It’s a funny thing about milestones, the way certain thresholds get set in our minds. If you follow reporting on the movie industry, breaking the $100 million gross barrier is a major achievement (and for those of us in the arts, an astronomical figure), although its not always connected to the cost of the film under discussion. But that number has been a yardstick for years, once cause for double page ads in Variety whenever it was reached, regardless of whether the movie that achieved it was released in the 60s, 70s, 80s or today – despite inflation making the success happen a little faster with every passing year. To be sure, plenty of movies still don’t make it, but it’s a less rarified club than it was in the days of The Sound of Music or Star Wars.

Once upon a time, when people still spoke of the price of a loaf of bread as an economic indicator, gas prices crossed a big threshold when a gallon broke over the $1.00 price point. People under 40 may not even remember this being breached. This was a big deal in those non-digital days, when prices couldn’t simply be altered with a tiny bit typing; I happened to be in England a few years back when the price of a liter of petrol broke the £1 mark, resulting in some creative solutions to signage that never anticipated announcing such a sum.

In theatre, in my lifetime, the big round number that sticks in my memory was the $100 ticket for The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, though it could be explained away by the massive physical production, cast size and length. It seemed a one-off as opposed to a trend-setter. Miss Saigon had $100 tickets at the start of its run, but didn’t sustain them, dropping back to the then more typical $65. The $100 price cropped up again for the 1999 revival of The Iceman Cometh, which by virtue of its length, simply couldn’t give enough performances in a week to make economic sense otherwise. You may know of other isolated instances.

We didn’t truly reach the $100 asking price per ticket milestone until The Producers introduced the $100 ticket in the wake of rave reviews, also giving us the innovation of the VIP ticket at the extraordinary price of $480. This was in 2001, just 13 years ago. At the time, other hits were quick to match The Producers, with Mamma Mia! jumping to $100 per ticket just two months later.

But it should be noted that the $100 price was the theatre equivalent of a hotel’s “rack rate,” the stated top price for rooms which were in reality variable and negotiable. In theatre, through group sales, discount offers, the beloved TKTS booth and day of show lotteries you could still see a Broadway show for much less than that. As a result, over the past decade, while regular prices have risen, especially at the most successful shows, the average price paid on Broadway stayed under $100 per seat. That is, until last year, the just-completed 2013-14 Broadway season, when the average ticket was $103.92, up $5.50 over the year before.

So while articles may be trumpeting record revenues and record attendance, they’re either downplaying, avoiding or ignoring the true breaking of the $100 threshold, preferring to lead with the allure of numbers in the millions (attendance) or billions (dollars). That’s a shame, because in terms of what matters to the average audience member, the average ticket price seems much more essential news. To me, that’s the headline.

It’s always important when discussing prices over time to acknowledge overall price changes in comparable fields or the economy as a whole. So let me point out that in the period since The Producers in 2001, the Consumer Price Index has risen from 177 to 233, an increase of 32%. The average movie ticket price nationally has gone from $5.65 to $8.13, a jump of 44%. But the Broadway jump from $58.72 to $103.92? That’s an increase of 77%.

I don’t have the resources to analyze all of the factors contributing to that jump, beyond the prevalence of premium or VIP seating, along with hit shows with higher prices that don’t need to discount (The Book of Mormon and Wicked) and superior supply and demand management (The Lion King). Maybe Nate Silver and his Five Thirty Eight team could work on this and tell us whether there’s a valid economic underpinning, or whether its just naked supply and demand having its day.

But surely if Broadway price hikes outstrip the economy and even other entertainment options, Broadway will eventually reach a tipping point that could have an impact on the already dicey economics of producing and running shows. Purchasing decisions based on price could put even more shows at risk for sustaining an economically viable run, whether in theory, as a Broadway engagement is contemplated, or even once it’s up and running.

So I want to call out this pricing milestone for all to see, and wonder where it will lead our commercial theatre yet a few more years down the line. If price resistance takes hold, if the Broadway price-value equation tips too far with the former outweighing the latter, will it be a place where shows can only be smash hits and utter flops, with no mid-level performers managing to run? If that happens, I hope it will prompt more people to sample institutional and independent theatre, here in New York and elsewhere. But on Broadway, and indeed at every level in the arts, ticket pricing is our global warming crisis, steadily rising year after year without raising true alarm and provoking meaningful action, until it threatens to swamp us all.

“Saturday at 10? It’s a date!”
Neil Patrick Harris in Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Broadway’s 7 pm curtain on Tuesdays was introduced more than 11 years ago. I thought it a somewhat more recent innovation, especially since I still regularly attend shows where audience members enter at about 7:50, usually far into the first act, looking embarrassed, angry or both.

Of course, this curtain time is no longer limited to Tuesdays, as many shows also play on Thursdays at 7, and shorter shows that can still give their company an appropriate break between matinee and evening even manage it on Wednesdays.

I remember the doomsayers when the Tuesday plan began: people wouldn’t be able to eat dinner, restaurant business in the theatre district would suffer, suburban patrons would be deterred from coming in for a show given the compressed travel time. That doesn’t seem to be the case, because while overall seasonal attendance has fluctuated between 11.5 and 12.5 million in the past 10 years on Broadway, there’s no evidence that the change in curtain times hurt business and it’s entirely possible that the adjustment helped to stave off declines by introducing flexibility.

