Post 639 - August 12, 2024

A torrential downpour washed out Broadway Barks in New York last week.

Just before that happened, we all thought we might be spared a storm. It was cloudy, but that was all. Shubert Alley was packed with people. Dogs from eighteen or nineteen shelters were at different tables along the length of the between-streets pass-through. Cats from half a dozen more rescue organizations were lounging comfortably in air-conditioned vans lining 45^th Street. A whole army of Broadway performers, stage managers, and willing volunteers were mobilized and ready to go. Yes, it was overcast, but we were still trying to convince ourselves that it was not necessarily stormy.

5:00 pm came. We started the show. Three items were raffled off from the stage. The proceeds of those raffles will go to the shelters to help care for the animals. Bernadette Peters and Sutton Foster were then introduced. Unfortunately, at that moment, they were still both upstairs in the Shubert offices waiting for the elevator to bring them down. They weren’t in any way ready to make their entrances and yet they’d just been announced.

At that moment, my heart leaped into my mouth and then dropped down onto the cement. Nothing was happening onstage. I called upstairs to see where everybody was. They were coming. It was taking forever.

While I was on the phone, two other actors, Shoshana Bean, and Betsy Wolfe, took matters into their own hands and climbed up the stairs to the stage and began singing a song. The audience cheered.

Finally, the elevator landed, and Bernadette and Sutton headed backstage. There wasn’t time to explain to them what was going on. Instead, we escorted them to the step & repeat to talk with the press while Shoshana and Betsy finished their song.

By now, it was fully apparent to everyone that we were about to be slammed by the weather. The sky had turned yellow. Something big was coming. There was an ominous breeze.

Finally, the ladies onstage finished their tune and bowed to thunderous applause as Bernadette and Sutton entered. After acknowledging the two who had stepped in, the two hosts of the afternoon finally started the scripted show proper.

After a bit of banter, the first notes of the opening number rang out from the keyboard on the ground, below. At the exact same time, the first raindrops began to fall. They were huge drops, heavy with intent. On cue, a chorus of Broadway notables made their way up the steps to add their voices to the song. Just as they did, the heavens opened.

It was a deluge. A few bars in, the sound of the downpour hitting the stage was so loud that it became difficult to hear the music. Umbrellas popped open onstage and in the audience. A few of us climbed up behind the singers with umbrellas of our own to try and keep them all dry.

It wasn’t working. I have this image in my memory of a steady stream of water gushing down onto Bernadette’s head from the umbrella of a taller person standing next to her. I tried to block the stream with my own umbrella, but it was pointless. She was soaked. We were all getting soaked.

Finally, there was a crack of thunder, and we had to call it. Water alone we could deal with, an electrical storm, however, no. It just wasn’t safe. We stopped the show and Bernadette quietly and calmly urged everyone to leave.

None of us could believe that we’d just had to do that. The Show Must Go On is a mantra that all of us who work in theatre have had hammered into us since grade school productions. You never stop. You never miss. Unless you are dead, you find a way to keep going.

For people who have a true inner calling to create, nothing stops them. Well, that’s not strictly true, everything has the potential to stop them. You need to eat. You need a place to sleep. If you have kids, they expect to be fed. And clothed. Despite all that, the artists among us keep trying to figure out a creative path forward through their lives.

Painters and writers can work at home. In theory, anyway. Both require solitude of a sort. I can write in an airport surrounded by hundreds of fellow travelers, but I can’t write in the living room if Michael’s there on the phone.

Theatre is different. It cannot be done alone. At the very least, you need one actor and one audience member. If you want to get fancy, you get someone else to write something for the actor to say rather than just having them improvise a story on their own. Somebody might step up and start suggesting to the actor where they should move and what they should do. Getting even fancier, somebody might build them a set, design them some clothes, and point a few lights at them. Eventually, one person alone onstage starts to seem a bit static, so you might add a few more actors into the mix.

All of that requires a team of people to coordinate. The audience never sees them, but they work just as hard backstage as the people onstage to present the story that’s being told. They are considered craftspeople rather than artists. Their work is all in service to somebody else’s artistic vision. It’s not to say that their work doesn’t have intrinsic artistry, just that the initial inspiration isn’t theirs.

