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The Economics of Broadway Shows
- PaulRobinson 5y agoNot knowing what makes a hit vs a flop seems... strange. Familiar actors and stories might help, but also things that are clever and artistically memorable (e.g. Hamilton) have got to help. I'd also be interested to know how many shows start off-Broadway or off-off-Broadway (100-500 seats and below 100 seats as per this article), and move up to the bigger theatres: test a show in a smaller venue, see if people/critics talk about it, let supply build and keep production costs capped. Some might argue - especially for musicals - that you can't produce "good" shows without much less in the way of production costs, but I think that could be a fallacy. I've watched enough shows and plays to know when one has good "bones" that could be enhanced with bigger sets, better actors, etc. and which are going to die no matter what you do. Hamilton would have been getting talked about and supply not meeting demand if it was Lin-Manuel Miranda in a backroom of a bar in a frock coat, a small band and some acting students making up the rest of the cast. The bones are so good on that show - it's clever, musically arresting, compelling story arc, memorable performance from himself - that anybody who would have seen it would have told their friends about it the next day. Some shows need to be big at the start, but they already have "built-in" audiences: Lion King trades on childhood memories of the film, it's not hard to see why it would be a success. Spider-Man which the article touches on was always a bit of a gamble: it has built-in audience, but how many people think of the Spider-Man films _fondly_? Contrast with Back To the Future which I saw premiere in Manchester, UK (the toughest place to test a show in the World perhaps), before lockdown, and it's moved to the West End and I'd predict is going to be huge on Broadway. Great bones, great built-in audience who love revisiting the film and story repeatedly. Perhaps I'm in the wrong industry, but this seems so, so much easier than software businesses...
- Grakel 5y agoHamilton was workshopped for a very long time and then had a long Off Broadway run at The Public Theatre where additional changes were made. A huge amount of money went into it because of the trust that Lin Manuel had generated with previous work. Spiderman was in tech for over a year (beta testing) because the damned flying didn't work. Then they radically changed the script because it hadn't been workshopped, and it was still terrible. I would encourage you to work on a theatrical production some time. I think you'll find a lot of familiar difficulties, including insane schedules, incompetent management, project bloat, abuse and burnout.
- wombatmobile 5y ago> … insane schedules, incompetent management, project bloat, abuse and burnout. … and as TFA says, financial calamities, and yet, we persist, and we love all of love it, and this art will never die. Why? It’s the essence of us. Story telling is the BIOS of humanity.
- mbg721 5y agoPeople talk about network effects and how beneficial it is to be in Silicon Valley if you're a startup--the same thing has got to be true about New York for on-stage performance. The last time I was there, I picked some random off-off-Broadway thing to go see for twenty bucks, in what was basically a hotel bar, and the quality of the acting was incredible.
- kingcharles 5y agoTotally. Sets and props and costumes don't necessarily add anything. Go to a theatre festival like the Edinburgh Festival and you can see dozens of amazing productions with amazing talent acting out of a broom closet, wearing the clothes they fell out of bed in that morning.
- oddthink 5y agoIt's definitely true. My kids go to school very close to Broadway, and it seems like something like half the parents are in some Broadway-related jobs, from performing to backstage to office, a lot of them living in Manhattan Plaza. It's a very hit-or-miss industry, so there will be periods when you're not doing anything, and then you're left with this pool of extremely high-talent people doing small productions, waiting tables, and the like.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoSounds like the difference between a low-budget game that gets plenty of iteration and playtesting before its wide release, and a AAA game that gets shoved out the door for Christmas because the fiscal quarter depends on it.
- michaelt 5y ago> Not knowing what makes a hit vs a flop seems... strange. Wouldn't any formula for a hit get repeated until audiences are bored and it stops working?
- rwmj 5y agoYes. Movie screenplays are already quite formulaic, eg: https://slate.com/culture/2013/07/hollywood-and-blake-snyders-screenwriting-book-save-the-cat.html https://slate.com/culture/2013/07/hollywood-and-blake-snyder...
- motoxpro 5y agoI think it's the opposite. There are many many more multi million dollar software business than broadway shows, meaning that you have a much lower chance of success making a hit show. It just looks easy in hindsight because you dont see the 10s of thousands of shows that failed and never got picked. Even the "flops" are better than the shows that didn't even get picked up.
- epc 5y agoI invested (way, way, way below the line) in a show which opened off–Broadway a few weeks ago. Had rave reviews when it ran outside NYC and was supposed to open in April 2020. For some odd reason they had to delay the opening to November 2021. It opened, the audience seemed to love it, but one review in the home town paper of record tanked it, I expect it to close this week or next. Off-off Broadway to Off–Broadway is doable, but the economics of adding that extra seat (499 to 500) and becoming a “Broadway” show are just unrealistic for a lot of shows. Different union requirements, plus the theatres impose different costs, and you have to raise a lot more money to open a Broadway show, regardless of where it’s coming from (out of town, off/off-off, local workshop, etc). The only "off off" Broadway show I can think of that made it on Broadway in recent times was Hedwig (started in the Jane hotel bar IIRC), and that took a detour through being turned into a movie. If anything, investing in startups feels easier, I could have spread the same amount of money across multiple startups, figure on losing 33-50%, breaking even a bit, and having one or two return everything. In contrast in a musical or play you’re gambling that the combination of director, cast, band, theatre, mood of the reviewers, mood of the audience will combine just the right way.