Of course, that flexibility has gone far beyond the 7 or 8 pm curtain options. There are also shows with 7:30 weeknight performances, matinees variously at 1 pm, 2 pm, 2:30 pm, and 3 pm, and family oriented shows may well play two shows on Saturday and two on Sunday. (I remember the 1999 Broadway revival of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown experimenting with three show Saturdays, though that was short lived and, to my knowledge, never repeated.). At long last, the Thursday matinee (long seen in London) has been added. Right now, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, perhaps to retain a connection with its downtown roots, has 7 pm and 10 pm shows on Saturdays, a performance schedule that was once commonplace in the Off-Broadway of my younger days. I’m probably leaving a few options out.

I recount all these variants because I think it’s worth recognizing that Broadway producers and theatre owners, no doubt in collaboration with the theatrical unions, have proven that by being responsive to the changing needs of audiences, they can break out of habits for which the rationale may be long forgotten. For tourists, this means there are more possibilities of catching a show; for die-hard theatregoers, it means their binge weekends can be even more packed, in that eternal quest to see as many shows as possible in a limited number of days. For local audiences, it means they may have plenty of evening ahead of them post-show, or the opportunity to get to bed earlier on theatre nights.

I will say that this proliferation of performance times doesn’t surprise me in the least. Growing up in Connecticut, many theatres there had 4 pm Saturday matinees (followed by 8:30 or 9 pm evening shows) and the 4 pm shows were usually the fastest to sell out, no matter what was on stage. 4 pm shows also yielded the most geographically diverse audience, since the schedule allowed for day-trips with the greatest options of complementary activities – even plenty of time to sit by a pool or at the beach before heading to the theatre. And it was in 1985 that we surveyed our audience at Hartford Stage about their weeknight performance preferences, finding that by a 2 to 1 margin, they wanted 7:30 instead of 8 pm. It was implemented with nary a complaint.

All of this is merely a reminder that, as we search for ways to retain or develop audiences, the most simple tried and true elements of past patterns may not be something to cling to, just as abandoned practices may yet come into vogue once again. What may have been just fine five years ago may not hold today. We’ll only know for sure by experimenting – and by asking our audiences for their input whenever possible. We’re never going to be Netflix when it comes to entertainment on demand, but we might find there are some demands we can easily meet, if we’d just listen, and give things a try.

The 2012 NEA SSPA Report

If yesterday’s news that theatre attendance is down more precipitously than any of the arts caused you to spit out your coffee over breakfast, well that’s probably because you haven’t been paying attention. To be fair, I suspect a lot of people haven’t been, with virtually every discussion of the performing arts in since 2008 having been prefaced with either “in these challenging times” or “since the financial meltdown of 2008.” But the time for qualifiers and excuses is clearly past, especially as every news report on American life in general seems to invoke the fairly recent cliché “the new normal.” Things have changed. Things are changing. Things will change. The arts need to change.

In citing slides of 9% for musical theatre and 12% for non-musicals over the past five years, and even more pronounced numbers over a longer range, the picture painted by the NEA shows an overall decline in arts attendance, with theatre hardest hit. Coming just days after some co-mingled summary numbers from an Americans for the Arts report suggested theatre might be looking up, it was certainly startling news. But a closer look at the latter study actually confirms the reported  NEA trend.

Looking elsewhere, the same picture appears. The last Theatre Communications Group “Theatre Facts” report, covering results from 2008 to 2012, shows a 1.8% decline in attendance in the portion of their membership studied – not as pronounced as the NEA figures, but certainly heading the wrong way as well. It’s also important to remember that as expansive as it is, TCG itself is only a subset of overall US theatres. In a more easily defined theatrical realm of activity, Broadway in the same period shows a 5% audience decline, with a 17%  increase in income, suggesting an increasingly inaccessible theatrical realm, and an economic model that will only further stratify audiences.

The Ticketmaster UK Report

The only encouragement that one might wish to cling to is a report from Ticketmaster’s analytics division, which shows stunningly positive stats about arts participation by younger audiences (including a snappy infographic). While it hints that there might be some lessons to be learned, we’d have to go to England to get them, because the study is entitled State of Play: Theatre UK. While it does include some US audience members (as well as a selection from Ireland, Germany and Australia), the US sample represents only 13% of the total, with 65% from the UK. Also, under theatre, Ticketmaster has folded in opera and dance, so it’s not a true apples to apples comparison.

Now I am one of the many who believes that theatre as a discipline will manage to survive the onslaught of electronic entertainment precisely because it is live and fundamentally irreproducible. We may be a niche, but there will always be those who treasure being in the same room with artists as art is created; I have often joked that theatre will only be in real danger when Star Trek: TNG’s holodeck becomes reality. Even these reports don’t sway me from that conceptual position. But I’m not sticking my head in the sand either.

Appreciation of the arts is, for many, something that is learned in childhood – namely in schools. Yet we only have to read about the state of public education to know that resources are diminished, anything that isn’t testable is expendable, and fewer students are being exposed to arts education than they were years ago. Citing the 2008 NEA SSPA report: “In 1982, nearly two-thirds of 18-year-olds reported taking art classes in their childhood. By 2008, that share had dropped below one-half, a decline of 23 percent.” In less than 30 years, inculcation in the arts through the schools declined notably, so is it any wonder that we’re seeing declines in arts participation over time?

