Hearing that the circus is coming to town usually evokes idyllic reveries of a parade of animals trouping down Main Street, the Big Top going up, the smell of sawdust and cotton candy. But when the circus in question is the multinational behemoth Cirque du Soleil, and they ditch the Big Top to stand in the reflected glare of Broadway’s lights, the effect on the Great White Way is somewhat chilling.

Cirque’s Zarkana made its debut last summer at Radio City Music Hall, just one avenue away from Mamma Mia! and Wicked. While Cirque had played New York many times over the years, they’d previously pitched their tent, literally, at the outlying Battery Park City or Randall’s Island, or occupied the unloved Theatre at Madison Square Garden with an oddity called Wintuk. But Zarkana changed the playing field, putting up to 54,000 available tickets a week on the market barely outside the Broadway district, accompanied by a marketing campaign commensurate with that capacity and a nearly four month residency.

While it’s impossible to cite any single cause for what anecdotally seemed a down summer in 2011 for shows that were less than smash hits, there was a lot of murmuring about the Cirque effect. That murmur approached a grumble when tickets were made available at TKTS, the Times Square half-price booth, vying for customers using the exact same tool as Broadway shows with available seats.

On the one hand, the presence of tickets at TKTS suggested that Zarkana was less than a smash. But it also meant that when tourists were seeking entertainment options, the widely marketed brand of Cirque was competing with shows that may have only had a couple of months to begin establishing themselves in the public consciousness. If a family was choosing between a new musical unannointed by the Tonys or the pinnacle of modern circus arts, the choice wasn’t necessarily hard. And the scale was daunting: with more than 5400 seats per performance and as many as ten shows a week, the ticket inventory in midtown Manhattan was expanded considerably; all of Broadway – if every theatre has a show on concurrently, which is rare – has just under 400,000 seats to sell each week.

The plan, it was generally known, was for Zarkana to return annually for five summers. As it turns out, Zarkana must have truly underperformed, because this year is already being advertised as the last chance to catch the show in NYC, the run was dropped from 152 to 121 performances, in June the balcony isn’t even being put on sale, the show has been trimmed from two acts to a 90 minute one-act, and more. While hardly the debacle that Cirque’s previous original Manhattan show, Banana Shpeel, had been (it was radically altered with little success during a protracted preview period at The Beacon Theatre), Zarkana is certainly one of the Montreal company’s rare misfires (although they’re hoping its fortunes will change in Las Vegas, its next home). No doubt this is a relief to Broadway producers, who are more than ready to wave goodbye to the clowns and acrobats that, for their money, can’t depart fast enough.  But Cirque may not give up: thwarted in their effort at a permanent home on 42^nd Street a few years back, they may not be ready to admit defeat in establishing, if not a year-round beachhead, at least a perennial success in such a prominent international destination.

It does raise the question of what happens to the cavernous yet elegant Radio City Music Hall now. Its management has been after a sit-down summer attraction for some time (35 years ago, they produced their own summer spectaculars, running some 150 performances as well). So do they have a back-up plan of their own– or might Cirque rotate in another show from its menu of productions? Is it possible that Radio City will return to a summer of one and two night concert stands, including the return of The Tony Awards, which were displaced in favor of a months-long booking? We know that while nature abhors a vacuum, the owner of an entertainment venue hates empty seats or an empty hall even more. Broadway may have dodged long-term Zarkana damage, but perhaps something equally threatening, or even more so, is waiting in the wings.

Gender and racial diversity in the arts has been a topic of discussion for as long as I can remember. But the ongoing inequities in the American theatre have been simmering for a long time. Intermittent signs of progress – Garry Hynes and Julie Taymor winning Tonys in 1997, dual firsts for women; the rich cycle of plays by August Wilson that brought a black voice to Broadway and stages across the country; the current Broadway season which featured two new plays by black female writers – are received with attention and even acclaim. Yet overall, there is general consensus that these constituencies are profoundly underrepresented.

While dissatisfaction can be directed at the commercial theatre, it is decentralized; each production is its own corporate entity and producers do not consult with all of the other producers. When it comes to new plays, as it happens, a majority of the work seen on Broadway (if not from England) has emerged from not-for-profit companies. Consequently, the publicly-funded resident theatres have become the locus of attention on these issues and, accelerated by social media, the continuing lack of meaningful process may be coming to a head.

The underrepresentation of women and racially-diverse authors on our stages has come into sharp relief recently as a result of the season announcement by The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, one of our oldest and largest companies. In announcing a season of 11 productions thus far, there are no plays by female playwrights (although a Goldoni adaptation is by Constance Congdon), no plays by any writers of color, and only one project with a female director (more accurately, a co-director, with Mark Rylance). In the outcry that ensued, it was noted that almost 10 years ago, while rallying support and funding for The Guthrie’s new home, Dowling had specifically said the new venue would allow for a greater variety of voices; responding to current criticism, he stoked the flames by invoking and decrying “tokenism.”

