Daveed Diggs and the ensemble of Hamilton (photo by Joan Marcus)

I am not a betting man, but if you are reading this column, I would wager that you’ve already listened to the Hamilton original cast recording. Yet given this publication’s UK reader base, and the relatively small number of people who have actually seen Hamilton in comparison to the number of albums sold, I’m also willing to bet that a great number of you haven’t yet seen the show.

I raise this issue not to once again lionize or even analyze Hamilton, but rather to raise the fact that the success of the Hamilton recording, a virtually complete version of the show’s through-sung score, means that a great many people who ultimately see Hamilton will do so while being very familiar with the full text. It’s quite possible they’ll be able to sing along.

To those who say that this has often been true for cast recordings, I would counter that few shows have been recorded so fully. Yes, many people know a musical’s songs before seeing it, and I know of many people who specifically prefer to listen to a score before seeing a show (though I’ve never understood the need). However, for most musicals, songs aren’t all there is. There are, of course, exceptions, such as Les Miserables and Jesus Christ Superstar, but I wonder whether those recordings were as widely heard as Hamilton prior to the shows being seen.

As the second Hamilton company prepares to begin performances in Chicago later this month, and other engagements are announced, it’s fair to say that the story will hold few surprises. Sure, there’s a brief neck-breaking moment that has no auditory presence, but even the story’s final chapter is pretty much a given to those who secure the golden tickets. As for Burr shooting Hamilton, that’s in most US history textbooks, and we probably wouldn’t have a show without it.

This textual familiarity affords a rare opportunity for making an important distinction too often lost on many theatregoers, and certainly on the casual ones, namely the difference between a play (or musical) as text and in production. The foreknowledge not only of the story, but of the very words of the piece, means that what will be new (video clips notwithstanding) is the direction, the set, the lights, the costumes and so on. Even people familiar with pictures and videos of the original Broadway cast will be embracing its physicality for the first time, without the “distraction” of trying to keep up with what is being sung. Yes, some will register vocal variances from the recording, especially with almost all of the original cast gone. Still, the primary focus will be on the non-auditory elements, as what they may have previously imagined is made flesh before them.

Some might be tempted to say that this holds true for Shakespeare plays, given how widely read, taught and seen his ‘greatest hits’ already are. I would counter that, yes, for regular theatregoers there is the opportunity to ultimately compare how productions differ over time, long after we’ve learned when Hamlet will stab Polonius, but I doubt that many people have ever seen Hamlet for the first time only after having committed the majority of the script to memory.

Many modern musicals, when staged indelibly the first time out, tend to form a template by which all subsequent productions – I refer not to companies stemming from the original, but later regional, university and amdram productions – model themselves. It wasn’t until John Doyle’s Sweeney Todd that that show was freed from the visual spirit of Harold Prince’s original staging; Cats is in the process of having its 1980s design re-imprinted on US audiences even as we speak.

So while we are in the full flush of Hamilmania, and long before its theatre audience numbers manage to equal or surpass its cast recording listeners, the show can be a teaching tool, not simply to students but to the public at large. The brains of countless fans have partitioned an area just for the recording masterminded by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Alex Lacamoire, but their visual imagination is still free until they see the work of Thomas Kail and his team. In that space, and for that time, theatregoers have the chance to explore and ultimately understand what it means to realise a production.

And I, having been fortunate enough to have seen Hamilton three times so far, already look forward to how another set of creative artists will reinterpret the show many years from now. If I live that long.

This post originally appeared in The Stage newspaper.

Walking through Covent Garden, I always imagine a site-specific production of My Fair Lady (or Pygmalion), with the opening scene played out on the very ground where it was first conceived to occur. This same flight of fancy has always held for me as well when I visit Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and dream of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin singing in the building where the musical 1776 is set and key moments in American history took place.

So when I received a press release about a concert of the musical Ragtime to be held on Ellis Island, the first stop for some 12 million immigrants to the US in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, I couldn’t scramble fast enough to secure a ticket.

I didn’t stop to fuss over who was producing, directing or performing, I just wanted to be there. I’ve been a great fan of the Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally show since I first heard the original recording. My affection was reinforced when the show landed in New York. The novel on which it’s based, by E.L. Doctorow, is also a favourite; I read it when it was new, while I was in my teens.

