More Theater Odds & Ends

 

[Here’s another compilation of short pieces from various outlets—this time, two Washington Posts and a New York Times—all about some aspect of theater.  Some of these—most of them, really—I filed away some years ago (these are all from the 2010s), and I’ve enjoyed rediscovering them.  I hope you find them interesting.] 

“THE LEAD HAS A BROKEN ANKLE?

GET THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR!”

by Rebecca Ritzel 

[The following article was originally published in the “Style” section of the Washington Post on 12 February 2014.  It was previously posted on the WaPo website as “Backstage: For Theater J, breaking a leg for real leads to 'Yellow Face' recasting scramble” on 11 February.]

“Call the understudy, I can’t go on tonight,” is the closing theme from the cult television comedy “Slings and Arrows.” The show about backstage drama at a theater company debuted in Canada in 2003, but in the ensuing decade, the refrain has become a bit dated.

[Slings & Arrows was a darkly comic TV Series, aired on Canada’s Movie Central cable channel and The Movie Network streaming service in 2003-06, and in the United States on the Sundance Channel, 2005-07.]

These days, it’s not “call the understudy,” it’s “text the assistant stage manager.” And post-recession, there may well not be an understudy to call.

Jessica Soriano, an assistant stage manager at Theater J, got the dreaded text message [Tuesday,] Feb. 4. The actor sending it was Al Twanmo, one of the leads in the play “Yellow Face.” He was at the hospital, being treated for a broken ankle after falling on black ice. Soriano then e-mailed (still no phone call involved) the production team with the bad news.

[Yellow Face, a 2007 play by David Henry Hwang, played at Theater J in Washington, D.C., from 29 January to 23 February 2014.  It was directed by Natsu Onoda Power; at the time, Ari Roth was the artistic director of the company. (Roth was fired in December by the theater’s parent organization, the Washington DC Jewish Community Center, for protesting the DCJCC’s cancelation of a series of controversial plays about the Middle East (some of which were critical of Israel). See my post on Rick On Theater “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux,” 13 February 2015.]

With little deliberation, Wednesday night’s show was canceled (ticket holders received refunds), but the actors were called to the theater. Director Natsu Onoda Power had an idea to make sure the show would go on sooner rather than later.

First, she re-blocked the entire play, allocating many of Twanmo’s lines to the four other actors in the ensemble who play multiple roles. But replacing Twanmo’s main character was going to be tricky. David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” is a satirical comedy about racial stereotypes. The lead character is Chinese American, as is his father, who Twanmo was playing. The only Asian actor Theater J found who could read for the role on short notice was, in the words of artistic director Ari Roth, “30 years too young.”

Undeterred, Power turned to Roth.

“There was just one person who knew the part, who is not Asian, and who the audience would accept in this role, and that’s Ari,” she said late Thursday night after Roth, a 50-something Jewish playwright, made his professional stage debut playing an elderly Chinese American banker.

Roth maintains that he wasn’t actually acting, “I did this as a reading, everyone else was up there acting,” he protested, adding that he was “doing Al” and did his best to match Twanmo’s cadence.

The part of the father is written in broken English, with lots of stubborn humor, given Twanmo’s character is an immigrant who worked his way up from a laundry worker to the chief executive of Far East National Bank. Before his fall, Twanmo had received praise for his work in “Yellow Face”; Post critic Peter Marks called his performance “beguiling” in his review of the show. Roth will not be nominated for a Helen Hayes Award [the Capital area’s local award for excellence in theater; Helen Hayes (1900-93), the “First Lady of the American Stage,” was a native Washingtonian] for his one-night stint as a substitute, but what he will take away is a bouquet of yellow roses, and some insight into life outside an artistic director’s office.

“I have never spent so much on my personal grooming,” Roth said, “At 5 p.m., I stopped doing my computer work and started preparing for the show.” Those preparations included both streaking his hair with gray and spending some time in front of the mirror trimming nose hairs. He came away not only with more respect for his actors but also for the stage managers and others working behind the scenes at Theater J.

“I have been running this theater for 17½ years,” Roth said, “and I’ve never been backstage watching for an entire show.”

When Roth did come out onstage, it was in a wheelchair, a change Power kept when Twanmo returned to the stage Saturday. In Act II, the script calls for an ensemble member to play the father’s doctor. In Power’s revision, the doctor (played by Mark Hairston) will always wheel Twanmo out. But there’s still a major challenge that they’ll have to deal with until the show closes Feb. 23: a massive set of file cabinets surrounds the stage, and only one entrance is wide enough for the chair.

“The scenery is not wheelchair-accessible,” Power said.

Casting a wider net

Theater J learned its lesson in staging accessible theater the hard way, but several other theaters in the Washington area are deliberately seeking to be more inclusive in their casting, and are succeeding artistically as a result. At Studio Theatre, Nina Raine’s play “Tribes,” about a deaf son in a dysfunctional family, has been extended through March 2. Out in Herndon [Virginia], NextStop Theatre Company is mounting a well-reviewed production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” with a deaf actor, Ethan Sinnot [sic; Sinott], starring as the murderous monarch.

