My sister’s visiting the city and she asked me if I could snag her a pair of tickets to A Little Night Music. This charming little show has always been a success and I fully expected to have to work a bit to find good seats but I didn’t expect to be faced with wall-to-wall sold-out performances all week long. Of course it’s never bad news when theatre is sold out in my book but, still, I couldn’t stop wondering if the crowds were lining up for the show or for the cast.
Die-hard theatre freaks can’t imagine missing another star turn by the incomparable Angela Lansbury and an entirely separate demographic is no doubt drawn to the box office of the Walter Kerr by the star power of Ms. Catherine Zeta Jones. Now the good news is, this Hollywood superstar’s got serious talent. And the same can be said of Mssrs. Jackman and Craig who proved to be box office gold for Keith Huff’s new two-hander, A Steady Rain last month. [ed note: see recent post, Hugh Jackman Talks to Woman in Row P]
If you’re reading this and thinking: “What difference does it make whether they flock to see my show or to see the stars we’ve put in it?” well, I think you may be fooling yourself. It makes a huge difference to the life of a play especially when it’s receiving its New York premiere.
You only need to read a handful of the lukewarm reviews given to Mr. Huff’s bold new play in the New York papers to discover one of the corrosive byproducts of the star machinery at work on Broadway. A play that is most worthy and left me thinking about it for days--if not weeks--after I left the theatre, was derided as “thin” and “clichéd” by theatre critics primed to not take it seriously by virtue of its bubblegum superstar cast. Read no further than the opening sentence of Ben Brantley’s New York Times review and you’ll see what I mean:
A Steady Rain, which opened on Tuesday night at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, is probably best regarded as a small, wobbly pedestal on which two gods of the screen may stand in order to be worshiped.
So the question I think we need to be asking ourselves as dramatists is: How and when should we exercise our veto rights when it comes to casting? And should we be so quick to accept the arguments made by producers again and again that the only road to Broadway runs through Hollywood?
When a producer tells us the only way he or she can possibly finance our work is by stuffing the cast list with television and film stars, what most of us hear is: “Your work is not commercial enough to attract large audiences without big names”
But I think we’re simply mis-translating. What we ought to be hearing is: “I’m too lazy to work to understand how to market the play you’ve written in a fresh way so I’m pushing you to allow me to resort to a tired old model that only works 50% of the time, if that.”
Don’t let another person’s laziness or lack of vision win the day because of your own lack of faith in your work. If Mr. Huff’s play was strong enough to win rave reviews and sell out in Chicago without superstars in its cast, there’s no reason to have assumed that would not have been the case in New York. And I’d expect had the Chicago cast been brought to Broadway, as they were in the case of another play from the same town, August: Osage County, Mr. Huff might be ringing in 2010 from the back of the Gerald Shoenfeld Theater as his brave little show took the Great White Way by storm. Instead, two brilliant and very famous actors took us all by storm. Not a failure by any means. But still, the play was not the thing.
And for us, as dramatists, that ought to be a shame.
[ed note: For more on the topic of Star-stuffing of Broadway shows, see Chad Bauman's Arts Marketing Blog.]