As it happens, the production was the vision of a 22-year-old tyro director named Sammi Cannold, heretofore unknown to me. She had apparently made a splash in California directing a site-specific production of the musical Violet on a bus while in college. She’ll repeat the production next year at Massachusetts’ American Repertory Theater.

Cannold’s concert was designed as a test run for a possible full production of Ragtime on Ellis Island. Held in the Registry Room for an audience of some 450 people, it featured a good-sized cast led by Laura Michelle Kelly and Brandon Victor Dixon, with narration and anecdotes from Brian Stokes Mitchell, who created the role of Coalhouse Walker on Broadway.

Perhaps a dozen songs from the expansive score were performed. Despite its relative brevity, the logistics must have been a challenge, since every element had to be brought to the island by ferry, including the audience.

Unlike my imagined My Fair Lady and 1776 productions, Ragtime had a particular resonance for me beyond the obvious historical link: all four of my grandparents came to America through Ellis Island. I watched this fictional story, which could have been that of my own forbears, unfolding in a building that I knew they had walked through, three leaving Tsarist Russia, a fourth having come from Marseille.

I never knew the specifics of their voyages – my parents, now deceased, never told me any details, my maternal grandparents died when I was an infant, and my father’s parents were taciturn and stern, never given to saying any more than absolutely necessary.

Monday’s water voyage to Ellis Island was vastly shorter than that of those arriving by boat more than 100 years ago, but the verisimilitude of approaching by water, of watching the Statue of Liberty loom ever larger, brought site-specific and slightly immersive work to a whole new level. Even without the book scenes acted out, I found myself moved to tears at one point by the confluence of art and history, and had a sense of being closer to my grandparents than I ever was in their lifetimes.

Of course, Ragtime is not the story of a single family of Eastern European immigrants, but also the story of black Americans and white Americans, their lives intertwined by fate, racism and forgiveness.

At a time when our Republican presidential nominee and the Brexiteers want to close borders to immigrants, Ragtime is a vivid reminder that immigrants and migrants are essential parts of the story of almost every country, even if the musical doesn’t represent every race. While its message will likely be evergreen and surely pertinent should a full production be realised, its resonance in 2016, even in a suite of songs, is impossible to miss.

As someone who has not travelled a great deal internationally, I have always said that it is the theatre that has taken me to places I’ve never been, in addition to being a time machine that has taken me to eras other than this one. Ragtime on Ellis Island was, for me, a singular experience in a lifetime of theatregoing as a result of the convergence of the show, the place and my own heritage.

But with 12 million immigrants having passed through its doors, I am surely not alone, as a second-generation American, in appreciating its hold. Ragtime on Ellis Island is a terrific argument for more theatre happening outside of theatres, in places where the stories truly or imaginatively took place, making the case both for the value of art and emphasising the humanity and truth that lies within art, merging invention and reality far from any proscenium.

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.

Michael Countryman, Raffi Barsoumian, Daniel Radcliffe and Reg Rogers in Privacy (photo by Joan Marcus)

Last week, The New York Times reported on a dispute between Theatre for a New Audience, one of the city’s major producers of classical theatre, and the acclaimed director Sam Gold. Gold had withdrawn from directing the company’s planned production of Hamlet, which was to star Oscar Isaac, the stage veteran and rising movie star. Gold cited artistic differences with TFANA’s leadership as the cause for the break, and the company’s artistic director was uncharacteristically public with his dismay. According to the article, Gold was shopping the production to other theatres, notably the Public Theater, and it appeared that he would be taking Isaac with him.

With only one side giving their account of the conflict, it’s impossible to parse what happened when, and who said what to whom. My attention, instead, drifted to the last paragraph of the article, which read: “Theatre for a New Audience ended up quickly making arrangements for a Measure for Measure production, directed by Simon Godwin, for next June. Without a star like Isaac, the theatre projected, Measure would make half the money that Hamlet would have.”

While Hamlet tends to be more popular than Measure in general, the implication of the article’s closing sentence, reflecting the sentiments of TFANA, is that the real loss is that of the ‘name’ performer, which will have an impact on the bottom line. That may well be true, though if it’s important to their planning, certainly the company has choice roles in Measure to offer up to other capable stars. I think Jessica Chastain would be a terrific Isabella, for example.

But should Off-Broadway companies be predicating their health on their ability to attract stars? Aren’t stars the essential ingredient of Broadway, with vastly more seats to fill and at a higher price?