Also worth noting: Deaf actor Hector Reynoso is a company member at Synetic [a physical theater company located in Crystal City in Arlington County, Virginia], and next month’s World Stages international theater festival at the Kennedy Center will include Israel’s ­Nalaga’at Theater for deaf and blind actors.

Locally, the two leads in “Tribes” and “Richard III” share an interesting connection: Sinott is chairman of the theater program at Gallaudet University [prestigious university in Washington, D.C., for the deaf and hard of hearing], and James Caverly, who plays the lead in “Tribes,” is one of his most successful graduates. Yet until he drove out to Herndon recently for a dress rehearsal, Caverly had never seen his former professor act. Caverly loved the concept – and the performance.

“It was brilliant!” Caverly wrote in an e-mail message. “For so long, I’ve thought of Richard III as it was written in the text: a hunchback, hobbled, and writhed villain who’s sole ambition was to destroy those who had more power over him. I never perceived him to be deaf. And it does make sense when you correspond it to a real-life scenario. Most of the royal court chose to seclude him because of his deafness, which eerily echoes with the daily basis of deaf people everywhere. . . . This is a big step for the DC theater scene, and [I’m] proud to be part of something bigger.”

[Rebecca Ritzel is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in more than 20 publications in the United States, Canada, and the U.K.  Ritzel regularly contributes arts and entertainment articles to the Washington Post, the Washington, D.C., City Paper, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer.  Washington’s Theater J, founded in 1990, produces plays “that are part of the Jewish cultural legacy.” 

[I have posted performance reports on three plays by David Henry Hwang (“Golden Child,” 9 December 2013; The “Dance and the Railroad,” 17 March 2013; “Kung Fu,” 8 March 2014) and a performance by the Nalagaat Deaf-Blind Theater Ensemble of Tel Aviv (Not by Bread Alone, 12 February 2013) on ROT.  Earlier, my friend, the late Helen Kaye (1934-2020), who reviewed theater for the Jerusalem Post, sent me her own review of Not by Bread Alone, which I posted in “Dispatches from Israel 1,” 23 January 2013.

[Coincidentally, Ari Roth’s experience filling in at the last minute in a stage role happened to me once, years ago.  I happened to think of it just the other day.  I was in college—May 1967, the second semester of my sophomore year.  I was taking a directing class, the final exam for which was to direct a one-act play.  I had finished my final rehearsal for the presentations the next day and one of my classmates, who’s rehearsal was scheduled to follow mine in the university theater, approached me.

[One of his cast members had been taken ill and wasn’t going to be able to do the show the next evening, and my classmate asked if I’d fill in.  Well, I couldn’t let him down for his final grade, so I agreed to learn the part—it was relatively small, even for a one-act play—but he and his cast would have to help me out.

[I said I could learn the lines and the blocking for the next day after the one rehearsal that night, but the rest of the cast would have to keep to the lines as written, especially the cues, and the blocking as rehearsed—no ad libs or improvisations when I was on stage.  I wouldn’t be able to handle deviations.

[I don’t remember who the director was, or the play, and I don’t know what grade he got on the project—but we made it through and, as far as I could tell, no one knew what we’d had to do.  I do remember being totally keyed up for the whole scene in which I appeared, which was only a few minutes but seemed like at least a half hour to me. 

[I’m sure I collapsed as soon as the curtain came down—and I probably found a drink somewhere as soon as I could get to it.  (In Virginia, where I went to school, you couldn’t buy a drink in a bar or restaurant at that time.  You had to by a bottle in a state package store and keep the booze at home.)]

*  *  *  *

“WITH TRAINED NARRATORS,

BLIND THEATERGOERS FIND A SIGHTLINE”

by Caitlin Gibson 

[Caitlin Gibson’s report ran in the Washington Post on 5 May 2016 (sec. C [“Style”]) and was posted on the paper’s website on 4 May as “'He's picking his nose': How volunteers help the blind 'see' a theater performance.”]

‘Describers’ bring onstage action to life

On the brightly lit theater stage, the first scene of Robert Schenkkan’s Tony award-winning play “All the Way” is in full swing: President Lyndon B. Johnson [1908-73; 36th President of the United States: 1963-69] is pontificating behind a podium. A large desk is wheeled into the spotlight. An agitated secretary darts into view.

[All the Way is a 2012 play by Robert Schenkkan about President Lyndon B. Johnson's efforts to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where it premièred 25 July-3 November 2012. The play was produced in 13 September-12 October 2013, at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the production premièred at Broadway’s Neil Simon Theatre from 6 March 2014 to 29 June 2014 (27 previews and 131 regular performances). It won the 2014 Tony for Best Play and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play.

[The Arena Stage production of All the Way in Washington, D.C., ran from 1 April to 8 May 2016 on the Fichandler Stage (the arena theater). Jack Willis played LBJ; he was nominated for a 2017 Helen Hayes Award as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Play.]