In a 2012 Department of Education study, it was reported that “the percentages of schools making [music and visual arts] available went from 20 percent 10 years ago to only 4 and 3 percent, respectively, in the 2009-10 school year.  In addition, at more than 40 percent of secondary schools, coursework in arts was not required for graduation in the 2009-10 school year.” That’s all the more reason to be concerned. Certainly many arts organizations have committed to working with or in schools, but are the programs comprehensive enough? We’ve become ever more sophisticated in how to create truly in-depth, ongoing education experiences, but perhaps in doing so, we’re reaching fewer students. Maybe we have to look at how to restore sheer numbers as part of that equation, while maintaining quality, to insure our own future.

Art from Americans for the Arts report

It’s time to make an important distinction. As I said, I believe ‘theatre’ will survive for years to come. Where we would do well to focus immediate attention is on our ‘theatres,’ our companies. On a micro basis, it may be easy to shrug off declines, especially if you happen to be affiliated with a company that is bucking the trend. But these reports with their macro view should take each and every theatre maker and theatre patron outside of the specifics of their direct experience to look at the field, not simply year to year, but over time. It suggests that there is a steady erosion in the theatergoing base, which hasn’t necessarily found a new level; just as a rising tide floats all boats, eventually our toys lie at the bottom of the tub once the drain is opened.

I don’t have the foresight to know where this will lead. One direction is that of Broadway, where the consistently risky business model favors shows that are built for the truly long run, but only for the select audiences with the resources to support ever increasing prices. Might that be mirrored in the not-for-profit community as well, with only the largest and most established companies able to secure audiences and funding if resources and interest truly diminish? Or might we see a shift away from institutions and edifices and towards more grass roots companies, where simpler theatre at lower prices and more basic production values finds the favor of those who still harbor an appetite for live drama?

I’ll make a prediction. While in the first half of my life I watched the bourgeoning of the resident theatre movement, which in turn seeded the growth of countless smaller local companies, my later years will see a contraction in overall production at the professional level; it’s already begun, as a few companies seem to go under every year and have been for some time. That means that it will become ever harder for people to make their lives in theatre, because there will be fewer job opportunities for them.

Since I’ve already employed science fiction in my argument, let me turn to it again. We’ve all seen or read stories where someone goes back in time to right some past wrong (and for the moment, let’s forget that they often as not ruin the future in the process). Is there a point where we could or should make some fundamental change in how theatre functions – not as an art, but as an industry? Is there a single watershed moment where one choice determined the course of the field that some future time traveler could set right? I suspect not, unless we were talking about preventing (in succession) the discovery of electricity, the invention of TV and movies, or the creation of the internet.

That’s why we have to shift the paradigm now, and not just worry about selling tickets to the current show or meeting next year’s budget, but focus on what’s truly sustainable in 10, 25 or 50 years time. This week’s data barrage shows one thing we mustn’t ignore: even if we can’t see it in our own day to day experience, what we’re doing now isn’t working and the tide is going out.

My thanks to Mariah MacCarthy, who brought the 2008 NEA SSPA Report summary and the 2012 Department of Education report to my attention.

Mind you, there’s only so much one can squeeze into a TV spot, but the ad I just watched managed the following in its voiceover: 1) play title; 2) key award nominations; 3) names of three lead actors; and 4) quotes from reviews. The name of the playwright, and the director, photos of the stars (not in costume), the logo for the not-for-profit theatre that produced it, and ticket ordering information appeared on screen. The piece runs only 15 seconds.

Now this is a Broadway show and it’s Tony season, so I could simply chalk this ad up to awards fever. But it’s just another in a long line of theatre marketing tools that I see which constantly manage to skirt what strikes me as a rather important element in theatrical communication: the plot.  TV time is precious, but that’s not the case in brochures, press releases and even radio spots, which are far more likely to be deployed by the majority of theatres in the country. Yet sometimes the plot is nowhere to be found.

Theatres skip over plots for one of two reasons: a) their show is a revival of a famous classic work and it’s assumed that everyone likely to be interested already knows what it’s about, or b) the theatre doesn’t actually want to say what it’s about, even if the play has never been seen before. In both cases, the decision is ill-advised.

For a classic, it may well be true that a significant portion of the likely ticket buyers already know not only the plot but the ending of Othello, A Doll’s House or Death of a Salesman. But cloaking the show solely in its author’s name and adjectives about its greatness leaves out anyone who happens to have not seen it before, and may be looking for clues as to whether it will interest them. Indeed, we forget that the great works of literature may be daunting to the uninitiated, so by bypassing even a bit of plot description, we skip the opportunity to cultivate new patrons or place the seemingly archaic work within a context that might appeal to a modern audience.

It also pays to remember that this applies to relatively recent works as well. For example, Children of a Lesser God won the 1980 Tony Award for Best Play and the lead actress in the film version won an Oscar in 1986, but how many 25 year olds know the piece? We must always be thinking of new patrons – whatever their age – not just endlessly mining the so-called “avids.”

