American Theater Wing Executive SING: Broadway musicals in renaissance, not decline

A recent New York Times piece suggested that “The Broadway Musical is in trouble.” Most of the report in that report is positive: capital costs have increased, risk tolerance is constrained by the economy and forced shows to fight more difficult than before to find their audience. But in my opinion as president and CEO of the American Theater Wing, the suggestion that Broadway musicals are facing an existential crisis misses the point. Broadway is not dead. It appears.

This is not the first time someone has raised the alarm. Broadway’s Doom has been predicted for more than half a century. In 1969, the times asked, “Did Broadway have it?” In 1995, New York magazine devoted a cover story to the posed question, “Can broadcasting be saved?” In 2005, The Yorker New Yorker Michael John Lachiya refuses to announce that “The Broadway musical is dead.” And for decades, Michael Riedel made a play to declare an art form in support of life. The articles keep coming. Broadway keeps on going.

What is different today is the broader economic climate that poses these concerns. Structural pressures such as persistent inflation, labor costs and material costs, actual sales prices and high customer acquisition and marketing costs have reduced margins for every manufacturer, not just one. The result is a place where there are well-liked shows that have to work with a more promising cost structure than previous eras. Rather than implying a decline in creativity, these pressures reflect the same macroeconomic realities that are reshaping all American industry.

There is a truth to the argument that rising costs are diminishing commercial music. When a new product can cost $ 25 million to climb to hundreds of thousands a week to run, even the most removed music can close before it finds its audience. But the deep debate isn’t the music itself. It’s a financial framework built around one small area of ​​success: Reinstatement.

Reinstatement is never a perfect metric. Today, it is a complete thing. It doesn’t matter how many lives it’s a show now it pays, and it doesn’t show who gets paid and when. Most show that “financial disappointment” still applies to hundreds of Union salaries, to pay fees, to travel without a license, to create international products, to enjoy long products in recordings, classes and regional products. Lead producers generate income from their products even when investors don’t want them. None of this is healthy. To measure the life of the American Musical solely by the restoration of the early Boodolays is like judging a river solely by its lowest point. In more subdued ways, it’s worth arguing the music flourishes. Green shoots are easy to find if you know where to look.

Importantly, the Broadway Ecosystem is not alone. Non-profit organizations and theater organizations across the country, often working with tight budgets, act as an engine for research and development of new talent, recruiting talent, screening materials and growing voices that increase the commercial pipeline. The life of Broadway is separated from the life of the non-profit institutions that support it.

Audiences reflect and change. The tower It continues to bring past Broadway battles to an art form, POP and R & B fans have never seen Broadway ‘for them.’ Buena Vista Social Clubsung entirely in Spanish, it has welcomed a Latino audience with a celebration of Afro-Cuban Musical Heritage rarely seen in commercial circles. Maybe a happy endingTour futuristic love story from South Korea, Box Office Records is on its way to the Tony Acward for Best Musical. These are not wars. They are evidence of an expanding circle.

In the American Theater Wing, we see this future building in real time. Our mission is to invest in bold work, support creative growth and expand through the pipeline of theater makers and audiences. From this point, the story is not one of collapse but of possibility. This year, our Jonathan Larson grants received nearly 1,000 applications, the highest number in a 28-year history. Writers bring new musical languages, new cultural influences, new storytelling traditions and new sonic identities to this form. The desire to want to do music has never been stronger.

And this framework is not theoretical. Larson Grant Alumni include Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Dave Malloy, Tom Kitt and Brichael Yorky, Shaina Tackson, Joe Iconis and other accomplished alumni. Together, they have gone on to win pulitzers, tons, grammys, emiys and oscars. If this form died, many amazing artists would not benefit from it.

The momentum goes beyond the music. Oh, Mary!The bold and daring Cole Escola is, proudly, one of the hottest tickets on Broadway. There is no franchise. No brand recognition. NO FREE CHURCH DOWNLOADS. Just one word. And the audience is hungry. And the status of musicals rades far away in New York. Screen conversion of – Ms exceeded $750 million at the worldwide box office. Captures included in the Hamilton drove approximately 752,000 app downloads To get Disney + in its first three days of broadcast. These are not death form statistics. They are proof of migration.

None of this ignores the very real economic challenges facing Broadway. They are different, important and shared across the industry. But a financial model that needs to be replicated is not a testament to the art form at Pril. It is proof that the infrastructure has fallen in step with the thought that it is intended to serve. Musical theater has never been one place, one income stream or one definition of success. The impulse at its heart, to turn the news into a song and gather the public to listen, predicts every limited sheet and will release every one of them.

The death of Broadway has been declared too many times. But as long as there are musicians who have something to say, audiences who have the courage to hear something authentic and positions committed to raising those who will do and see this work, the orchestra will continue to play. We should not be afraid of the future of music. We have to keep building, every day, and musicians are already writing its next song.