This prominent example generated press coverage beyond the Minneapolis-St. Paul market, let alone an ongoing rumble of dismay across blogs and Twitter. Perhaps it was Dowling’s defensiveness that made The Guthrie situation so volatile. After all, this past season, Chicago’s acclaimed Steppenwolf Theatre mainstage season featured plays only by men (one an African American), and this from a theatre with a female artistic director; I don’t remember comparable outcry. Was this tempered by the season including several female directors? Or has the Guthrie flap made it easier to raise these issues?

Now each new season announcement is being held up to an accounting, not necessarily in its own board room, staff meeting or local press, but by activists seeking to lay bare this congenital issue. In 2012-13? Arizona Theatre Company: Six plays, all by white males. Seattle Rep: Eight plays, two by women, one of them African American. Alley Theatre in Houston: 11 productions, 2 by women (one of them Agatha Christie) and one by an Asian American man. Kansas City Rep: seven shows, six by men and one developed by an ensemble. Obviously I cannot go theatre by theatre, and I think more detailed data will be gathered, but underrepresentation of works by women and writers of color (of any gender) prevails. What of Steppenwolf? Their next five play season includes plays by one woman and one African-American man.

Is it fair to apply what some might call a quota system in assessing the diversity work on American stages? I would have to say, as so many of our resident theatres are on the verge of celebrating their 50^th anniversaries in the next few years, that a public declaration of these figures is not only fair, but necessary. Theatres have been asked by foundations, by corporations, by government funders to break down their staffs and boards by gender and race for years, and knowing that they were under scrutiny may have caused many companies to diversify internally more, or more quickly, than they might have otherwise. Actors Equity has conducted surveys of seasonal hiring, broken down for gender and race, for a number of years – another watchful eye. Now the focus must shift to the writers of the work on our stages if progress is to be made.

It is ironic that the civil rights movement in America is perhaps most associated with the 1960s, followed closely by the feminist movement — the very same period that coincidentally also saw the bourgeoning of the American resident theatre movement. How unfortunate that some of the language associated, for good or ill, with the first two efforts (tokenism, quotas) are even relevant in discussion of artistic breadth of the latter half a century later.

Having had a hand in The Tony Awards from 2004 through 2011, awards show-watching has been more than a pastime for me. But I’m a latecomer to The Olivier Awards. Two years ago I sat at home, watching the livestream in a window on my laptop. Last year, I finally accepted my annual invitation from the Society of London Theatres to attend in person. Earlier today, I spent four hours in the Jazz at Lincoln Center facility, where the livefeed of the Oliviers was shown on a large screen in Rose Hall, perhaps the city’s most unique venue, with views of Columbus Circle and Central Park behind the stage and, in this case, screen.  Today’s experience felt like an amalgam of my prior two: I was watching on a screen, but a big one which often brought the event to larger than life size; instead of calling out the winners to my wife in the other room, I was surrounded by several hundred theatre professionals and other guests.  This was the “NT Live” version of The Oliviers, so to speak.

I had expected the crowd to resemble “the usual suspects” seen at most opening nights, but it was an eclectic mix, with many folks I didn’t know. I spotted producers (Michael David of Jersey Boys, Sue Frost & Randy Adams of Memphis, Jed Bernstein of Driving Miss Daisy and Hal Luftig of Evita), some not-for-profit leaders (Teresa Eyring of the Theatre Communications Group and Victoria Bailey from the Theatre Development Fund), and a smattering of press (The New York Times, Playbill, Theatermania and AM New York). There was a large contingent from One Man, Two Guvnors there up through intermission (they had to depart for a 3 pm matinee), I don’t know how many from Ghost, Paulo Szot of South Pacific, and James Earl Jones.

It is impossible to know how many attendees had seen some, or any, of the nominated shows (I had seen only four), so an obvious question was whether one would feel any “rooting interest” in the room. Certainly the Guvnors crowd applauded heartily as their nominations were announced, but that was the only apparent partisanship in the room (and completely appropriate). What pleasantly surprised me was that the audience did respond as if at a live show, instead of a cinema; there was applause at the end of every musical number performed, all of which came off well on the big screen. If not the same as being there, there was the unifying effect that experiencing entertainment in a large group can bring; there was definitely a frisson of excitement when Matthew Warchus accepted his award live in New York – made even more exciting by it taking place just seconds after the briefly interrupted video feed came back online.