As for avoiding the plot, the motivations can be varied. Perhaps the actual storyline could be seen as off-putting (deranged barber murders customers and his landlady bakes their remains into pies; boy blinds horses) or vague (two hobos wait endlessly for someone to show up). But skilled copy writing can put those stories into a larger and perhaps more enticing context without ever being untrue or misleading. It’s when we employ only adjectives that we’re dropping the ball; plays (and all stories) are rooted in nouns and verbs, that is to say people and action.

Even when the work in question is brand new, and there’s concern about revealing too much, it’s a mistake to say nothing; your gaggle of adjectives will less effective, since there’s no outside affirmation (as might eventually come from reviews), there’s just you trying to tell potential patrons what they’re going to think of the show if they come. (I refer you to my guides to clichéd marketing-speak and the true meanings behind it in Decoder and Decoder II.)

I’m not advocating lengthy recountings and I recognize that very often, a cursory précis of a story can be reductive; I’ve seen many authors (and artistic staffs) bridle at simplifications. But marketing and communications are not reviews or dramaturgy or literary criticism; they should be as accurate and appealing as possible, but they can’t be all-encompassing. And they must appear. The play may be the thing wherein we’ll catch the king’s conscience, but we’ve got to get him into the theatre first.

“There is nothing quite as wonderful as money! There is nothing quite as beautiful as cash!”

I have made no secret of my disdain for the practice of announcing theatre grosses as if we were the movie industry. I grudgingly accept that on Broadway, it is a measure of a production’s health in the commercial marketplace, and a message to current and future investors. But no matter where they’re reported, I feel that grosses now overshadow critical or even popular opinion within different audience segments. A review runs but once, an outlet rarely does more than one feature piece; reports on weekly grosses can become weekly indicators that stretch on for years. If the grosses are an arbiter of what people choose to see, then theatre has jumped the marketing shark.

So it took only one tweet to get me back on my high horse yesterday. A major reporter in a large city (not New York), admirably beating the drum for a company in his area, announced on Twitter that, “[Play] is officially best-selling show in [theatre’s] history.” When I inquired as to whether that meant highest revenue or most tickets sold, the reporter said that is was highest gross, that they had reused the theatre’s own language, and that they would find out about the actual ticket numbers.” I have not yet seen a follow up, but Twitter can be funny that way.

As the weekly missives about box office records from Broadway prove, we are in an endless cycle of ever-higher grosses, thanks to steady price increases, and ever newer records. That does not necessarily mean that more people are seeing shows; in some cases, the higher revenues are often accompanied by a declining number of patrons. Simply put, even though fewer people may be paying more, the impression given is of overall health.

I’m particular troubled when not-for-profits fall prey to this mentality as part of the their press effort, and I think it’s a slippery slope. If not-for-profits are meant to serve their community, wouldn’t a truer picture of their success be how many patrons they serve? In fact, I’d be delighted to see arts organizations announcing that their attendance increased at a faster pace than their box office revenue, meaning that their work is becoming more accessible to more people, even if the shift is only marginal. If selling 500 tickets at $10 each to a youth organization drags down a production’s grosses, that’s good news, and should be framed as such, unless our commitment to the next generation of arts attendees is merely lip service.

From my earliest days in this business, I have advocated for not-for-profit arts groups to be recognized not only as artistic institutions, but local businesses as well. While I think that has come into sharper focus over the past 30 years, I’m concerned that the wrong metrics are being applied, largely in an effort to mirror the yardstick used for movies. It’s worth noting that for music sales or book sales, it’s the number of units sold, not the actual revenue, that is the primary indicator of success, at either the retail or wholesale level (although more sophisticated reporting methods are coming into play).

In a recent New York Times story about a drop in prices at the Metropolitan Opera, I was startled by the assertion that grosses were down in part because donor support for rush tickets had been reduced. Does that mean that fewer tickets were being offered because there wasn’t underwriting for the difference in price? Does it mean that the donor support was actually being recognized as ticket revenue, instead of contributed income? What does it mean for the future of the rush program if the money isn’t replaced – less low-price access? No matter how you slice it, something is amiss.

That said, the Met Opera example brings out an aspect of not-for-profit success that is, to my eyes, less reported upon, namely contributed revenue. Yes, we see stories when a group gets a $1 million gift (in larger cities, the threshold may be higher for media attention). But we don’t get updates on better indicators of a company’s success: the number of individual donors, for example, showing how many people are committing personal funds to a group. The aggregate dollar figure will come out in an annual report or tax filing, but is breadth of support ever trumpeted by organizations or featured in the media? I think it should be. I also can’t help but wonder whether proclaiming high dollar grosses repeatedly might serve to suppress small donations.

Not-for-profit arts organizations exist in order to pursue creative endeavors at least in part in a manner different from the commercial marketplace. Make no mistake, the effort to generate ticket sales for a NFP is equivalent to that of a commercial production, but the art on offer is (hopefully) not predicated on reaching the largest audience possible for the longest period possible. When NFP’s proclaim box office sales records, they are adopting a wholly commercial mindset. While it may appeal to the media, because it aligns with other reportage of other similar fields, it disrupts the perception of the company and their mission. And look out when grosses drop, as they inevitably will at some point.

We all love a hit, whether it’s the high school talent show or a new ballet. But if all we can use to demonstrate our achievements is how big a pile of money we’ve made, well then forgive me if I’m a bit grossed out.