That’s not to say that the idea of stars Off-Broadway is a new concept. I think back to the late Jessica Tandy at the Public in the early 1980s in Louise Page’s Salonika as an example of a legendary actor taking a role in a venue much smaller than the Broadway houses to which she was accustomed. But have we reached a point where the major Off-Broadway companies, subsidised theatres all, need names who have established themselves not just in the theatre, but in television or film as well?

Earlier this year at the Public, we saw Claire Danes, John Krasinski and Hank Azaria in Sarah Burgess’ Dry Powder, and right now Daniel Radcliffe is there in James Graham’s Privacy. This fall will see Rachel Weisz in David Hare’s Plenty. New York Theatre Workshop will have Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo in Othello (also directed by Sam Gold). George Takei will be at Classic Stage in John Doyle’s revival of Pacific Overtures. Matthew Broderick was at the Irish Repertory Theatre in Conor McPherson’s Shining City until just a couple of weeks ago. And so on.

None of this is invoked to question the talents of the actors involved, who absolutely should have the opportunity to do work on stages other than Broadway, even after they’ve achieved a level of fame that might well sustain a commercial run on the Great White Way. It’s also a credit to these companies that stars will forego the income and amenities of film, TV and Broadway to consider working there. The phenomenon is not new, though anecdotally it seems more prevalent than ever before.

But with more TV and film stars seemingly taking leading roles Off-Broadway as well as on, especially when it comes to plays, is the opportunity for solid working actors to be discovered in smaller houses being incrementally lost? After all, this year’s Tony winner for best featured actor in a play, Reed Birney, has only been in Broadway shows four times in his career, and there was a gap of more than 30 years between his first and second opportunity. It was Off-Broadway (and Off-Off-Broadway) that sustained him, but if more stars take leading roles, how will fine actors such as Birney manage to maintain their careers?

There’s no question that it is a special thrill to see a star who is also a superb actor in a small venue. But it is also a thrill to see great actors who may not yet have been ‘discovered’ and to watch younger actors hone their craft in major roles, as was the case with Nina Arianda in Venus in Fur. If the need for stars, that some bemoan is now a driving, even essential, force on Broadway, has trickled down to Off-Broadway as well, theatre may be denying itself the opportunity to create its own stars and falling prey to the drive toward ‘celebrity first’ that has permeated our culture. Indeed, this is reinforced by media outlets that only give coverage to theatre when there are big names on the stage; good work is no longer enough to merit mainstream media attention in many cases.

Off-Broadway seemed a place where theatre was holding out against this, but perhaps it has already lost its standing as a place where talent alone rules, with economic pressures increasingly underlying some creative choices. The question is whether it’s too late to do anything about it, or whether anyone actually wants to.

Reed Birney, Jayne Houdyshell, Cassie Beck, Sarah Steele, Arian Moayed, and Lauren Klein in The Humans (Photo by Joan Marcus)

With Broadway’s seasonal winnowing of the herd well underway – only 29 shows running, with nine closing by the first weekend in September – it seems a good time to look back at what was, and what we know about what will be.

What we know is that in the last Broadway season, only eight new plays opened on Broadway, and only one of them is still running, Stephen Karam’s The Humans. Based on productions with firm opening dates and theatres for the coming season, there are only three new plays on tap so far, and even that’s generously allowing Andrew Upton’s The Present, based on Chekhov, into the group.

It’s not that Broadway will lack for plays, but they’re predominantly revivals, everything from The Little Foxes to The Cherry Orchard to August Wilson’s Jitney – these from our subsidised companies with Broadway homes. Commercially, we’ll see The Front Page, Les Liaisons Dangereuses and The Glass Menagerie.

That’s not to say that more new plays won’t find their way to Broadway, and surely more productions will be announced between now and early January, at which point the season is usually pretty well set. At this time last year, we didn’t yet know about Eclipsed or The Humans, which made quick trips from Off-Broadway to on. Off-Broadway’s institutional companies have a raft of new work on tap, any of which could catch fire and make the leap, as could a sudden UK hit, or even, though it’s increasingly rare, a play emerging from the array of regional companies around the US.

But the ongoing problem of how plays manage to hold a place on Broadway, especially if they don’t come with a true box office draw star attached, is certainly apparent from last season and the one to come. The risk of mounting new plays, sans stars, is now incompatible with Broadway, unless buoyed on a wave of critical acclaim and industry awards. Even Off-Broadway, subsidised producers are hedging their bets with stars such as Daniel Radcliffe at the Public Theater and Matthew Broderick at the Irish Rep this summer.