People who create theatre need each other. In the early days of what we would consider contemporary English theatre, traveling companies would make their way from town to town struggling to survive. They’d pull up to a hotel in an overloaded wagon and the innkeeper would take the nut holding the wheel in place on the axle as a security deposit. The merry band of players would need to earn enough money performing that night so that they could pay their lodging bill and get their nut back the next day.

The troop had to work together to make that happen. Rain or shine, in sickness or in health, the show had to go on. If anything kept you from a performance you’d be stuck. There was little worse than not making your nut.

Permanent theatres began to be built. This gave everyone working a chance to live a slightly more normal life. You could sleep at home while you were performing rather than having to travel around. When this practice grew, some of the people involved in putting up a show started to become rich.

William Shakespeare was wealthy. He owned a share of the theatre that presented his plays. In Stratford-Upon-Avon where he lived with his family, he had several grand houses. He, his wife, and his daughter and her husband are all buried under the altar of the town church as befitting people of means.

While Shakespeare grew rich, I doubt that the rest of his troop or the folks who worked for him backstage did. Did they complain about the inequity? Maybe. Maybe not. They must have known how fortunate they were to have him as their leader and writer-in-residence.

Throughout my career, I have been able to work with some of the people whose work I most admire. I’ve been in rehearsals with Pinter, Mamet, and Albee, among countless others. I’ve stage managed for directors like Julie Taymor, Des McAnuff, and Sam Mendes, and plenty more equally as skilled and insightful. They all got paid far more than I ever was, and, in my opinion, they more than deserved it. I was just happy to be there with them watching them work.

If my job is to support the storytellers, then I want to support the best storytellers I possibly can. If William Shakespeare is writing your material, why wouldn’t you do anything in your power to make your contribution worthy of being in one of his productions?

The Show Must Go On. We theatre folk have dedicated our lives to the telling of stories that illuminate our existences. I’ve spent decades grateful to be in the room with great writers, directors, composers, and designers. I cannot imagine where my life would be now had I not had the chance to learn from all those people.

Something, though, since then, has changed.

There has been a shift in the act of creation. It has mirrored the economic shift in our society. No longer is theatre just about telling stories, it has become more about making money.

I am not so naïve as to think that money-making hasn’t always been a part of theatrical life. It has. For every painter or writer’s patron who has supported them for love of the art, there have always been plenty who have exploited artists for their own greedy ends. Lead actors and other practitioners of the craft have always branched off and formed their own companies so that they could get rich themselves rather than just helping others prosper. Even so, it has always been a brutally difficult way to earn a living – unpredictable, long, hard work days that exact a heavy emotional toll, and ever on the brink of total disaster.

It took the pandemic and some distance away from it all to be able to see just how much truly has changed about our business in a generation. The uneasy balance between art and commerce is now completely out of whack. Our industry’s highest award for artistic achievement is now available for sale to anybody who has invested a few bucks in that year’s winning production. Art is now taking a back seat to commerce rather than driving it. More and more artistic decisions are being made by accountants rather than the creatives.

Most of the people initiating and maintaining these shows are not sharing in the financial windfall their work is generating. They are all working away six days a week with very little time off so that the investors who had no part in the piece’s creation can all get rich. It is no wonder that people are rethinking their commitment to the idea of The Show Must Go On no matter what.

It doesn’t feel like we are telling stories that need to be told anymore. Instead, producers seem to choose to present material because some financial algorithm has indicated that the public might be receptive to it. Weak writing and pallid ideas get covered up by technical productions costing tens of millions of dollars. That’s not to say that all the work is bad – far from it. Art always finds a way. There are still a lot of talented people out there trying to make sense of all this. Great work slips in despite the corporate structure – rarely because of it.

Chita Rivera was famous, during her career, for rarely missing a show. She skipped funerals, honeymoons, weddings, and baptisms, just so that she could be onstage in front of an audience. Twenty- and thirty-year-olds must look at that these days and think she had to have been crazy. The world in which Chita was dancing no longer exists.

Nobody is willing to work in a storefront theatre for car fare anymore. This new generation has grown up in a society ever more driven by the almighty dollar. Working in a tiny off-off-Broadway theatre in that light looks like failure whereas to us older folk, it looked like opportunity.