Andre Ptasyzynski’s opening remarks playfully hinted at rivalry between Broadway and the West End – he cited 14 million London admissions last year vs. Broadway’s 12.5, but also noted $1 billion in New York revenues against London’s $800 million, and also differentiated between voting rules for The Oliviers and The Tonys. But the prevailing spirit was of a carefree spring afternoon in London (even if it was nighttime there). The U.S. audience might have benefited from a few annotations by voice or on screen (Collaborators author John Hodge was never identified by name), and it was my sense that even with an introduction, the crowd neither understood who Ronan Keating and Kimberley Walsh were or why they were dropped into the middle of the event’s second act. Presenters from Downton Abbey needed no such identification.

Too often, in the press surrounding both The Oliviers and The Tonys, there’s an effort to stoke the fires of national competition. I’ve always thought it a false construct. This initial large scale opportunity for the New York theatre to join together for the Oliviers was a good first step and reinforced what I have always found to be true: the underlying unity of all theatre communities, wherever they may be and whoever wins their awards.

If you stand on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, at the corner of either 44^th or 45^th Streets, and look west, you see the iconic image of brightly illuminated Broadway marquees lining both sides of the street. 14 of Broadway’s 40 houses are in view on two streets.

If you stand on the corner of 42^nd Street and Ninth Avenue looking west, you may see only a few glints of light off of display windows or subtle marquees, but there are 11 theatres in the next block: Theatre Row (with five stages), Playwrights Horizons (two stages), the Little Shubert and the newly opened Signature Center (with three). Extend your gaze almost to Eleventh Avenue and make it an even dozen, by adding in Signature’s former home.

There’s no comparison in scale or capacity between the Broadway stages on 44^th and 45^th Streets and the Off-Broadway venues that line this stretch of 42^nd Street, where the largest theatre is 499 seats and the average is probably half that. But there’s no arguing that the range of theatrical production on 42^nd Street is at least as vital creatively, especially when you consider that the Broadway theatres may be home to long running shows, while the turnover at the smaller venues will yield many more new productions annually, even if they do play to a fraction of the Broadway audience.

The emergence of West 42^nd Street is emblematic of a growth spurt among New York’s subsidized companies, and it’s not restricted to 42^nd Street; there’s other recent or planned theatrical renovation and construction going on elsewhere. In The New York Times, Charles Isherwood took note of this expansion, expressing concern that companies might be driven by a need to fill this real estate in contravention of their artistic goals or capacities; he also commented shows’ journeys from these intimate spaces to Broadway, which he sometimes finds ill-advised.

I won’t weigh in on whether certain shows should – or shouldn’t have – transferred to Broadway’s commercial arena, but I will say that such a decision is rooted in one of the most significant conundrums in New York’s theatrical ecosystem: the diminished viability of commercial Off-Broadway production of new plays and musicals. While there are long-running entertainments in New York’s smaller commercial venues (Stomp, Blue Man Group, De La Guarda) and there have been some other hits (I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change; Love, Loss and What I Wore), plays like Freud’s Last Session and the just opened Tribes are relative rarities. Off-Broadway is even now home to one-time Broadway successes (Million Dollar Quartet, Rent and Avenue Q) sustaining their New York lives through reduced expectations.

But when it comes to a Off-Broadway success from a non-commercial company, the only option today seems to be Broadway or bust, as the cost of producing sustained runs in these small venues under a commercial contract proves impossible for most serious-minded fare (or even intelligent comedies) because of many factors, from the limited revenue to the high cost of advertising on a small budget. This is markedly different from 15 or 20 years ago, when the work of companies like Playwrights Horizons and Manhattan Theatre Club would transfer regularly to commercial engagements. A mainstay of Off-Broadway in the 80s and 90s, playwright A.R. Gurney, used to see his shows transfer from a non-profit to commercial run almost annually; now his plays, no matter the reception, get a six-week run at Lincoln Center Theatre, Primary Stages or The Flea and are over. He’s joined by most playwrights in this limiting atmosphere. Even when long-running Off-Broadway hits from the past are revived, they go to Broadway, as recently evidenced by Driving Miss Daisy and Wit.

The great irony is that the New York productions become loss leaders, garnering press attention and respect, but achieving larger audiences and multiple productions in the country’s regional theatres, where they generate healthier royalties for playwrights. Nowhere is that more evident than with Clybourne Park which, after a couple of months at Playwrights Horizons, went on to regional runs in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC and almost every U.S. major city (as well as London) before finally coming to rest after copious acclaim, at last, on Broadway.

The Off-Broadway building boom is a boon to theatre both in New York and beyond. But to benefit more theatergoers here, the challenge is to restore a healthy middleground between Off-Broadway not-for-profit runs and Broadway berths, so that work can stay at its proper scale, achieve a modicum of financial success and stick around for as long as people want to see it, while always making room for yet more new work. It’s a puzzle, but one worth solving.