Steps from the bustling action in the Fichandler Stage at Arena Stage, about 20 audience members are not actually watching the drama unfold. They sit silently, some with their heads bowed, others with their eyes closed. They are all blind or visually impaired; they either can’t see the stage at all, or it appears as little more than a haze of light and shadow.

But these theatergoers aren’t missing the action: Through the headphones clamped over their ears, a woman’s voice is explaining everything happening onstage, in detail, in real time.

The voice belongs to Rita Tehan, a veteran theater describer for the Metropolitan Washington Ear, a nonprofit organization that provides audio services to the blind and visually impaired in the Washington region. Tehan sits behind the crowd in a dark, elevated sound booth as the fast-paced plot — depicting the efforts of Johnson and civil rights leaders to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — unspools below.

Tehan speaks crisply into a plastic audio mask linked to a large radio transmitter, explaining what’s happening on the set as vividly and efficiently as possible.

“He waves her away, and pats her on the rear end,” she says when Johnson abruptly dismisses his frazzled secretary.

“LBJ is picking his nose — really deep,” she says during one of the show’s comic moments, raising her voice slightly to be heard over the audience’s laughter. “Hoover is watching.” [That’s J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), the first, and longest serving Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1935-72).]

Tehan points out when Johnson turns from one character to another mid-sentence: “He’s talking to the tailor now,” she quickly interjects. She makes sure that her listeners don’t miss the joke when Johnson, frustrated by his strict diet, swipes a bite of Sen. Richard Russell’s [1897-1971; Democrat of Georgia (1933-71)] dinner. (“LBJ stabs a pork chop on Russell’s plate and pops it in his mouth,” she says. “Russell’s eyes widen.”)

She continues for well over an hour, until the stage lights dim and Act One comes to an end.

“This is intermission,” she says. “It will be about 15 minutes.”

Then she lowers the mask and exhales.

An art in itself

Tehan’s preparation for “All the Way” began weeks before the May 1 matinee, one of more than 50 annual performances with description services provided by the Ear. Describers typically see a performance at least once or twice before they narrate it live, to familiarize themselves with the script and note important visual cues.

The Ear’s roughly two dozen volunteer describers serve more than 250 blind or visually impaired people at seven local theaters every year. They take special requests, too — a couple of years ago, a describer accompanied a blind fan to a Lady Gaga concert at Verizon Center.

“It takes a very special person to be a describer, someone who can think fast on their feet,” says Neely Oplinger, the Ear’s executive director. The people who sign up — and pass a rigorous audition — tend to stick around; many have been volunteering for 10 years or longer.

Tehan joined the organization in 1992, but she had practice long before that: Her father went blind from diabetes when she was a teen, and she used to describe his favorite television shows to him.

“They are so dedicated, and most of them really know theater,” Oplinger says of the group’s volunteers. “But it takes a lot more than knowing theater.”

They also have to know the rules: When describing a performance, you have to slip all the description into the gaps between dialogue. You shouldn’t make judgments; instead of concluding that a character looks “disappointed,” you note simply that he frowns and his shoulders droop. You must capture any movement that’s essential to the plot. And — as with any live performance — if you make a mistake, you have to keep going.

These guidelines were created by Margaret Pfanstiehl, who founded the Metropolitan Washington Ear in 1974 to improve the lives of the blind and visually impaired. Pfanstiehl, a Virginia native, suffered from a degenerative disease called retinitis pigmentosa, which eventually left her almost entirely blind.

At first, the Ear was a radio reading service — still a core part of its identity. The Silver Spring, Md.-based nonprofit has nearly 400 volunteers who read newspaper and magazine articles over closed-circuit radio, and the organization offers a dial-in service for listeners to hear recordings of articles from major publications, including The Washington Post, the New York Times and many others. About 5,000 people in the Washington area use the service.

But Pfanstiehl, who died in 2009, was also a devoted opera fan and theatergoer who longed to find a way for blind audience members to enjoy live performances.

“I always wanted a little voice to tell me whether it was a gunshot or a slamming door onstage, if the villain was walking across the stage with a dagger, and whether or not the lovers were facing each other,” she once told Reuters.

In 1981, Arena Stage approached the Ear about making live performances accessible to the blind. Pfanstiehl — then Margaret Rockwell, a divorcee — recruited longtime Metro spokesman and radio pro Cody Pfanstiehl as the first volunteer describer.

They watched dozens of movies together, says Oplinger, and he described the scenes unfolding onscreen. “Together, they devised what they called ‘the art and technique of audio description,’” says Oplinger. “And in the process, they fell in love.”

The couple, who married in 1983, went on to develop a comprehensive training system, teaching hundreds of volunteers to capture live performances for the blind.

Of course, the human mind is not a camera, so the description process is perhaps more like translation — an art in itself: The word choices matter, as do the pacing of the narration, the tone of voice and the clarity of enunciation. A secretary doesn’t just run into view, she gallops. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. doesn’t touch his wife, he gently strokes her arms. The describer has to engage in a sort of verbal dance with the actors, gracefully avoiding overlap or interruption.

And like any art, it’s imperfect. Sometimes details are missed, or a describer talks over a character, or the audio sounds muffled. But even with minor hiccups, the effort makes all the difference to a blind member of the audience, says Freddie Peaco, president of the Ear’s board of directors.