Musicals have no such problems. Indeed, at any given moment there seem to be more musicals circling Broadway hoping to secure a theatre than there are landing slots. These are largely new works, too, and the coming season will include stage adaptations of films, such as Amelie and Anastasia; transfers from London, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Groundhog Day; and original pieces such as Come from Away and Dear Evan Hansen (both of which were first seen regionally). There is no dearth of new musicals, a far cry from 1994/95 when Sunset Boulevard and Smokey Joe’s Cafe, the latter a revue, were the only new musicals of the season. Even when many new musicals come and go quickly, losing $10 to $12 million each, there seem to be more waiting in the wings.

Are the successful, and even the unsuccessful, musicals driving plays away?

That’s not necessarily the case, since so many factors go into producing decisions. But it’s worth noting that The Color Purple – like Once before it – has made a good home of the intimate Jacobs Theatre, and while American Psycho’s run was short, it colonised the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, another smaller house more commonly used for plays. If musicals can be budgeted to work in smaller houses even more frequently, it’s likely they’ll proliferate there as well, since there seems to be so much less willingness to lose $4 million on a play and so much more financial upside to a hit musical.

Plays aren’t disappearing from Broadway any time soon, but the opportunities for new plays, at least from the current vantage point, seem to be on the wane. That’s a by-product of Broadway’s overall robust health, and perhaps the bounty of creative musical theatre talent, as well. But there’s no dearth of talented playwrights, either. Without the boost that being on Broadway can bring, in popular perception and in the media, will plays come to be seen by some as a truly separate form of theatre, if they can’t stand side by side with musicals everywhere theatre is found? Let’s hope that’s not where we’re headed.

Profiles Theatre, Chicago, in 2013 (Photo byEric Allix Rogers/Flickr)

The closure of a 50-seat theatre in Chicago, even one with a 28-year history of production, doesn’t typically become a topic of conversation nationally, let alone a subject for discussion internationally. But the shuttering of Profiles Theatre, announced by website and Facebook posts late on Tuesday evening, is a cautionary tale for anyone who makes theatre. Because Profiles Theatre didn’t shut its doors because of lost funding, dwindling attendance or poor management – the theatre is gone because it had, allegedly, condoned predatory and abusive behaviour on the part of one of its two artistic directors for many years.

On June 8, at 4:30pm Chicago time, the Chicago Reader posted an online story titled: “At Profiles Theatre the drama — and abuse — is real,” written by Aimee Levitt and Christopher Piatt. It was rapidly shared online throughout that evening and well into the next day. Described as being drawn from a year-long investigation that involved more than 30 interviews, the story carried accounts of reprehensible behaviour of Darrell W. Cox, co-artistic director, director and frequent lead actor at the company, which had often been praised by critics as being emblematic of the raw Chicago style. The article detailed a series of claimed transgressions towards women at the company, including allegations of manipulative sexual relationships and genuine physical abuse on stage during performances.

Save for an anodyne statement declining to discuss the charges, Profiles was silent. Two days later, after Penelope Skinner withdrew the rights to her play The Village Bike, which was to be the next production, Cox posted a statement to the company’s Facebook page. Neither materially challenging the assertions nor apologising for his behaviour, Cox bemoaned having been made into a villain, saying that those who knew him best knew the truth. Cox’s co-artistic director, Joe Jahraus, remained silent. Come Tuesday night, whether Profiles was unwilling or unable to offer any counterargument about what had occurred, they were gone. Just a week had passed. On the evening of June 15, responding via email to questions from the Chicago Tribune, Cox suggested his actions had been misinterpreted.

At the same time the main report was published, the Reader’s critic, Piatt, wondered in a separate essay whether he should have intuited an unhealthy culture at Profiles. Several days later, Chris Jones of The Chicago Tribune expressed his own regrets, via Facebook, about his own unwitting role in the Profiles story, a company he had praised often. Several women who had worked at Profiles, but had not been interviewed for the article, came forward, seeming to corroborate the behaviour it described.

The ‘storefront’ theatre community of Chicago, which would certainly be recognised as akin to fringe theatre in London, is intertwined with the larger, more fully professionalised companies in ways large and small companies might not mingle in other cities. Profiles had operated for much of its life as a non-Equity company, only coming under an Actors’ Equity agreement four years ago. While the Equity status offered actors at Profiles recourse against inappropriate behaviour, the Profiles ethos is said to have produced a culture of silence that was apparently whispered in the theatre community, but only emerged fully with the Reader story.