It is unfortunate that “zirkusschadenfreude” is not an actual German word, because there seemed to be a lot of it flying around last week, that is to say, “joy at the unhappiness of a circus.” Many news outlets and commentators were pulling out the wordplay a bit gleefully last week on the news that Canada’s famed Cirque du Soleil was laying off 400 employees after almost three decades of spectacular growth and acclaim. “Is the sun going down?” asked England’s The Independent.

The layoff announcement was the latest in a string of bad news emanating from Cirque, which has of late dealt with several shows closing much earlier than expected; Iris at the one-time Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles is the most recent casualty. A couple of years ago, New York witnessed the protracted birth and rapid death cycle of Banana Shpeel (which inexplicably went on national tour); Zarkana limped through two seasons at Radio City Musical Hall before being packed off to Nevada, where an Elvis-themed show had recently underwhelmed. There have been failures internationally as well.

Needless to say, the Canadian press followed the story most closely, given that this is a major employer and national treasure downsizing. On one newscast I watched, the anchor blithely asked Globe and Mail reporter J. Kelly Nestruck whether “greed” was a factor, seemingly misunderstanding or disliking the idea of commercial success that Cirque has enjoyed in spades. To his credit, Nestruck parried by saying it was perhaps a certain lack of attention and over-accelerated growth.

Now I should say that as an audience member, I’m wildly ambivalent about Cirque. I’ve seen them six times as I recall: their first U.S. tour, of Nouvelle Experiénce, in Seattle in 1990; Mystère at Treasure Island in Las Vegas circa 1998; the Dralion tour in Santa Monica in 1999; O and Love in Vegas in 2010, and Zarkana at Radio City Musical Hall in 2011. You’ll notice a 10 year hiatus, and that’s because after my enthusiasm for Nouvelle, my second and third experiences seemed diminishing returns; only years of emphatic recommendations brought me back two years ago, to my utter delight.

Then Zarkana brought me crashing back to dismay, and their 3-D movie this winter, Worlds Away, was a particular letdown. The movie, which hasn’t burned up U.S. box offices, was nothing more than a flimsy premise connecting pieces of their Vegas shows. I had been hoping that Cirque might reinvent film narrative the way they reinvented circuses, only to find myself watching a minimally conceived and eccentrically shot and edited greatest hits package.

I take no pleasure in the retrenchment of Cirque. But frankly, while I feel for those losing jobs, a company that has proven that live artistic undertakings can reach mass audiences can only be strengthened by reminders that they are not infallible, even when they’re working at such astronomically budgeted scales. I would dearly love to wield phrases like, “What clown was keeping their books,” but that fails to draw out what can be learned from the current troubles.

One has to applaud the entrepreneurship of co-founder and owner Guy Laliberté, who took the company from street performers to veritable rock stars, making it almost impossible for most circuses to survive unless they dropped “circus” for “cirque”; I am less sanguine about Soleil’s efforts to monopolize the word. As the world has grown more sensitive to the treatment of animals at circuses, their completely human entertainment carries no whiff of exploitation or cruelty, even as we may wonder how people learn the superhuman skills on display.

My own back and forth opinions on the shows themselves may be reflective of erratic quality control and perhaps overproduction (they recently began producing several new shows annually instead of one), but O and Love were so remarkable that I’m eager to see them again, even at $150 a ticket, and I’m regretting having skipped Ka, which I hear is also incredible. I’m not the first to suggest that Cirque is most successful when they’re in venues specifically built, or radically refurbished, for their sit-down shows; perhaps they have grown too big for the big top.

Producing to “fill slots” is often the bane of performing arts organizations; they have to put on something to give to their audiences, and perhaps they don’t always have sufficient brilliant ideas to fill the available holes. By creating more slots, surely Cirque has created the same problem for itself. The news reports also suggest that expenses weren’t carefully controlled, and that will fell any business; outside of real world arts, we can watch the same problem played out on Downton Abbey.

It’s very hard, when you’ve come so far, so fast, to stop and take a breath and reassess. But Cirque is no different than any performing arts organization, even if it no longer relies on public subsidy. It may need to get back to its core values. It can look to the simpler, grittier and altogether wonderful Les 7 doigts de la main (known in NYC for Traces), a mini-circus at the most human level. They succeed in no small part because the performers seem like people you might meet on the street, who go out of the way to personalize the performance and ingratiate themselves with the audience, making their feats that much more awesome. There is no wailing of indeterminately ethnicized pop music, no waddling oddballs spouting gibberish, just skill.

Stopping to remember that circus is in fact a form of theatre, and never more so than when it eschews animals, I’m eager to see Cirque’s Amaluna, directed by American Repertory Theatre’s artistic director Diane Paulus, to see how her theatrical sensibility infuses the Cirque formula. It’s interesting to note that Paulus is also coming to Broadway with a Cambridge-bred Pippin revival created in collaboration with 7 doits, further exploring theatre as circus and circus as theatre. The two may well be worthwhile case studies for Cirque (though Paulus is not the only theatre director to collaborate with them).