“You can hear the voices, but you don’t know the setting of the stage. The audience gives a great gasp, and you don’t know why they’re gasping,” she says. “With the describer, all of that comes to life, and I can’t tell you how meaningful that is.”

The show goes on

For a describer, Tehan says, “the moment the curtain rises, you’re on your toes” — and so she is as the second act of “All the Way” begins. She stands in the dark booth, her eyes trained on the stage.

“House lights are fading to black,” she says.

After the show, her listeners will praise her performance —“You did a great job, a great job!” one man will gush, grasping her hand — but Tehan won’t be entirely convinced. Even now, halfway through, she’s frustrated by details she couldn’t capture, by how little time she has to speak between the actors’ lines. An artist is never satisfied.

But the show goes on. Tehan cranes forward to follow the actors, her glasses reflecting the glow of the stage lights. She raises the mask to her face. In the seats just beyond the booth windows, all ears are on her.

[Caitlin Gibson is a feature writer focused on families, parenting, and children.  She joined the Washington Post in 2005.] 

*  *  *  *

“INVESTING IN THE THEATER

CAN GET A CHILD’S FOOT IN THE STAGE DOOR”

by Liz Moyer 

[Liz Moyer’s report appeared in the New York Times on 27 May 2017 (sec. B [“Business Day”)].  It was posted on the Times website on 26 May as “To Invest in Your Child’s Theater Dreams, First Invest in the Theater.”]

Dean Roth, the owner and president of a New Jersey company that makes parts for the tool-and-die industry [William T. Hutchinson Co. in Union, New Jersey, a third-generation family business], admits he has utterly failed to talk his teenage daughter out of pursuing a career in musical theater.

Instead of watching helplessly as she bounded down an uncertain career path, he became a Broadway investor to get an inside track: He said his initial $1,000 outlay [equivalent to $1,400 today], in the 2011 revival of “Godspell,” was “tuition for me to find out what the business was like.”

[The Broadway revival of Godspell, conceived by John-Michael Tebelak, who wrote the book based on the Gospel of Matthew, with music and new lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, ran at the Circle in the Square Theatre from 7 November 2011-24 June 2012 (30 previews and 264 regular performances).

[The production was directed by Daniel Goldstein and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli, with scenic design by David Korins, costume design by Miranda Hoffman, lighting design by David Weiner, sound design by Andrew Keister, and projection design by Daniel Brodie.]

Since then, he has invested in 22 other shows, with six returning profits so far. And he and his daughter, Kim, now a musical theater student at Syracuse University [see my note following the article], have come to an understanding about where to draw the line between meddling parent and struggling artist.

Like so many parents juggling feelings of pride and concern as their children step into adulthood, Mr. Roth said he wanted his daughter to understand the risks — as well as the rewards — associated with a career in the arts, and the only way he could see doing that was for both of them to get closer to the business.

“I wanted her to go into this with open eyes and know what she was getting into,” Mr. Roth said.

As with practically everything in New York, especially the insular world of Broadway, connections mean everything. Being a child of an investor in a show doesn’t secure a part or even an audition, but it can create opportunities that open doors.

“Getting to know a director and having the opportunity to observe a rehearsal or a script reading to get a deeper understanding of the business, that is a definite advantage,” said Pippin Parker [b. 1969], a playwright and the dean of the drama school at the New School in New York City.

Ken Davenport, a Broadway producer [the current Gypsy with Audra McDonald and the upcoming Othello with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal; he’s produced two Tony-winners] and blogger who raises money for shows and has worked with Mr. Roth [the 2011 Godspell] and other investors, said he has seen more parents invest in shows to encourage a passion they share with one of their children or to bolster the child’s career prospects.

“The parents don’t have the friends or relationships, so they do it the old-fashioned way by writing a check,” he said. “All that check does is get you in the door. It’s up to the kids to prove themselves.”

Of course there’s no substitute for talent, Mr. Parker and others said.

“Investing is a wonderful and glorious activity, but unless you know what you are doing as an investor, the best you can hope for is a glass of Champagne with Bette Midler,” said Peter Cooke, the head of the drama school at [Pittsburgh’s] Carnegie Mellon University, which sends many graduates on to Broadway careers.

The only career path he can see, he said, “is being well trained.”

There are different ways productions raise money, but for many shows, affluent individuals play a key role. Typically, these are people with at least $1 million of investable assets — what the finance industry calls an accredited investor, who is presumably able to swallow the considerable risks associated with this type of investing.

Producers raise the money by putting together pools of investors, who tend to give an average of $25,000 to finance a production in a Broadway theater. Sometimes there are different investing tiers, and those who give more can get perks like having their names printed above the show’s title on posters and Playbills, or getting an invitation to a dress rehearsal.

The investor pools are usually organized as a limited partnership, like a private equity investment fund. Very often these investors are people who know the show’s insiders, including the actors, writers, directors and others bringing it to the stage.

