in the days when engagements in cities like Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia and Washington DC were frequent and true out of town tryouts, productions that were on a direct path to New York, and it has many modern analogues: The Producers’ pre-New York run in Chicago or The Scottsboro Boys’ sojourn at The Guthrie Theatre are two recent, truthful examples. In these cases, if the shows were promoted as playing prior to Broadway, they were stating a fact, as they indeed had all of the necessary arrangements made in order to move them into Manhattan after their out of town runs.

What bothers me are the countless shows that announce themselves as prior to Broadway without having raised a dime or having received a commitment from a Broadway landlord to rent the production a theatre. Yet it happens all the time and is, I fear, swallowed whole by press and audiences.

On a purely semantic level, one could claim that any literary material that has not previously been presented on Broadway is therefore “prior to Broadway,” since the Great White Way might be in its future. That is why you can express all due skepticism at the title of this piece (and please, feel free), but the claim is not ever absolutely impossible, no matter how improbable it may be (and composing teams are welcome to call me).

Let me posit some of the dangers of the “prior to Broadway” (from here on, “PTB”) gambit:

1. Declaring a show from the outset as being PTB may be nothing more than a fishing expedition. In my days as a press agent, the most desirable place to announce a forthcoming show was in “the Friday column” (it had various names) on page two of the Friday arts section of The New York Times. Most weeks in those pre-Internet days, The Column would carry at least one such announcement. Some came to pass, but others were, according to one of my former bosses, placed by producers who he considered to be “producing in The Column.” That is to say, they would float an idea in the paper and if their phone rang enough in the ensuing days, then they might begin work on such a project in earnest. Today, when a press release can be instantly rendered fact by multiple news sites and subsequent propagation by Facebook, Twitter and the like, the column is no longer required, just a reasonably reliable publicist with an e-mail account. But PTB (or its cousin, “Broadway-bound”), lives on and on. The Apprentice, The Musical, anyone?

2. PTB creates expectations that may not be fair to the play or musical to which it is applied. The moment a show declares its Broadway destination (or aspiration) it is looked at through a new lens. Critics and audiences alike become show doctors, dramaturges, prospective investors and commercial soothsayers, viewing any such production not simply for its inherent qualities in the current incarnation, but prognosticating as to its future chances and pondering what elements should or should not make the trip to Manhattan. Such pressure is ultimately antithetical to artistic development, since the project is thereafter seen only through eyes looking for commercial feasibility.

3. Theatres that regularly trumpet shows as PTB and have some successfully play there create false expectations for all of their shows. If your audiences and local media become accustomed to Broadway transfers that you repeatedly trumpet, at some point they imagine that PTB is the goal of every show you do, and the expectations are there regardless of whether they are intended or claimed. To be sure, there are a number of not-for-profits that have achieved popular recognition and financial remuneration from their transfers, but that only serves to make shows which don’t equally succeed to be perceived, even tacitly, as somehow less than worthy than the others, even when the audience has a great time. Broadway should be a bonus, not a raison d’etre.

4. Some producers come to believe that all not-for-profit organizations hunger for PTB product. Frankly, there are plenty of theatres that would love to be the home to an out-of-town commercial tryout, to raise their profile and perhaps their coffers. But I suspect that these days, it is the promise of enhancement money and star talents that lead to commercial projects landing on not-for-profit stages, diminishing and demeaning the mission and perception of the not-for-profits. The days when a show like The Great White Hope or ‘night, Mother were produced by not-for-profit theatres and discovered by the commercial theatre are in the minority.

I will never forget a cold call I received from a producer offering their show to Geva Theatre in Rochester, immediately stating the amount of money they could offer to support the production. The call was surreal on many levels, among them a) that the call was made not to the artistic director (who chose our productions) but to me, the managing director, under the assumption that the offer of funding would make me an ally in advocating the project to the a.d. and b) that it came from someone I had dated very briefly a few years earlier, who made no connection between our dinners and the name on her call list of regional theatres until I reminded her (but perhaps the latter issue results from other factors as well).

But not-for-profits are hardly naïve. Indeed, I have heard of theatres so eager for PTB engagements that they all but have rate cards at the ready, in order to quote their required enhancement price when producers come calling, regardless of actual need.

5. A show that garners PTB attention, albeit naturally, during an out of town run can place stresses on both the theatre and the show. The moment Broadway buzz begins, expectations change, and the concerns raised in Item 2 come into play. In extreme examples, situations can arise where artists are removed from creative teams while the show is still in a not-for-profit setting, on a show that is open and running, which may be antithetical to the credo of the producing company. I worked a regional show where commercial producers, unnecessarily, informed one member of a five member acting company that the show would be traveling to New York, but that he would not be going with it, yet the actor had to continuing performing for two weeks in the role, knowing that he had been judged commercially less than worthy.

6. Promoting PTB reinforces the notion that theatrical success can only be achieved on Broadway. There are only 40 theatres that are designated as Broadway houses and they are controlled by a handful of individuals or companies. On an annual basis, there are perhaps 35 to 40 new shows in total, in contrast with some 500 to 600 film releases and untold music and book releases. Broadway is a fabled place where great things can happen, and money can be made, but in order to play a Broadway house, a show must jump over countless hurdles, and very few ever will. Theatre as an art form benefits from having a wider horizon for and definition of success.

I cannot deny the allure of reaching Broadway, not simply because the American Theatre Wing’s Tony Awards are a widely recognized symbol of success in that iconic arena. I have also been a part of productions that have gone to Broadway and have felt the thrill of being in that heady maelstrom, even though none of the shows succeeded commercially. But for the sake of artists, I urge producers, commercial and not-for-profit alike, to wield the claim of prior to Broadway very carefully, lest it backfire on them and the artists involved. I urge journalists to get more detail before repeating such a claim, as a protection of your own integrity. And I urge audiences to watch any show thusly labeled as if it were just another night at the theatre, and enjoy it not as a result of its marketing and prospects, but for its own sake, and for your own.

P.S. While I’m harping on shopworn promotional phrases, let me offer another tip. If you ever read publicity materials which summarize a show as being “about the human condition,” you should immediately assume that the project comes off as confusing, at least to the people promoting it, or has content that they are worried will turn off potential audiences, and they’re hiding it. After all, every piece of theatre is about the human condition. Even Cats.

This post originally appeared on the American Theatre Wing website.