Despite avoiding them for 10 years, I remain hopeful for Cirque du Soleil, as performing arts wunderkind, as entrepreneurial model and, believe it or not, as “my” circus. I was never taken to a circus in my youth; my only “regular” circuses are the Big Apple Circus in 1984 when I was 22, Circus Vargas in about 1989 and Circus Flora (at the Spoleto Festival) in 2003. The only other experiences I’ve ever had at a circus have been with the Canadians — that’s right: no Ringling Brothers. That means that 66% of my lifetime circus-going has been with Cirque du Soleil (Traces was performed in a 499 seat theatre). Cirque has thrilled me and disappointed me, but for better or worse, it’s what I’ve known.  Unless they are overwhelmed by hubris, mismanagement or both, Cirque should to be around for a long time, and reports of their doom are not merely exaggerated but unfounded.

Yes, Cirque is a corporation now, with 14 million tickets sold a year and $1 billion in revenue; sympathy may be in short supply. It needs to ground itself before it flies again, econonomically and creatively. Cirque might look to the late 70s and early 80s, when people said Disney was on the ropes as well, and the company came back only stronger, proving that family entertainment can endure. Cirque du Soleil is not too big to fail, but the company is too inventive and successful to quickly start counting out, like so many clowns in a car.

How the denizens of Times Square have changed.

This past Saturday morning, I willingly went into Times Square. Why did I go? Because I had decided I wanted to see One Man, Two Guvnors again before it closes at the end of this week, and to avail myself of the discount seats at the TKTS booth. Why do I use the word “willingly”? Because, to be honest, I do my best to avoid Times Square if at all possible.

This certainly hasn’t always been the case. As a child on our family’s annual day trip into New York, seeing Times Square was a part of the ritual, as much for my parents as it was for myself and my siblings. That trip involved theatre only once; we were mostly sightseers, gazing in windows of stores in which we would never shop.

As a teen, traveling via train to Grand Central Station, entering Times Square was a sign that my goal, the theatres that lay on its far side, were very close. I am old enough to remember a billboard that puffed smoke to simulate a steaming hot cup of coffee; I am old enough to have seen Blade Runner in its initial release and marveled at the impossible vision of a future in which video images several stories high covered the exterior of buildings. But as someone who never understood the allure of standing in Times Square waiting for the ball to drop in New Year’s Eve, for whom colored signs took a backseat to the colored marquees on the side streets, Times Square was an eternal guidepost, never a true destination. As an adult, who in my 40s worked one block south of Times Square and had to traverse it at all hours of the day and night, Times Square became an unpleasant, tourist-clogged obstacle for which I had increasingly less patience.

However, the TKTS booth, at the northern end of the area, has always been a gateway for me, as it was this weekend. Going back almost to its debut, the booth has been an essential part of my theatergoing and, this past Saturday, after acquiring tickets with exceptional speed, I decided to play tourist for a bit, trying to take in Times Square as I might have once upon a time.

The video screens everywhere still do amaze me, since, as a Blade Runner aficionado, I continue to feel that Times Square is the future come to life, ahead of schedule. That some of these screens have become interactive, which was initially enthralling, has lost its allure for me, especially since they mean pushing through or going around the gaggles of sightseers, standing still, who seem endlessly fascinated to be able to wave at themselves on a giant screen. Yet I imagine that seeing these screens for the first time, or as the parent of a child taking in this experience, they remain a marvel.

A vestige of the past, at the Times Square Visitors Center

I wandered into the Times Square Visitors Center, which has been in place for years, but seemingly uncertain of its purpose, except as an acceptable public restroom. Though it now serves as a souvenir shop and ticket vending location, it also features some theatrical displays (costumes “in the style” of ones worn in famous shows), and small dioramas and video screens with Broadway history. Since New York has no theatre museum, even these small displays appeal, less for myself to whom they are nothing new, but for those who may wander in and get a bit of insight into how theatre gets on stage. The Visitors Center more successfully turned me tourist with the opportunity to gaze, from only a few feet’s distance, at one of the Swarovski crystal-laden “balls” that descend annually to welcome the new year; TV has never conveyed its size or intricacy fully; it reminded me of a long-ago visit to see the Tournament of Roses floats from a similar distance. I particularly loved the Visitors Center tribute to the scuzzy Times Square I remembered, where walking from 7^th to 8^th Avenues on 42^nd Street was to be avoided at all costs. Its method: three peep show booths showing video loops of that bygone era, with a giant neon “Peep Show” glowing above them. I applaud whoever conceived of this reminder, insuring that amidst the retails outlets, the true past of Times Square was not completely whitewashed away.

Back into the light, I crossed back to the environs of the TKTS booth, curious about the blue-shirted, self-proclaimed “Your Broadway Genius”-es who hovered just off the curb of Duffy Square, in contrast to the red shirted TDF employees who helped those figuring out the intricacies of the booth. I sensed a color war.

I approached one of the geniuses to see what insight he was dispensing, with his iPad in hand. Learning that he too was selling theatre tickets, I noticed the telltale Square attachment on his iPad and asked whether he could actually sell theatre tickets right there, and was told he could; certainly wandering ticket outlets from any location is the wave of the future for those untethered to a computer. What Broadway shows did he have on offer? As it turned out, the answer was none. The Broadway Geniuses offered only three shows – Voca People, Rent and Avenue Q, Off-Broadway attractions all. The same shows were available only feet away at the booth, so it would appear that the Geniuses were attempting to siphon off business that might otherwise go through the long-established, not-for-profit official venue. As I am not a tourist, I was not fooled, but I do wonder how many people are taken in by these misleading, opportunistic off-brand vendors, who I later saw accosting people merely sightseeing, not unlike the ever-present touts asking, “Do you like comedy?,” in an effort to lure in new patrons for a nearby comedy show. While I admired the technology, their aggressive pitch and inaccurate branding put me off.