An issue this highlights is about how difficult it is for artists, especially young artists trying to make a place in the theatre community, to come forward when they face established, even acclaimed, artists who are abusing their positions. Further, when artists are working in situations without the protection of union agreements and without a clear place to go for help, they are at a particular disadvantage. The Reader exposé is an important step in empowering people to come forward, so that such a culture isn’t allowed to fester for as long as it may have at Profiles.

Not so coincidentally, an initiative called Not in Our House was begun in Chicago, specifically designed to develop resources for those working in the city’s extensive non-Equity theatre ecosystem. The rumours and whispers about Profiles were part of the impetus for the formation of NIOH, which back in February proffered a draft code of conduct for the non-Equity community, seeking input through crowdsourcing. Since the Profiles situation was blown open, NIOH is hearing from theatre communities around the country, and may well serve as a template for satellites or similar organisations.

In a week when most eyes were focused on the Tony Awards, Broadway and New York, Chicago’s theatre community was convulsed by the Profiles situation, and even with the theatre having suspended operations, any sense of closure is surely still in the distance for so many. But instead of being looked at as an anomaly, the Profiles story needs to provoke more conversation, even in theatre communities that might like to think everything is perfectly fine. Because we never know, until we know.

Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos and Lin-Manuel Miranda in Hamilton (Photo by Joan Marcus)

When it comes right down to it, the question isn’t whether people will pay outrageous sums of money to see Hamilton. It is who will benefit most from these stratospheric prices.

To be sure, ‘Hamilton’s top ticket increases to $849‘ is an eye opener of a headline, but considering ongoing accounts of people paying upwards of $1,000 per ticket on the secondary market, what such headlines were really taking note of was that the show itself would now be getting more of that revenue, instead of outlets like StubHub and Ticketmaster’s own resale service. With every commercial production having a fiduciary responsibility to its investors, it became almost untenable for the show’s producers to allow that much money to go to other parties, bypassing not only investors but the creators of the show as well.

The producers had previously conducted a repatriation of tickets that appeared to have been sold to scalpers in bulk via automated bots (which I’ve written about before, as has Hamilton writer Lin-Manuel Miranda). The show’s producers say they have now put in place measures to stymie such automated sales going forward, limiting purchases not only by customer but by IP address (which limits sales to individual computers or networks). But whenever there’s a valuable commodity that is scarce and undervalued, and Hamilton tickets have been both, there will be profiteers. Even these measures aren’t going to shut down the resale market. Perhaps it will at least put a dent in Hamilton’s, by reducing the aftermarket profits available.

Reportedly only 200 tickets will be sold at $849 per performance, and when I last went online to buy Hamilton seats a few weeks ago, I was already seeing original sale tickets at over $500. But no matter what, this is still a leap. To counter the inevitably outcry, the producers also expanded the daily online ticket lottery, making 46 tickets per performance available at $10 each, for those able to attend with little notice and the luck of the draw. Also noted was the show’s arrangement with the New York City Department of Education, whereby some 20,000 tickets were made available to schools at about $10 each, with the Rockefeller Foundation underwriting another $70 per ticket, still less than half the original asking price.

But as it has come to symbolise new musical and dramatic styles, as well as an embrace of diverse artists, Hamilton has also sadly come to represent the growing inaccessibility of Broadway, and indeed a great deal of professional theatre, from the widest possible audience. Even recognising the basic economic imperatives of supply and demand at play with Hamilton, it’s unfortunate that theatre has a new round of headlines that reinforce the idea of theatrical elitism and an economic divide, at the very time when so much of the field is waking up to the need for equity, diversity and inclusion on the stage and in the audience. Despite the move’s inevitability, it remains an unfortunate new price precedent. As someone who clearly recalls the outcry when The Producers introduced VIP pricing just 15 years ago, I’m quite sure it won’t be one that stands forever.

The expanded lottery and discounted school tickets notwithstanding, the Hamilton producers didn’t help matters when they made seats from the next block of tickets (January to May) available for exclusive sale for five days to holders of the very top tier American Express cards, fostering an elitism that contradicts the spirit of the show. As for why the tickets then go on sale to everyone this Sunday at 8pm, precisely when die-hard theatregoers begin watching The Tony Awards, it’s simply a mystery.