Tim Speiss, a former board chairman of the Abingdon Theatre Company, a Broadway production group, said he once auctioned an item for a production in which the winning bidder could get his or her child a small speaking part in one performance. “There are some very clever ways to raise money,” said Mr. Speiss, who is a wealth adviser at EisnerAmper, an accounting and advisory firm based in New York.

Once a show gets up and running, the investors might get their money back, proportionate to what they put in, plus any profit after the show’s expenses are covered.

Many shows are money losers: Just one in five will end up being profitable, and even fewer are runaway successes. But Mr. Davenport points out that those odds aren’t much different than those of any other alternative investment in which a high-net-worth investor might dabble. As far as privately held start-ups — a favorite of private equity investors — some 50 percent of new companies fail after the first four years, according to labor statistics.

Linda Huber, an executive at a financial services company in New York, began investing in Broadway a few years ago when her daughter, now a high school senior, showed an interest. Her daughter, Claudia Lopez-Balboa, gives her advice on which shows to bankroll. So far she has invested in four, including “On Your Feet,” a musical about the lives of Gloria and Emilio Estefan [Marquis Theatre, 5 November 2015-20 August 2017], a story that resonated with her daughter’s part-Cuban heritage.

“For art that’s worth making, it’s the responsible thing to support these endeavors — it’s a thing to do together,” Ms. Huber said.

Her daughter is about to graduate from St. Paul’s School, a New Hampshire boarding school, and plans to go to the University of Michigan in the fall to major in finance and minor in arts management.

Ms. Lopez-Balboa said that Broadway had captured her imagination since she saw the show, “Bring It On” [St. James Theatre, 1 August-30 December 2012], as a middle-school student — she recalled skipping all the way home afterward.

“I wanted to produce a show that would make you leap in the air,” she said.

She reached out to Daryl Roth, a 10-time Tony-winning producer (and no relation to Mr. Roth, the tool-and-die executive) to seek out an informational meeting about the business.

Ms. Roth recalled that initial meeting and said she was impressed by Ms. Lopez-Balboa’s energy and interest — enough to hire her as an intern for two summers.

Ms. Roth, the lead producer of the show “Kinky Boots” [Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 4 April 2013-7 April 2019], said she understood where Ms. Lopez-Balboa was coming from because her son Jordan had also dived into the theater world. “I wanted to help Claudia learn and be excited about working in theater,” Ms. Roth said.

For Dean Roth, the industrial company executive from New Jersey, the first $1,000 investment got him and his daughter invited to a cocktail party at Sardi’s, where they mingled with other investors and met the show’s director, Danny Goldstein.

Some of those contacts advised Kim Roth on whether she should pick college or an acting conservatory (she chose college), gave her tips for getting started in the business, and helped answer other novice-level questions.

Ms. Roth, who interned for Ken Davenport one summer, has one year of study left at Syracuse before setting out for what she hopes will be a career as an actress, singer and dancer on Broadway. [She got her BFA in 2018; see below.]

“Living so close to the city just getting to make those networking connections is definitely helpful,” Ms. Roth said. [Westfield, New Jersey, where the Roths lived at this time, is 23 miles from New York City—a 35-minute drive or an 85-minute train ride.] “Knowing someone doesn’t necessarily help, but it doesn’t hurt.”

[Kim Roth (b. 1996), originally from Westfield, Union County, New Jersey, completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in musical theater from New York’s Syracuse University in 2018, and is now living in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey.  She’s had additional training at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, on whose stage she’s performed (The Merchant of Venice, 2016).  Acting, singing, and dancing are her passions.  Roth is a member of Actors’ Equity Association.

[Liz Moyer is a journalist with experience reporting and writing about finance, markets, public policy and consumers.  She was most recently a reporter at Barron’s; she was previously an editor at the New York Times and a reporter at the Wall Street Journal.  Moyer has a Master of Science in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1991).

[My friend, and a generous contributor to this blog, was, with his late wife, a small investor in a Broadway musical (Memphis, Shubert Theatre, 19 October 2009-5 August 2012).  It won several awards, including the 2010 Best Musical Tony! Read about his take on being a “Broadway Angel” (by Kirk Woodward, 7 September 2010).]

“Smell of the Greasepaint, The Funds of the Crowd”

by Patrick Healy 


[In another article on inside theater, the New York Times reports on innovations in financing commercial productions.  This one started in London (where the laws are different) and is called “crowdfunding,” and it’s on its way to the U.S. and Broadway.  The days of the big, powerful individual producer has been gone for a while, but even the producing conglomerate or consortium may be on its way out, if Patrick Healy’s report is an indication of things to come on the Great White Way.]


LONDON — As an up-and-coming theater producer, Jamie Hendry didn’t have many investors when he started raising money for a musical based on the children’s novel “The Wind in the Willows.”


What his show did have was a famous title and a celebrity script writer, Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey.” And their publicity value came in handy given how Mr. Hendry was trying to raise money for the show here: by appealing to the masses.