The blue-shirted geniuses are hardly the only commercial opportunists wandering Times Square. In less than an hour I saw the following characters ambling along, taking money in order to be photographed with and by visitors: Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Elmo (red), Elmo (blue?), SpongeBob SquarePants, Toy Story’s Woody, The Naked Indian, a stumpy Elvis impersonator, Hello Kitty, Alvin the Chipmunk, a Smurf (I can’t tell them apart), the Statue of Liberty, and an elderly man in a psychedelic bikini. I know these figures to be entirely unauthorized and I frankly worry about who is inside them, freely embracing unsuspecting tourists for a price; I also worry about turf wars, since it wasn’t uncommon to see several Elmos of varying hues in a single block. To those who say Times Square now feels like a theme park, these plush figures add to the perception, ever if they are an infestation, rather than an enhancement.  Curiously, I did not see the now legendary, more “authentic” Naked Cowboy; perhaps he was on vacation.

Three-ball juggling has replaced three-card monte in today’s Times Square.

There were yet more characters traversing Times Square in endless loops, with a different and more official purposes: young men and women “flyering” for Broadway shows. Dressed in costumes appropriate to the productions they represent, I saw a cheerleading duo from Bring It On, a red-stockinged, exuberant faux Fosse dancer for Chicago, several very polite rock dudes for Rock of Ages, umbrella skirted jugglers for Zarkana and a sole lackadaisical pirate for Peter and the Starcatcher. The cheerleaders in particular were happily posing, and jumping, for pictures with tourists; I admired the energy that they and the Chicago chorine brought to their task and wondered whether Times Square might be even more engaging if the plushies were banished and motivated representatives from Broadway shows both present and past peopled the territory, as Broadway branding and show marketing. I must confess, I would love to see faux Marthas and fake Georges drunkenly accosting tourists to hand them flyers for the upcoming Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? revival, but that’s my own improbably fantasy.

Another loop up back to the TKTS booth revealed a claque of uncostumed flyer distributors, taking a rest, it seemed, but graciously offering to help visitors regardless of what they were apparently paid to promote. A young man holding a fan of flyers for Newsical was counseling a woman on the best show for a six-year-old while the other flyer guys were making up song titles for an imagined Brokeback Mountain musical. They were a scruffy but gentle lot, with a noticeably collegial spirit among them all; no doubt they saw each other often.

Just off Times Square, in Shubert Alley, a youthful marketing team was hawking the attractions of a Cadillac and offering a free Playbill t-shirt for anyone who filled out an information form (think of them as the Glengarry leads). On that day, placed between two theatres without tenants (the Shubert and the Booth), they seemed a bit overeager and undervisited; I was effusively urged to fill out a form and take a t-shirt even though I assured them I had no need of a car. Clearly they were trying to meet goals that their location didn’t appear to support.

As showtime approached, a small brass band set up at the corner of 45^th Street, launching into “When The Saints Go Marching In.” Moments later, a couple walked past me, the woman singing and bopping her head along to the tune, clearly talking on a party spirit that was at odds with my usual grumbling about a crowded Times Square.

By the end of my visit, I saw that hustlers had not been vanquished from Times Square, they had merely been transformed from three-card monte experts to ratty-looking comic figures, but I also saw genuine entertainment and the potential for so much more. While I may not rush to walk through, let alone spend time in, Times Square again so soon, I saw opportunity for true brand-building for theatre and for New York amidst the haphazard assemblage of diversions.

The Theatre Development Fund’s TKTS booth in Times Square.

But nothing impressed me so much as the very first thing I had seen that morning. As I waited in a very short line to acquire theatre tickets at TKTS, I began talking with one of the line attendants, a chatty man, maybe my age, named Daryl, who spoke enthusiastically of shows and asked me about ones I had seen. We were interrupted when a family of three – father, mother and son of perhaps 10 years of age – left the sales window and the son, who appeared to have been born with Down Syndrome, walked up to Daryl, threw his arms as far around him as possible, and squeezed him with a hug, which Daryl reciprocated. Then, the mother approached and kissed Daryl on the cheek, and finally the father shook Daryl’s hand, before the wandered off.

I do not know what interaction I had missed, I saw only the genuine and moving results. Can that happen for each and every person who passes through Times Square? Of course not. But as the businesses, the theatres and the city seek to attract ever more visitors, perhaps they need to learn more about what Daryl offered, sans costumes, sans flyers, sans displays, sans script. Because I feel quite certain that for that family, and for me, Daryl was the star attraction of Times Square that day.

They come, with startling regularity, on Monday and Tuesday each week. “The Grosses.” The Broadway League aggregates and releases the gross sales and attendance for every Broadway show on Monday afternoons (Tuesdays when there’s been a holiday), and a wide range of outlets dutifully report on the biggest hits, the biggest losers, and prognosticate on a show’s future based on their own analyses, some informed, some less so. For a few thousand people who work in professional theatre, this is valuable information  (I touched upon this earlier this year in another post, “Scoring“). For most people, however, The Grosses have become the new arbiter of quality, since a review runs but once, while The Grosses appear week in and week out.