Most of the theatrical legends I’ve worked with in my time were, on some level, narcissists and bullies. It was almost across the board. To be around them, I had to learn how to navigate through it all. That I was good at it should not recommend it as a working way of life. These days, I am not willing to do that nearly as much. In my early days, though, just being in the same room with all that creative energy was enough for me – I could deal with the rest of the nonsense that came with it.

Getting the approval of an inspired artist felt like everything. Getting the approval of a greedy producer still feels like less than nothing.

These days, missing funerals, weddings, and other important life events so that you can do another performance of a pop-song-driven musical entertainment seems absurd. Why should anyone give undying loyalty to a production that wouldn’t dream of giving it back to you in return?

I initially greeted this new generation’s resistance to giving themselves completely over to their work with an eye roll. Now, I think that they are right. They wouldn’t have been right, in my opinion, when I was starting out. These days, though? That level of commitment isn’t worth it. What are you getting in return?

Stage Managers on Broadway are being called upon to navigate through waters that have far more reefs and sunken obstructions than you could possibly imagine. It is no longer about the work but about the emotional lives of the workers. Stage Managers should be managing the stage – maintaining and running the shows. Instead, they now need to be psychologists. None of them are trained for that.

Stage Managers can’t run and maintain shows properly anymore because producers are terrified to stand behind any sort of disciplinary action that may be needed to make it all happen. If there are no repercussions at all, how do you get a cast and crew to arrive at the theatre on time, let alone do the jobs they are meant to do? Passion only takes you so far.

At the same time, the pressure is on to get the show up because the machine needs the ticket buyer’s money. Cancelling a show because too many people are out, is still unthinkable. Not because the story needs to be told, mind you, but because refunding cash to the crowd will eat into the investors’ grotesque profit margins. The level of expectation for everyone involved to keep going is immense. Stage Management, at least on the Broadway level, has become an impossible job because of this, and one that I am no longer willing to do.

It's interesting what happens when you can separate the creation of art from the need for the resulting work to generate income. I don’t get paid to write and I am fine with that. I can write what I want when I want. I don’t have to answer to anyone. Of course, I am only able to do this because for over forty years I worked in commercial theatre making sure the show always went on, I still need to work sometimes, at least for the next few years. I happily don’t have to do eight shows over six days a week with only two weeks of annual vacation anymore.

We don’t get paid for putting together an event like Broadway Barks. We do it so that all the dogs and cats in New York City’s shelters have a shot at finding loving homes. That they often do is payment enough.

A few days ago, we did our second West End Woofs in Covent Garden in London. I guess it was inevitable that we spread across the Atlantic. It was hosted by Bernadette Peters and Elaine Paige. We were much luckier here in that it didn’t rain. Everybody stayed dry and we made it through the entire show without stopping.

When we first started doing Broadway Barks over a quarter of a century ago, it took a while before the different shelters trusted us enough to participate. It also took a while for the audience to not only find us but to begin to make plans to attend weeks in advance.  Here in London, we are still in our early days. The shelters are just beginning to get it. The audience is… growing. We had nine shelters participate this year, which was more than came into town to be with us last year. Barks, in comparison, had twenty-five shelters join in last week.

In both places, it is beyond moving to watch starry performers willing to do anything for those dogs and cats without any thought of compensation. Even on a two-show day, there they are standing outside in the heat, and sometimes the rain, just to hold up a puppy in the chance that somebody might open their heart to it and give it a home. We provide some coffee and snacks but that’s it. They, like us, are in it for the love.

That’s what theatre should be. We share a story, no matter what the venue, on the off chance that it might touch somebody in the audience. Afterward, we all go off to our regular jobs so that we can earn enough money to live so that we can come back and do another show. Oh lord, the ridiculous jobs I took just so that I could be a part of that great storytelling. My generation all worked our butts off doing anything we could just so that we could practice our craft and passion anywhere that would let us.

Even though the Barks show got rained out, we’ve heard that at least sixteen of the dogs and cats who were there found their forever homes regardless. In the end, despite the rain, it was all worth it.

Some shows need to go on and some shows don’t. It’s taken me decades to be able to tell the difference between the two. For this next generation, I wish them nothing more than that they find something that is worth their life-long dedication. It is my fervent wish that at least a few of them stay in the theatre and figure out how to make plays of consequence because I want to see them. I need to see them.

Artistic passion must be expressed or else it festers. My fellow working contemporaries were able to find our outlet. I hope that all of you next lot can find yours.