Day 159…
There is a new musical called Diana that was scheduled to open on Broadway right around the point that everything shut down. Performances began on March 2, but it hadn’t officially opened yet. The show was still being worked on when it stopped on March 12.
During what are called previews, the show’s creatives and producers watch the show with the audience each night. There’s only so much you can fix in the rehearsal studio. In performance, you can tell when an audience is really responding to something and, possibly more importantly, you can also tell when their attention starts to drift.
While the show is still in previews, changes are put into the show every day in the hours before the audience arrive. It’s is the busiest time in the life of any show. Sometimes those changes make the show better but sometimes…
Theatre is not an exact science. The same team that had a huge hit with one show may not be able to duplicate that success with the next one. You’d think that once you stumble on the formula that you should be able to keep using it, but no, that almost never works.
The producers of Diana have just announced that they are going to film the show in the theatre where it was, without an audience, and stream it on Netflix later this year.
They are still planning on opening the show live next year in May. This is a way to not only keep the creative flow associated with the show moving forward but also a way to generate some funding to help finance their reopening.
As of a month ago, the musical Hamilton had been downloaded on Disney + nearly three quarters of a million times world-wide with 540,000 of those downloads happening here in the US.
The Richard Rogers theatre where Hamilton was playing in New York seats about 1,300 people. At eight performances a week, Hamilton can perform 416 times in any given year. That means that over the course of a year almost exactly the same amount of people who downloaded the show in the US online in the last two months would have been able to see it in person on Broadway. The difference, of course, is that Hamilton was on track to becoming one of the longest running shows on Broadway. That amount of people would be watching it every year, not just one time.
In September of 2014, six years ago, Disney’s The Lion King became the top-grossing single piece of entertainment in any medium in world history.
I’m not talking about the movie I’m talking about the Broadway show. As of 2017, The Lion King live musical had grossed $8.1 billion in global ticket sales. That number is obviously higher now. $1.6 billion of that is solely from the Broadway company.
In comparison, the highest grossing film of all time is Avengers: Endgame with worldwide grosses of $2.7 billion. That’s about a third of the Lion King musical’s total take so far.
The original FILM of The Lion King is 7th on the list of highest grossing films at $1.6 billion. Again, to compare, 8th on the list of the highest grossing LIVE performances is Jersey Boys which also has a total of $1.6 billion in ticket sales world-wide. And still counting.
Is it any wonder that so many movie studios are trying to produce Broadway musicals?
There are currently about 13,000 empty rental residential apartments in New York City. It is a record number for the 14 years that this kind of data has been tracked.
Rental rates dropped 10% in July. July and August are usually the busiest months for new rentals in the city largely because people want to move in before school starts. This year, in light of the pandemic, that consideration is a little different.
Schools in New York City are scheduled to start to reopen on September 10. As schools reopen across the country, however, every problem associated with COVID-19 possible has cropped up.
Testing is still problematic - Michael still hasn’t gotten the results from his virus test from over two weeks ago now. Clusters of cases have spiked in different schools and different areas. A district in Arizona just had to delay its reopening by two weeks because too many teachers had called out. Schools all throughout the south are having to quarantine as spikes happen there.
Many parents are just knuckling under and having their kids be taught online until it all gets safer.
Here in New York among the people I know in the theatrical community, many have moved out because they simply couldn’t afford to stay here.
A couple of summers ago, Michael and I went up to the Berkshires for a week to visit his Aunt and see a whole bunch of theatre. Looking in the window of a real estate office, we realized with not a little bit of horror, that with what we paid for our one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side on Manhattan, we could buy THREE nice homes in Western Massachusetts.
Salaries on Broadway are among the highest in the country. The cost of living in New York, however, is also among the highest in the country. We may make more money here, but we have to spend more money to be here as well.
People who work on Broadway aren’t always working there. The last time my husband was on a Broadway contract was in 2009 when he did the revival of West Side Story. He has worked fairly steadily since then on regional productions as well as on films and TV shows, but none of them have paid as well or as steadily.