The Grosses are followed, and sometimes preceded, by a bevy of press releases from individual shows announcing their most recent box office achievements: “Highest grossing week ever in x theatre,” “Highest grossing week for x show,” “Biggest one day box office gross at x theatre,” and so on. Because there is now an industry of websites and bloggers who regurgitate this information largely unremarked-upon, this has become the new currency of achievement on Broadway. “SRO” just doesn’t mean the same thing as “$$$.”

What no one stops to point out is that these ever-higher box office achievements are taking place with the same number of seats in each theatre, meaning only one thing: people are paying more and more for tickets, or records wouldn’t be set. Since the introduction of premium seats 10 years ago, the pace has accelerated; the ability of shows to put tickets at the TKTS booth at varying discount rates has also allowed seats to be filled more strategically, so shows with excess inventory at the last minute need not be bound to a 50% discount, but can use a sliding scale. Box office prices are not even fixed any longer; displayed on video screens in lobbies, I am told they can be adjusted a couple of times each week based on demand.

So the fact is, yes, Broadway is setting records, but it’s doing so by generating more money per seat, or in layman’s terms, raising prices. If you thought it odd when Broadway shows said they were playing to 101.6% of capacity (meaning they’re selling standing room), now we can marvel at how shows can gross hundreds of thousands of dollars more than their declared weekly potential.

Before you start shouting “Occupy Broadway” and running with your hastily but tastefully made signage to camp out in Shubert Alley, let’s take a breath.

The majority of productions on Broadway are commercial enterprises. Each show is its own corporation and it has a responsibility, like any business, to maximize its revenue. Famously, only one in five shows supposedly turns a profit; many of the limited runs on Broadway are fortunate to simply return their capitalization.  Finding investors is difficult, costs are escalating from a variety of sources (labor, advertising rates, etc.) and the entire business model is called into question by many. Can we blame producers for seeking to keep Broadway alive, and shouldn’t we accept that the hits need to be ever more remunerative in order to keep more investors interested in participating in Broadway shows and mitigating their losses elsewhere? I think these are all valid considerations and should not be ignored in favor of simple populist rhetoric.

But at what point do we reach, or have we passed, the tipping point where, to echo some of the Occupy Wall Street rhetoric, the top 1% of the country’s theatregoers can afford and secure 99% of the tickets, and every effort to popularize theatre and insure future audiences is negated by economic reality? Just as people have begun to ask about banks and brokerages, is it possibly unethical to make “too much money” with the arts, whether commercial or non-profit?

Yes, I know that many people don’t pay the “rack rate” for Broadway. There’s the aforementioned TKTS booth, the wide range of discounting practiced by all but the most successful shows, the $20 lotteries for front row seats held at 6 pm nightly in front of many theatres. Frankly, Broadway has developed a balkanized pricing system, with the hit shows charging ever higher amounts while shows with less broad-based appeal forced into a cycle of discounting from which they can rarely escape. But the rack rate keeps increasing, so even the discount seats increase in price.

I shouldn’t pick on Broadway alone, as recent news reports have indicated that premium pricing has infiltrated Off-Broadway, both commercial and non-profit. One New York non-profit that famously gives away tickets to several productions for free each year will also let you acquire reserved seats for a pre-set donation amount, perhaps the most pronounced example of price disparity that allows the “haves” to simply pay in advance for what others must seek out for free at the expense of considerable waiting time. Also, while Off-Broadway’s rack rate may be half of that on Broadway, the Broadway discounts equalize the prices – forcing Off-Broadway to then discount its own seats to a point where the production can’t meet its weekly costs, giving rise, in part, to the reduction in commercial activity Off-Broadway in recent years.

“Load management,” pioneered by the airlines, is the original term for what the arts now politely call “dynamic pricing” and it’s not just a New York phenomenon, as both presenting houses around the country and resident theatres attempt to maximize revenue, although perhaps in a less pronounced manner than what we’ve seen thus far in New York. In the case of airlines, they actually can control seating capacity by running greater or fewer flights on various routes, sometimes limiting seating to maximize the price per seat. Theatre doesn’t have this option, but even as one who years ago pondered how to adopt load management at a not-for-profit, I now look to the public’s low opinion of airlines and air travel and worry that the arts could drive themselves into a similarly unpopular consensus. To top things off, this comes at a time when a recent report has informed us that charitable giving to the arts disproportionately benefits the upper echelons of arts audiences.

There is a theatrical ecosystem and it includes professional theatres from small communities to Broadway; I am sure the same is true for symphonies, museums and all of the arts as well. There is absolutely a case of trickle-down economics, but not in any positive way: it is the negative of the upward price and expense cycle that rolls downhill to everyone’s detriment, but most especially to undermine everyone’s supposed shared goal of attracting new audiences and introducing future generations to the arts, if not out of altruism, then out of self-preservation.

Do we need a movement? Perhaps not yet. But do we need pronounced change we can believe in when it comes to access and pricing for the arts? Absolutely. Otherwise, things will just get grosser.

This post originally appeared on the 2amtheatre website.