He raised about one million pounds ($1.7 million) last winter by selling equity stakes in “Willows” in relatively small units of £1,000, £2,500 and £5,000 through an online campaign. Any British citizen could buy in with a debit card by visiting Mr. Hendry’s website, which included a plainly worded prospectus dotted with images of Toad and Mole, characters from the story. He had the money in three months from 400 people, and he now has a list of 10,000 others who signed up to learn about investing in the future. “Willows” hopes to open in the West End in the fall of 2015.


Call it entrepreneurship or gimmickry, but Mr. Hendry’s strategy was London theater’s most ambitious attempt at crowdfunding — and a method that will soon become an option for New York producers. Proposed changes to United States securities rules, which could take effect by this fall, will make it far easier for Americans to raise money the way Mr. Hendry did. 


“The old-time producers with wealthy investors are a dying breed,” said Mr. Hendry, who is 29 and studied computer science and management in college. “Who’s going to put millions of pounds into a commercial musical when those people are no longer with us? We have to find ways to expand support for theater.”


Under the proposed United States rules, theater artists and producers would be able to publicize and sell equity stakes in plays and musicals online, which is now generally prohibited. The proposed rules would also expand the pool of potential backers.


Current rules make it cumbersome to enlist so-called nonaccredited investors, or people who earn less than $200,000 a year or have a low net worth: those who might be risking their life savings on a play or musical, say, given that 75 percent of Broadway shows flop. The proposed rules would make it easier for them to invest limited sums and allow Broadway and Off Broadway productions to raise up to $1 million a year through crowdfunding websites registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.


Under the current system, most producers have long made private equity offerings to wealthy associates and friends, many of whom have invested in theater before. Broadway plays regularly cost $3 million to produce, and musicals tend to cost $8 million or more, and investors usually put up at least $25,000 apiece; the amounts are considerably less for Off Broadway. (The equivalent amounts in London are often one-third of Broadway’s numbers.) 


“In American theater, we now have a powerful club of producers who work with wealthy investors to put on shows they like, and younger people don’t have access,” said Crystal Skillman, a New York playwright who has earned strong reviews for Off Off Broadway plays like “Geek!” and “Cut.” “Being able to recruit our own investors online could become revolutionary.”


Ms. Skillman and her husband, the comic book writer Fred Van Lente, are among the thousands of theater artists in the United States and Britain who have increasingly turned to crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo for financing. But people donate though these platforms; they are not purchasing equity in shows. 


Ms. Skillman said that she and Mr. Van Lente planned to look into selling equity in shows once the proposed securities rules take effect. 


Broadway has had only one major attempt at crowdfunding: the 2011 revival of “Godspell,” in which 700 people invested $1,000 or more and made up about 55 percent of the show’s $5 million budget. The “Godspell” strategy was hamstrung, however, by the securities rules: Ken Davenport, the lead producer, said he could not make online sales as Mr. Hendry did, and recruiting nonaccredited investors involved red tape and legal expenses.


“I would crowdfund again, if it was the right show — ‘Godspell’ was about community, and we had a community of investors — and if the rules do become lighter,” said Mr. Davenport, who is going the traditional route of recruiting accredited investors as a lead producer for the Broadway show “It’s Only a Play” this fall. 


“I just find it ridiculous in this country that we prevent people from investing in Broadway if they are not accredited and well connected to producers, and yet anyone can travel within 60 miles of their homes and bet their life savings at a casino,” added Mr. Davenport, who writes a blog called The Producer’s Perspective.


The “Godspell” approach has not caught on, because most Broadway producers look down on crowdfunding, citing the presence of their pools of experienced investors and the administrative headaches that Mr. Davenport had. But “Willows” could emerge as a new model, especially for Off Broadway as well as London. The producers of the current West End revival of “The Pajama Game” raised about $340,000 late last winter from 218 investors through the equity crowdfunding site Seedrs; the money accounted for 15 percent of the show’s capitalization. The limited-run production is scheduled to end in September and will probably close at a loss, although the producers declined to confirm that.


Other British producers are interested in licensing Mr. Hendry’s online platform, he said; he declined to name them. But several London producers said crowdfunding seemed like a tool for producers who needed cash or a stunt to raise the profile of younger ones like Mr. Hendry, who has also been a producer here on the Beatles’ tribute show “Let It Be” and the musical “Legally Blonde.”


“Jamie gave a very posh workshop of the musical at the Savoy Hotel, but it remains to be seen if his approach will work and if the show will indeed open,” said Michael Codron, a producer who has been mounting shows here and on Broadway for more than 50 years.


“When I started out, I had a group of people — agents, other producers, people I got from my accountant — who regularly invested with me, and I was sufficiently autocratic that I didn’t have to listen to their opinions,” said Mr. Codron, who was responsible for major premieres of works by Tom Stoppard, David Hare and Harold Pinter, among others. “Now, I usually take a deep breath and write my own check to get shows on, because there’s too much paperwork with investors today. Crowdfunding sounds like even more bureaucracy.”


Mr. Hendry said he had raised “a significant chunk” of his $11 million show budget, chiefly from traditional investors, including some in the United States. As for his online investors, most of them are affluent or middle-class professionals in their 40s, 50s and 60s from London and surrounding counties, and 91 percent of them had never invested in theater before, according to a survey by Mr. Hendry’s office.