Make no mistake about it, he is the definition of a successful actor. Like every other working actor, he takes the work that challenges him. Sometimes that pays well and sometimes, not so much.
So, here we are in the middle of a global pandemic and everything has shut down. All Broadway salaries along with even the HOPE of a Broadway salary are gone. So, everyone who has been paying high New York City rental and mortgage rates suddenly has no income.
Of course, they are leaving the city. They cannot afford to stay here - especially if they have kids. They are moving to places where their kids don’t have to be cooped up in a small apartment. Many people are moving back in, temporarily, with their parents to save money.
Living in New York is not always a picnic. There are things about it that are hard and, sometimes, downright miserable. Those things are balanced, though, by the great things that the city has to offer - its community and its culture.
Neither of those, these days, are possible so we are getting far more of the worst of New York than we are of its best.
New York City is not dead. Kicked in the b$%s, yes, but not dead.
Many companies are finding that their employees are being more productive working from home. I don’t believe that when everything opens up again that that level of output is going to continue. People are going to get distracted when there are other things to do.
Going TO a place to work focuses you. Stephen King can go and write in a separate office at home, but the rest of us don’t always have that kind of space.
At the moment, big companies are thrilled with the idea that they are going to be able to shut down their expensive offices.
A friend of mine works for Pixar the animation company. They have a kind of campus in Northern California. It is a stunning location that is completely designed for people to interact - open communal areas, sports areas, dining areas. It’s like a gorgeous playground. People at Pixar are encouraged to play together instead of staying in their offices all day. You only have to look at the incredible series of films that have come out of that studio to see how successful that model is.
Human beings are not solitary creatures. We are not designed that way. The worst punishment you can (legally) give someone in prison is solitary confinement. You put someone by themselves for too long, they go insane.
Do I want to watch Diana on Netflix?
No, actually, but I will but only because I can’t see it in person yet. Seeing it online is better than not seeing it at all.
Do I want to do production meetings via zoom forever?
No. I do not. We learn more about each other sitting together in the same room for an hour than we would participating in a lifetime of online sessions.
I have no doubt that some zoom meetings will continue after all of this, they are far better than having people phoning in. I think, however, that we are going to want to start doing them in person again as soon as we can.
Putting together a show is like dating a whole group of people at the same time. It is hard work and, sadly, often prone to devastating failure. What gets us through it all is the fact that we create a family each and every time we dive into a new project.
Sure, there’s always a crazy Aunt Betty and nobody likes Cousin Morty, but we all end up being in it together and that communal supportive energy is what allows the success to happen. We all get very close, very quickly. We can’t do that when we are by ourselves looking at the world through a screen.
Beginning next week, New York City’s museums are going to be allowed to reopen. We will need to make reservations for timed entries and capacity will be limited to 25%. Mask-wearing will be mandatory.
That is a major item in the plus column for those of us living here.
Is it how I want to experience museums forever? Absolutely not, but for now, I will embrace it with open arms and the deepest sense of relief possible.
While it may seem that there is no way out of this, there is.
Yes, things will change. Some of what we are doing now will definitely carry over as we move forward.
We, as human beings, however, are just not going to change that much. We will still need to be around each other. We will still need each other’s energy. That is how we were created.
Some of the people who have moved out of the city will, indeed, find new lives wherever they have ended up.
Despite that, there will always be new, excited people coming in - maybe from those very same places - to occupy their empty apartments.
Stephen Sondheim said it best (and he said it in 1970 while people were already leaving the city in droves):
It's a city of strangers
Some come to work, some to play
A city of strangers
Some come to stare, some to stay
And every day
Some go away...
And another hundred people just got off of the train.
And another hundred people just got off of the train.
And another hundred people just got off of the train.
And another hundred people just got off of the train.
Another hundred people just got off of the train.
“Putting together a show is like dating a whole group of people at the same time”
❤️
only you stay in love forever
“Someday.....
xx