- wombatmobile 5y agoPeople don't invest in theater to make money. Same with films, and authoring books. People invest in the arts to make a living. This has nothing to do with the accumulation of money.
- lordnacho 5y agoThere's a number of these industries that seem to have a lottery-like element to them, where getting a ticket to the big time requires a bunch of things to come together. Fine-dining restaurants also "need" a chef with a name, a sensible location (though you can do OK many places), and some favorable early reviews. Hedge funds, my industry, is similar, though the real estate issue is not quite so pressing as for a theater. Starting your own band is also one of those where there's a big time where there are certain industry standards that you'll have to get familiar with while you work on the actual product. Common to them all is you have to bring together a certain mix of human capital, experience, and novelty to get the right doors to open. There's always kind of structure that everyone in the industry understands, with its own lingo and skills and important players that everyone knows. What they also have in common is that you can have very competent people who know how to do stuff that don't strike the gold. Everyone's heard music from highly accomplished musicians who aren't famous.
- TomAbel 5y agoHere is two interesting articles from The Economist where they analyse the success of Hamilton[1] and where they see if you could have predicted the success of Hamilton[2] and here is a in depth post on the data and methodology of the model they created and used[3] [1]https://www.economist.com/business/2016/06/16/no-business-like-show-business https://www.economist.com/business/2016/06/16/no-business-li... Archive of the first Article https://archive.md/L3xzV https://archive.md/L3xzV [2]https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2016/06/15/predicting-the-success-of-hamilton https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2016/06/15/... Archive of the second Article https://archive.md/oylse https://archive.md/oylse [3]http://www.economist.com/broadway-business http://www.economist.com/broadway-business Archive https://archive.md/5HUpH https://archive.md/5HUpH
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago> could have predicted the success Some wag, noting how economists were better at explaining the past, remarked they had successfully predicted nine out of the last five crises ...
- tsimionescu 5y agoThere's also an observation that economists are the people most able to tell you how long your nails will be in 5 years assuming you never cut them.
- dehrmann 5y agoThe main sign it was going to be a success was a performance Lin-Manuel Miranda did at the White House. Listen for where the laughs are; they're not there when you see it on Broadway (and I assume The Public Theater). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNFf7nMIGnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNFf7nMIGnE That's important because the premise is high school cringy. Let's take a historical story and set it to rap! If it wasn't so well-executed, it would have come off as painfully gimmicky.
- anm89 5y agoI would say the general perception is that it was extremely cringey. Obviously they found a large enough audience that disagreed but I don't think they were a majority. Obviously anecdotal.
- tobtoh 5y agoAs someone who moonlights in the theatre industry (as a theatre photographer), I'm vaguely familiar with the economics of putting on shows - the article is very interesting and tallies with my experience. However, I do question one line in the article: > The average income of Broadwaygoers in 2018-19 was $261k — roughly 4x the median household income in the US. $261k?!? the average income of attendees?!? That's can't be right can it?
- chii 5y agoif there's a number of ultra-high net worth people there, it would push the average up, by a lot probably. Median income is a more representative number than average, when there would be outliers like that.
- tobtoh 5y agoOh of course. I forgot about the difference between median and average! For the purpose of the point the article was making in that section (about how the efforts to 'make Broadway more affordable and more democratic come up short.', the 'average' income seems particularly useless as a metric to gauge success. As you point out, the median is a much better metric.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoI think we need a law that all data needs to be presented in deciles, or at least quintiles. It is incredibly annoying to know that someone had the data and chose to not show its distribution, when it costs them almost nothing to do so. I assume any use of the word “average” without specifying mean or median, or really any use of mean average, to be clickbait because there is no reason to use it when you know the underlying distribution is skewed.
- sandworm101 5y agoHow many Broadway tickets have you bought recently? Not many regular people can afford to go regularly. I'm not broke, but spending 400+ on a pair of tickets, plus other costs ... That is not something I would do every month.
- massysett 5y agoMost U.S. live theater survives only through philanthropy. Broadway’s investor-driven model is a remarkable outlier.
- dehrmann 5y agoYou have to remember that musical theater is more pop-driven than operas, orchestras, and plays.
- kingcharles 5y agoPoster didn't mention musical theatre, but that is a much easier sell to the public, IMO, than straight plays. You don't see many indie musicals produced though compared to say the number of Shakespeare productions that are probably going on in any city right now.
- kingcharles 5y agoThis. As someone who helped to run a theatre company in the USA, it is incredibly hard to do it as a for-profit except at the very high-end, e.g. Broadway. My First Wife was an actor by career and most for-profit productions survive because they pay their actors so little. And you're only paid for performances, so those many weeks of rehearsals where you are perhaps driving 10 miles each way are going to eat up most of your income from the production.
- imapeopleperson 5y ago> union contracts