If the primary motivation behind the new record-setting ticket price for Hamilton was to depress the secondary sale market and undermine scalpers – less than a decade after Broadway industry leaders supported an end to caps on resale markups, helping pave the way to the current scenario – here’s a thought. Maybe some portion of the new revenue (which is at least $60,000 per performance, by my estimate) could fund a new Hamilton Foundation, literally enabling the show to fund its own outreach to communities which could otherwise not attend, perhaps even extending that largesse to other shows without the same means to underwrite discounted tickets. Then the Rockefeller Foundation could support yet other good works, rather than funnelling money to a commercial theatre production, however worthy it may be as art and education and however much it is discounted.

Hamilton was in a no-win situation, and perhaps with time they’ll figure out some new initiatives to balance out the impact of their new pricing structure. But as was the case with Book of Mormon, Jersey Boys and The Lion King, to name just a few, additional productions and time will slowly make it possible for more people to end up in one of the many rooms where Hamilton will be happening, without spending a month’s rent or mortgage payment for the privilege.

Cirque du Soleil’s Paramour (Photo by Joan Marcus)

I never wanted to run away and join the circus when I was a child. This is no doubt due to the fact that I never saw a circus live (I was aware of them through other cultural means) until I was 23 years old. The first circus I ever saw was the Big Apple Circus.

The founders of BAC began as street performers in England in 1974, but within three years they created a circus that quickly became a New York fixture, with a commitment not simply to selling tickets, but to educating young people about the circus – and through the circus – making certain their not-so-big top was accessible to people throughout the city (not just in Manhattan) at reasonable prices. Set up as a subsidised enterprise, it pursued its mission of a one-ring circus with a genuine intimacy that was in marked counterpoint to the famed Ringling Brothers shows that played arenas in the area annually. Last week, a feature by The New York Times laid out a rather dire outlook for BAC’s future, attributed in part to lost corporate group sales in the wake of the 2008 economic downturn. Their 39th season, at Lincoln Center this fall, is in jeopardy.

As it happens, the report came just after Cirque du Soleil’s Paramour opened on Broadway, the company’s third attempt at a sit-down production in Manhattan. Cirque has beginnings equally as humble as BAC, but its trajectory has been markedly different. Over 32 years, Cirque du Soleil has exploded into one of the major brands in entertainment, with shows both touring and playing in purpose-built venues around the world. I imagine, only slightly facetiously, that its beverage and candy sales each year exceed the entire budget of BAC. Since it arrived on the scene, with its distinctive production values and new approach to circus arts, even using the word circus has become old fashioned – there are countless cirques everywhere, and many have never been near France or Quebec.

In 2013, Cirque pared back its staff, as several shows closed or underperformed. At the time, I wrote about not being particularly worried for the company’s fortunes. Like any fast-growing multinational business, it took stock of where it stood and needed to restructure. It’s possible that BAC should have done the same thing a few years ago, or if it did, it didn’t fully anticipate the degree to which its income model was changing due to forces beyond its control. Even as Cirque’s Paramour opened to a welter of mixed to negative reviews, and pulled in only 56% of its potential gross revenue last week, I think the company can weather another shaky New York effort, while the hometown team is in direr straits.

Big Apple Circus (Photo by Maike Schulz)

Despite the divergence in scale between these two companies, I do wonder whether they both haven’t fully faced up to one common issue, namely the nature of their work more than three decades after they began. Each has a fairly distinctive house style that transcends any particular production or season; you could walk me into either BAC or Cirque with no foreknowledge and I could immediately tell you which company I was seeing. But whereas both probably emerged in response to the three-ring spectacle of Ringling Brothers and other circuses in that style, perhaps both Big Apple and Cirque now grapple with their own aesthetic histories. Big Apple hasn’t bowed to the Cirque style or scale, as so many other companies have, while Cirque still offers shows that echo the DNA of Nouvelle Experience, their first show to tour the US. Their efforts outside of those parameters are the ones that haven’t succeeded (such as their Las Vegas Elvis show or their first theatre venture, Banana Shpeel).

