It never ceases to surprise me how the way theatre operates in London and New York is so different. We may well have the edge in terms of variety, accessibility and quality of the product, since the West End has not (yet) been entirely lost to the behemoth of the all-pervasive musical; but Broadway still has the edge in terms of making the theatre into an event and convenience.
There is still a massive sense of occasion about Broadway theatre that we, who take our theatre somewhat for granted, have long lost. That sense of occasion is heightened, of course, by the geography and energy of the city itself: since the major Broadway theatres are largely compacted within a roughly twelve block radius, from West 42nd to West 54th Street and mostly on the single block between Broadway and 8th Avenue (with a few houses on the other side between 7th and 6th), it’s much more tightly focused than in the disparate West End that stretches from Victoria to Holborn. Then again, of course, there’s the standardized start times for Broadway shows – 8pm for evening performances, 2pm for Wednesday or Saturday matinees, 3pm for Sunday matinees – that means that there’s a common purpose on the streets around 7.30pm (or 1.30pm): everyone seems to be heading to a show. It’s fantastic to watch the neighbourhood restaurants, too, galvanizing to clear their customers by 8pm to get them to the curtain up time.
But there’s also an indefinable sense of expectation in the air, that you can’t fake or manufacture, from the lines that form outside the theatres to get in (even though seating is reserved, people start queuing in an orderly fashion from about fifteen minutes before the doors actually open), to the buzz in the tiny theatre foyers as people pass through to get in.
Most of all, however, there’s the smart glamour of most of the Broadway houses themselves. Unlike the run-down shabby state of all but the refurbished Mackintosh theatres in London, Broadway theatres are almost all in fantastic nick; there’s an air of luxury, albeit in seating so cramped that it makes economy class seem spacious, to the actual auditoria.
If we’re going to start taking pride in what we see onstage in the West End again, we need theatre owners to start taking pride in where we watch the stage from. And when we take this lesson from Broadway, isn’t it time, too, to finally take another one from there as well, and that’s to give everyone a free programme (Playbill in the US) on the way in? Very often a programme, not just a mere cast list, is an essential part of the enjoyment of a show, since it helps to set the place and scene (for instance, at The History Boys that I saw on Broadway on Friday night, the Playbill’s brief background note on Oxbridge examinations would have been invaluable to audience members unfamiliar with the system), order of songs for musicals, and the past credits of the performers.
