CULTURE

BROADWAY: THE REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS OF IRRELEVANCE

Alas, poor Broadway, we knew it well. Let us contemplate the rewards and punishments of its current irrelevance.

Confoundedly enough, irrelevance still proffers extraordinary financial rewards.  Although nary a show arrived on the great white way this season that any prudent observer would consider inspiringly relevant to the text or subtext of our lives, ticket sales have been just fine, thank you. 

How is that conundrum possible?  While there is always plenty of demand for carefree irrelevance, the real basis of the continuing financial plentitude is simply that the audience base in which suckers can be snagged has increased dramatically.

Once a show has lasted long enough to make it onto computer screens of travel agencies worldwide, a show can begin to hope for a run that almost makes the trifle seem annoyingly immortal.  Of course, the staying power to achieve such an unmerited eternity is costly – and one of the reasons that a producer like Disney, with pockets that rival the size of the ocean deep, is consistently successful, no matter how unmeritorious the show is. 

With the caveat of such an approach securely within its budget, the “entertainment giant” doesn’t even have to care much what the critics or even the early audiences say.  It can pre-sell the heck out of the show, glean whatever praise, if any, it can from the reviews, and then doggedly keep the dollop up and promote it until the reviews disappear into yesterday and yesterday and yesterday, creeping in this petty pace to their own irrelevance, while colorfully positive ads for the affront replace their unwelcome negativity. 

Now, the busily employed travel agents, unencumbered by nagging questions about the excellence of the show, can recommend it to a generally inexperienced or enthusiastically willing audience, most of whom will finally be served an evening that does not meet their expectations and sends them out of the theater, sullen and often grousing about the extortionate price of the tickets.

Yet, despite the vast new reservoir of patrons who can be tapped to spend a punishing evening on Broadway, we cannot help but reminisce about that wondrous yesteryear when intelligent people actually expected consequential shows to appear there and considered them deserving topics for distinguished conversation.

What have we now, in place of this nascent and once hopeful American theater?  A business conducted as mundanely as any other, specializing largely in variously cobbled and already proven imports and exports, along with regular revivals of the lighter box-office fare of yesteryear. 

Meanwhile, new American theater hobbles along, discouragingly under-funded and with hardly a chance of reaching a wide audience.  

The blame for this punishment of our discontent can be laid at a variety of doorsteps. 

The withering of intelligently relevant American theater is, of course, very much brought to us by the unwillingness of the skeptical merchants who oversee today’s Broadway to nourish it by spreading around real bucks to fertilize the various gardens that can grow it.  But it is also, measure for measure, due to the pinch of public funding under the aegis of a national administration that blithely seems to find art unnecessary, let alone grasping its importance in nourishing the understanding, spirit, and unity of the nation.  Recently, there is at least one penlight of hope.  New York, attempting to preserve its place as the world hub of cultural activity, primarily for pecuniary reasons, has instituted a new program to help fund creative endeavors, among them theater.  

To add embarrassment to our punishing theatrical ineptitude, England continues to nourish intelligent theater, at least in line with the talents of its contemporary playwrights, and ships the works here, with various degrees of success, the current example being David Hare’s drama about the buildup to the invasion of Iraq.  Guarantee that, untried at the box office, it wouldn’t have found a cent of funding on Broadway or even in today’s cash-strapped Paducah.  One hears the choir of producers already.  “It takes a minimum of three years for us to break even on a straight play, and Bush is only going to be in office for three more years.  So how is it going to pay back our investment?”  Many a venue as far Off-Broadway as the imagination is likely to tarry would have had to confront the same gripping financial exigency.

And thereby hangs the tale.

We may still give our regards to Broadway, but we must also leaven our regards with regret.

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