“The game is on in London and New York to find the investors of the future,” he said.


[This article was originally published in “The Arts” section (sec. C) of the New York Times on 28 July 2014.  Patrick Healy has a New York Times reporter since 2005 (when he started reporting on politics) and has been covering theater for the paper since 2008.  His beat extends from news, features, and profiles about Broadway, Off Broadway, elsewhere in New York, and then to the national theater scene.]

                                                                                                                

 

Broadway Angel

By Kirk Woodward

[As my friend Kirk says, I’m “continually on the lookout for unusual aspects of the theatrical experience,” so when I heard that he and his wife had invested in a Broadway production, I asked if he’d consider writing about the experience of being a Broadway “angel.” Happily, he agreed and here’s the result: a description of what it’s like to be a small investor in a Broadway musical. This story even has a happy “ending” (it’s not really over, of course) because the show the Woodwards, veteran theater people but first-time angels, put their money into was Memphis, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical (as well as a few other categories) at the ceremony on 13 June, justifying the Woodwards’—and everyone else’s—commitment to the production. As the song says, “There’s no business like show business”! ~Rick]

As everyone knows, putting on a Broadway show is incredibly expensive. No matter how you try to contain costs, a Broadway musical will need several million dollars just to get it open, and once it’s playing in New York, it will continue to need pots of money in order to continue to run. Those operating costs are called the “nut,” and anything over the nut, if there is anything, goes toward paying off the show’s investors, hence the observation of my friend Dan Landon, house manager for one of the Shubert theaters, that “One dollar over the nut – it’s a hit!”

That saying is definitely true about a show in terms of how long it runs – under ordinary circumstances, as long as a show makes its nut it can stay on the boards. There are exceptions to this principle. Sometimes, for example, a producer wants to close a show even though it’s making money, perhaps in order to free a theater for a new (and presumably more profitable) show. But in general, as long as you meet your operating expenses, you can keep your show open.

Just because a show runs, however, doesn’t mean its original investors will make their money back. They may not, and of course they know it, or they ought to – most Broadway shows don’t turn out to be profitable, sometimes even at the end of a long run. Jekyll and Hyde is said to have lost its investment – in other words, not paid its investors back anything – even though it ran on Broadway for four years.

Nevertheless people keep investing in Broadway shows, on the principle, to borrow a remark from the playwright George Axelrod (who said it about playwrights), that on Broadway you can’t make a living, but you can make a killing. (Axelrod reversed the order.) I’ve met people who invested in Same Time, Next Year, and more recently in Jersey Boys. They are rolling in kale. And the odds of succeeding on Broadway may be better than the odds of winning the lottery . . . but not all that much better.

Decades ago a producer might put up his or her own money to bankroll a Broadway musical. (As Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II once wrote in the New York Times, "A great many producers 30 or 40 years ago used to invest their own money in their own shows. They all died broke.") Those days are gone forever. Nowadays producers are either corporations – the Shuberts, Disney – or massive lists of, basically, “angels” – people who put up money for a show. When a musical wins a Tony and the producers, a herd of them, come up to the stage to accept the award, most of those people didn’t do anything about producing the show at all, except to produce their wallets at the appointed time.

I write these words as a Broadway investor – a very small-scale investor, and, as you’ll see, not a terribly sensible one, but still . . . . To be precise, I didn’t actually invest in a Broadway show. Instead, I invested in a group of investors. The show is Memphis. It’s a fictionalized version of the beginning of the popularity of rock ’n’ roll, with a major theme of relations between the races. Memphis had four productions before it came to Broadway, at the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Massachusetts; at TheatreWorks in Mountain View, California; at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, California; and at the 5th Avenue Theater in Seattle, Washington.

Obviously a show with so many productions had something to offer – many theaters won’t touch a play that’s not a premiere, but three theaters picked up this one, not counting Broadway. Another way to put the situation is that the show had “buzz,” which is the noise I heard in my ear when at a party I asked a friend who works for a ticket sales agency what shows were stirring up the most advance interest. “There’s Memphis,” he said without hesitation. “I hear it’s great.”

By coincidence, the next week another acquaintance of ours sent around an email asking if anyone was interested in investing in – you guessed it – Memphis. Serendipity! This was the first time my wife, Pat, and I had ever had a chance to invest in a Broadway show of any sort. We discussed the opportunity, and agreed to look at the materials for the show, which at that point was close to beginning previews in New York. The investor group, as I said, was actually a sub-investor, intending to buy a share in the show itself. We would buy, then, a piece of an investment. Our money would be used for an advertising reserve.

Among the many reasons I was interested in becoming a Broadway backer, two stand out. One, of course, was the possibility of making money. It would be lovely to have Broadway provide some disposable income. Another and, I suspect, more important reason was the feeling that we’d be participating in the Broadway world – in a Broadway adventure. For people like us who’ve worked in theater for years, being part of the Broadway community, even in a small way, is a powerful emotional lure.

