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.

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.

“I have a guy.”

I used to hear this phrase a lot, from various people not in the theatre industry, who always seemed to be able to acquire tickets to sold-out Broadway shows with ease. I don’t hear it so much anymore, because now everybody has a guy, whether ‘he’ goes by the name of StubHub or Ticketmaster Fan-to-Fan resale or something along those lines.

In 2007, when New York State lifted caps on the amount that ticket resellers could charge over face value, long-standing opposition from the commercial theatre community had gone silent. Only six years after The Producers had introduced ‘VIP’ or ‘premium’ pricing, using the argument that these higher priced tickets would make it possible for productions and artists to realise more income via direct sales, most shows followed suit, with their sales success directly correlated to audience demand. Resellers jumped into the fray, more openly than ever before. But now, with the rise of automated bots that gobble up tickets for sale online, it seems to be getting even harder for the average ticket buyer to acquire seats at something close to a reasonable price, even from the official ticket outlet, in the already expensive Broadway arena, if they can get them at all.

In “Why Can’t New Yorkers Get Tickets?,” a report issued last week by the state attorney general, the results of which surprised no one familiar with what’s been generally evident for some time, it was affirmed that a combination of preferred sales that limited the number of seats actually made available to the public, along with mass acquisition of tickets by bots, were biting into ticket inventory in a big way. While there are laws in New York against the use of bots by resellers, and a few fines have been levied, it’s going to take a lot more scrutiny to police such sales. As it seems in so many aspects of modern life, the people determined to get a leg up on everyone else, even when their actions are criminal, seem to be further ahead of the technology curve than those chasing them.

Theatre is not alone in this struggle; the same holds true for rock concerts and sporting events. But any given theatre is so much smaller than those venues that the problem seems more pronounced, as does the heightened demand that drives prices up, a situation most apparent today with Hamilton, which is enjoying demand that’s comparable to those experienced, in my theatregoing life, by, among others, Cats, Phantom, Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, the 1992 Guys and Dolls revival, Rent, Jersey Boys and The Book of Mormon.

So this isn’t a new story, even if it has been turbocharged by technology and made more apparent by the rise of online sales. It’s based in the fundamentals of supply and demand. Some theatre buffs might feel some small sense of pride that theatre is able to generate this kind of interest and desire. But in the process, it only emphasises how expensive theatregoing can be, even when only a few shows command eye-popping prices on the open market.

Broadway is a predominantly commercial enterprise, so it’s unlikely that capitalistic efforts will ever return ticket sales to something close to accessible for the majority; the real battle is over who gets their hands on the most significant part of the revenues being generated. However, just as dynamic pricing spread from the commercial realm to subsidised companies, one can’t help but wonder what’s happening when celebrities appear in regional houses, or when 200-seat theatres such as New York Theatre Workshop start selling tickets to Othello with David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig in the leads this fall. While NYTW made an effort to limit resales during its run of Lazarus by requiring photo ID to pick up seats, that will only go so far.

As someone who was extremely surprised when the commercial theatre industry ended its opposition to resale caps almost a decade ago, I certainly applaud efforts to put all ticket buyers on a level playing field and stem the tide of unbridled price hikes, both official and illicit. At a time when income inequality continues to divide America in so many things, it’s a worthy effort, though I fear a losing battle which has probably already had an insidious and deleterious effect on the perception of theatregoing as an entertainment option for all, even beyond the confines of Manhattan.

Somehow, some way, people with the means to do so will manage to get the tickets they want, when they want. They will always have a guy, even if their guy is now a silicon chip.

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.