| IS BROADWAY WORTH THE PRICE?
by Jason Loewith on 11/27/2007 04:11:00 PM
Terry Teachout had an interesting article in last weekend's Wall Street Journal:
The Price of the Ticket
It costs a lot to see a Broadway show. Is it worth the expense?
November 24, 2007
Time for a pop quiz inspired by the stagehands' strike that shut down most of Broadway. Who said this - and when did he say it?
"It is not for nothing that New York is the place where the critics are the most powerful and the toughest in the world. It is the audience, year after year, that has been forced to elevate simple fallible men into highly priced experts because, as when a collector buys an expensive work, he cannot afford to take the risk alone: the tradition of the expert valuers of works of art, like Duveen, has reached the box office line. So the circle is closed; not only the artists, but also the audience, have to have their protection men - and most of the curious, intelligent, nonconforming individuals stay away."
That quotation is from "The Empty Space," an influential book about theater by Peter Brook, the avant-garde British director whose celebrated version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," set in an all-white space and played by actors who walked on stilts and swung on trapezes, was one of the most admired Shakespeare productions of the '60s. Mr. Brook wrote "The Empty Space" 39 years ago, when the top ticket price on Broadway was $11, $64 in today's dollars. Nowadays it will cost you anywhere between $51.50 and $121.50 to see "Young Frankenstein" - unless you're prepared to fork out $450 for a premium-priced weekend seat.
Speaking as one of the simple, fallible New York critics Mr. Brook had in mind, I feel obliged to ask: Is Broadway really twice as good today as it was in 1968? I recently looked up the theater listings in the Nov. 23, 1968, issue of The New Yorker. Zoe Caldwell was starring in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," Lee J. Cobb in "King Lear," Dustin Hoffman in "Jimmy Shine," James Earl Jones in "The Great White Hope," Lotte Lenya in "Cabaret," Donald Pleasance in "The Man in the Glass Booth" and Maureen Stapleton in "Plaza Suite." You could also see new plays by Brian Friel and Arthur Miller, as well as the long-running original productions of "Fiddler on the Roof," "Hair," "Hello, Dolly," "Mame" and "Man of La Mancha."
Case closed? Well, maybe not quite. As I look back over my pre-strike Broadway reviews of the past year or so, I find lurking amid the dross a fair number of memorable shows, including Tom Stoppard's "Coast of Utopia" trilogy and "Rock 'n' Roll," the Manhattan Theatre Club's unforgettable revival of Mr. Friel's "Translations," the Roundabout Theatre Company's "110 in the Shade" and "Pygmalion," John Doyle's perception-changing rethinking of Stephen Sondheim's "Company" and Frank Langella's sensational star turn in "Frost/Nixon." I would gladly have paid a hundred bucks to see any one of these shows -- but would I have paid $1,800, not including dinner, to go to all of them with a date?
That last number came to mind as I read Mr. Brook's discussion of the high cost of playgoing in 1968. Even then, the curious, intelligent, nonconforming middle-class New Yorkers celebrated in "The Empty Stage" could still afford -- just -- to visit Broadway often enough to feel that they were keeping up with American theater. Now they're more likely to go once or twice a year, if that. Broadway is no longer a meaningful part of their cultural lives.
To read the rest of Terry's article (which takes in the issue of the strike discussed in this blog), click here.Labels: Broadway, union
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