In the meantime, yet new iterations of circus have emerged, with my particular favourite being the Canadian Les 7 Doigts De La Main, whose stripped down, jeans and t-shirt style shows place the focus solely on the art of the performer, not on the man in the top hat or the clown babbling nonsense. In its simplicity, it is all the more remarkable. As for merging circus and Broadway, director Diane Paulus (who also staged Cirque’s Amaluna) already did that impeccably with her revival of Pippin, aided by 7 Doigts’ Gypsy Snider. This came after the singular Bill Irwin, both alone and with his occasional partner David Shiner, had created utterly original pieces, including Largely New York, Fool Moon and Old Hats, bringing clowning to new levels of artistry in theatres on and Off-Broadway.

I genuinely hope the charming Big Apple Circus finds the funds to sustain its mission, but uses the opportunity to explore whether its performance template has contributed to its financial decline. As for Cirque du Soleil, whose productions have sometimes thrilled me, perhaps they’ll take the time to ponder their future and realise that bigger isn’t always better – and that Broadway musicals are a unique art unto themselves. Maybe some new creative energies and artists, breaking from the past, can help to sustain these two circuses, both alike in revelry.

Patrick Page and Damon Daunno in Hadestown (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Walking into most theatres, the experience is much the same. At one end of the space, ornate or otherwise, there is a box, which will contain the play you’re about to see. It may be open to view, it may be shielded by a curtain, but we know the box is there. Thrust stages and theatres in the round, while rarely curtained, have their defined footprint, and to a degree the audience becomes the box, surrounding the first setting of the play. Of course, environmental or immersive productions blow up these divisions entirely. But we grow used to the parameters of a given space, of our relationship to the stage, if we visit performances with any regularity.

That’s why one of the more enjoyable experiences of visiting Off-Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop is its willingness to alter the space entirely from show to show. While plenty of productions there fall in with the prescribed model, others play with the audience/stage relationship so often that entering the small East Village theatre can be a complete surprise. Right now, there is a three-quarter oval seating space, echoing a Greek amphitheatre, for the musical Hadestown. It’s a fitting choice, since the show is a modern retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, drawn from Anais Mitchell’s album.

For Ivo van Hove’s Scenes from a Marriage, the seating and playing spaces were trisected in Act I, with the audience moving from space to space, before a mid-show makeover removed all scenery and stripped the house to the walls, changing what was noticeably reduced into something seemingly vast.

For the US premiere of Caryl Churchill’s A Number, the theatre’s seats were placed on to steep scaffolding, putting one in mind of a vintage operating theatre.

By upending our expectations the moment we walk into a theatre, a show begins to exert its pull, and while it may be lost on newcomers, regular visitors have a special insight. Of course, NYTW is a 200-seat Off-Broadway theatre, and while its reimagined settings involved significant and singular construction, it’s not the same as if they had 1,000 seats. That said, even Broadway shows try to realign our relationship with the stages – the big boxes – from time to time.

Seating chart for Natasha, Pierre and The Great Comet of 1812

The seating charts for the upcoming musical Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 caused a stir when they were posted online because they looked less like the map of a theatre and more like a particularly challenging version of Snakes and Ladders. Neat little rows remained in some places, but what were those yellow squares? The grey dots? The blue dots? The gentle ‘s’ making its way through the centre of the stalls? The white striped curvatures jutting out from the mezzanine? They were ramps, chairs, tables and more, all designed to add a fluidity to the Imperial Theatre that evoked the environmental intimacy of Ars Nova, where the show began, and the large tent where it played extended runs both in the Meatpacking District and just off Times Square.

Broadway has certainly played with seating occasionally in the past. Hal Prince’s 1974 Candide comes to mind, as does the mid-Act II transformation of the Winter Garden Theatre for Rocky. The short-lived Holler If Ya Hear Me created stadium seating in the Palace Theatre, building up from the stalls so that the seating flowed in the front of the mezzanine, leaving a good portion of the stalls area blocked off and empty. Fela removed seats to allow the actors to cross through the Eugene O’Neill Theatre and pass among the audience beyond the standard aisles.

As exciting as the reconfigurations can be creatively, they can be expensive – and not simply to build. If seats are removed to create a new dynamic, that’s revenue lost, and especially on Broadway, with seats selling above $150 each for musicals, you can be talking at least $1,200 in lost revenue per seat per week, provided the show is selling well. While it appears that Great Comet has added onstage seating, and may well be netting out with greater capacity, Holler If Ya Hear Me surely reduced the overall earning potential with its redesign. Obviously, this is a matter for careful budgeting, and negotiating artistic goals with the hard facts of economics.