Obviously due diligence requires careful research on the show, so obviously that’s not what I did. Well, I did to a certain extent – I went on the show’s website, for example, and listened to parts of the score, and I liked it. On the other hand, I didn’t read the script (I don’t remember if it was available), and I didn’t really consider the fact that Memphis had no “big names” or film stars in it. I don’t recommend my procedure to anyone as a best practice. My way of selecting a show to invest in didn’t differ that much from horse players who pick a winner based on its name, and perhaps a tip from the guy at the newsstand. Be warned.

Nevertheless I persuaded Pat that we should make the investment, and we sent in a certain amount of money we weren’t sure we had. Pat made it clear that the responsibility for this decision, about as financially sound an idea as investing in a treasure hunt, lay entirely on my shoulders. But the die was cast, and we sent in our check, joining a mighty throng – the musical’s poster lists thirty-seven producers, both individual and corporate, and that doesn’t even begin to include sub-contributors like us.

We began to receive encouraging emails from our investment coordinator, and finally – glory be – an invitation to both Opening Night and the subsequent cast party. We’ve both been to opening nights before, but never to a Broadway cast party. This was beginning to look good.

The show opened, after previews, at the Shubert Theater on October 19, 2009. We didn’t hire a limo to take us to opening night – we’d spent enough money on the show already – but we did get there early and wandered around, feeling very connected. The show was excellent and well received, as it should have been, considering how many seats must have been filled by investors like ourselves. At intermission I talked with a few people connected with the show, including its producers in Seattle. Nowadays, even though newspaper and TV reviews typically appear following opening night, those reviewers actually see a show at an earlier preview performance rather than at the official opening, so there was no worry about how this particular performance had gone. But it did go well.

Then off to the cast party, at the Hard Rock Café on 42nd Street. You undoubtedly have images of Broadway cast parties, with the breathless entrance of the person who’s snagged the first copy of the New York Times. Alas, there must have been eight hundred people at this cast party, all screaming at the tops of their lungs over a background of rock music, and that breathless entrance wouldn’t have been noticed if the person were carrying a stack of copies of the paper a mile high. That, my friends, is a lot of producers.

We milled around a while, trying not to be suffocated while we looked, fruitlessly, for the table assigned to our investment group, whose name we weren’t sure of anyway. Finally, hunting for breathing room, we located a clearing which happened to be near the press area, and saw the only celebrities we identified the entire evening – the entire lineup of Bon Jovi, whose keyboard player, David Bryan, had written the score (lyrics with Joe DiPietro). The band looked relaxed and happy, and they posed for numerous pictures. We watched this cheerful spectacle for a while, and then we went home.

The next morning we had the excitement of bringing in the New York Times from the lawn and reading our review – and damn it, it wasn’t good at all. We were, what’s the word for it, crushed. Also we felt a lot poorer than we had the night before, our wallets a great deal lighter. I look at several papers in the course of the day, and the other reviews I read were quite good. But the Times is terribly important to the success of a Broadway show, and all in all, October 20, 2009, was not a happy day. In addition, adding insult to injury, several days later my favorite magazine, The New Yorker, didn’t like the show much either.

Well, theater is a matter of continuing ups and downs. A few days later we got a package in the mail, containing the following: a Memphis souvenir worth displaying on the family room mantle; a poster of the show signed by the whole cast; and a letter explaining that, while the Times hadn’t liked the show much, most of the rest of the reviews were terrific, and that a well thought-out and creative advertising campaign (that’s where our money went, remember!) would eliminate the effect of the review in a short time, and the show seemed likely to have an excellent run.

That was almost exactly eight months ago as I write this account, and since that day I haven’t heard a word about how our money is doing, except that for income tax purposes I received a form of about eight pages, which I passed on to our preparer without my understanding a word of it, except that it definitely didn’t say we’d made any money yet.

But there was, of course, one more event worth mentioning. The Tony Awards were presented on Sunday night, June 13, 2010. The Times, true to its nature, had seemed to us to try its hardest to promote Fela for Best Musical, but there are limits even to the power of the Grey Lady. My wife and I were barely even paying attention to the Tony broadcast when the winner was announced. I heard a scream from the next room – that was Pat - and ran in to see on TV – yes – a crowd of producers on stage, yelling like soccer fans and bouncing up and down while their designated spokesperson reported how delighted they all were.

So were we. I was happy, of course, because since I was mostly responsible for our decision to invest in the first place, now we had official ratification that the decision had been a good one. I was also happy because both Pat and I have worked in theater for years, and now we had a Tony! Truly the Lord works in mysterious ways.

I suppose the last paragraph of this piece shouldn’t be written until, months or years or decades from now, we receive a final accounting on our investment. There will be a national tour of Memphis in 2011, I’ve read, and after a while the rights to the show will be made available to amateur groups, who should have quite a good time with it. But in a way, all that is just bookkeeping. We became Broadway investors! We helped a show reach Broadway and stay there, at least for a while! We invested in a show we were proud of! And we got a piece of a Tony Award, even if we’re the only ones who know about it. All in all, not a bad eight months. Theater can always surprise you.