As an audience member, I delight in the unconventional; as a theatre manager, I find myself pondering what that lack of convention cost, and whether it might make the show’s path to fiscal success more difficult. At least in subsidised settings, grants may rebalance the books (NYTW hasn’t lost a single seat for Hadestown). But as audiences come to desire ever more interaction in their live experiences, whether at the theatre or theme parks, and as virtual reality nips at the heels of a discipline that has long offered the benefit of having always been in 3D, breaking out of the box and erasing the proscenium divide seems ever more essential, even if our largest and most popular theatres may be the least suited to making that happen.

Brandon Victor Dixon and Audra McDonald in Shuffle Along (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The act of making theatre is of endless fascination to those who make theatre, which accounts for the litany of backstage plays and musicals going back to, at least, the mechanicals’ scenes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By sheer coincidence, New York is home to two new entries in this genre, both focusing attention on actual productions from the 1920s, and in the process restoring currency to forgotten works.

The more elaborate of the two shows is the Broadway musical Shuffle Along, Or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, written and directed by George C Wolfe. This chronicles the history of Shuffle Along, America’s first all-black musical – both on stage and behind the scenes. It was a groundbreaking, bona fide smash in its debut, playing nearly 500 performances and making stars of many cast members. However, the show itself was very much of its time, and in the days before cast recordings, and no doubt as a result of failed revival attempts in 1932 and 1953, it faded from memory. Only thanks to Wolfe’s creative efforts has the show regained a foothold in theatrical history, beyond the realm of scholars.

By sheer coincidence of timing, Paula Vogel and Rebecca Taichmann, with their Off-Broadway play Indecent, have performed a similar act of resurrection on God of Vengeance, a play with its roots in European Yiddish theatre, which played in two Off-Broadway theatres in 1922 before reaching Broadway, in an English language version, in 1923. Like Shuffle Along, God of Vengeance was largely lost to time, but not after a long successful run. God of Vengeance was effectively shut down when its cast and producer were charged and convicted with offering an immoral performance, and subsequent legal proceedings continued for the next three years, ultimately exonerating them long after the play had shuttered.

Adina Verson and Max Gordon Moore in Indecent (Photo by Carol Rosegg)

Reading press coverage from that era, any number of reasons were cited for exactly what it was that made God of Vengeance so offensive, ranging from depictions of prostitution to portrayals of the desecration of Jewish religious symbols. What the press accounts of the charges left out, like many of the reviews that preceded them, was that the play depicted a lesbian relationship. While that love story was judged harshly by other characters in the play, it was portrayed as liberating by the playwright, Sholom Asch, rather than as shameful, which might have placated the moralists of the time.

As a student of the theatre, I was not unaware of Shuffle Along or God of Vengeance, but these new works certainly made them more vivid for me by recounting their histories theatrically. Working against theatrical censorship 90 years after those plays were first seen in New York, I confess to having invested deeply in Indecent long before I saw it. I went in anticipating a work that might in some way inform my own work, that would show me parallels to the small-mindedness that fuels censorship then and now.

While that is certainly a strand in Indecent, I was surprised to find that it was not, as I’d imagined, a straightforward anti-censorship tract. In fact, it is a love letter to the people who struggle to make theatre against all odds, in this case against those who wish to police morality, just as the new Shuffle Along pays tribute to the men who broke through a theatrical colour barrier, through racism, even though there were (and are) many more societal challenges to face. Both works are about vision and tenacity, with the more mournful Indecent putting me in mind of yet another play about the making of theatre, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good.

While I don’t necessarily think those who forget theatrical history are doomed to repeat it, it’s impossible not to think about the histories of these plays in light of the discourse surrounding America’s endless presidential campaign, where racial bias and limits on free speech are discussed as if they are viable planks in a political platform. I don’t think theatre artists want to turn the clock back one bit – but it’s worrisome to think that the attitudes that artists faced in the 1920s might once again gain political currency, even if they have always been present in our society, both covertly and overtly.

The new Shuffle Along and Indecent are reminders, as they honour and celebrate achievements and travails of the past, of why barriers broken cannot be allowed to be rebuilt. It is why, like the ghostly troupe in Indecent that reanimates nightly to tell the story of God of Vengeance over and over again, we must utilise and support theatre, and all of the arts, in an effort to dispel the worst impulses that will shape not just our stories and our ability to tell them, but our lives.