Where are the producers?

Earlier this week I noted the West End’s current domination of musicals over plays, but appearances can be deceptive. I am reliably informed — by none other than Richard Pulford, the Chief Executive of the Society of London Theatres — that taken across the entirety of 2006, if you wanted to see a musical in a West End theatre, you had 34 shows to choose from, overall. And if you wanted to see a play (in a commercially-run West End theatre, i.e. not including the National, Donmar or Royal Court), there were nearly double the number to choose from: 63. (Trafalgar Studios 2, which I characterised in the same blog as a fringe theatre in the West End, isn’t included in the count, either – it does not come under the auspices of the Society’s reach either, in terms of “full member” status that would enable productions staged there to be considered eligible for the Olivier Awards it presents annually.)

So plays are still reaching the West End – perhaps they’re just failing to run, but then maybe neither are they meant to. Musicals, because of the vast costs of capitalising them in the first place, tend to arrive with longevity in their sights. And that, as I also pointed out the other day, has longer term implications to the real-estate market of the West End: if they fulfil their ambitions to run indefinitely and turn into The Mousetrap or The Woman in Black, they take theatres out of circulation. And gridlock ensues. But theatre owners, who are not charitable institutions, want longer-term tenants who are doing good business at the box office, since their slice of the cake will be larger as a result – not to mention the ancillary incomes that the theatre keeps entirely for itself, from bar sales to programme sales, as well as their percentages of merchandise operations that they may not even have to run (and certainly don’t have to capitalise) but earn a proportion of.

Though some theatre owners like Howard Panter of the Ambassadors Theatre Group (whose stock of buildings are mainly playhouses, not musical venues) proactively work to fill their venues by being principal producers as well, landlords have to work with what the market offers them; and that’s the bigger crisis affecting the long-term future of the West End. Despite SOLT’s attempts at running bursary schemes to nurture the next generation of producers, it remains a fairly stagnant pool: though in a vanity-driven world you can get to call yourself a producer (and have your name above the title as such) by simply ponying up the cash that helps to put a show on, the people who actually devote their lives – and seek to make a living – from being a producer are few.

I’ve blogged about this before, noting then, “It has long been a dinosaur industry – not, in fact, unlike my own” (I was writing long before Nick Hytner’s “dead white males accusation”), and added, it is “still dominated by the same players who have been doing it for the last twenty-five years or more.” Of the few plays on in the West End right now, two of them are duly being presented by veterans Bill Kenwright (producing The Letter) and Duncan Weldon and Paul Elliot (The Last Confession).

Still, it’s a step too far to say of Sonia Friedman, who has this week added In Celebration to her West End slate that currently includes Boeing-Boeing, that she is “our last, serious hope of keeping straight plays alive in a West End deluged by musicals,” as the Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh claimed when he reviewed In Celebration this week.

It’s true that she’s a force of nature (and of nurture, in terms of bringing projects to fruition), but to give her sole credit here is to also ignore the contributions – financial and also artistic – of the business partners that she regularly joins forces with, like Michael Edwards and Carole Winter in this case, or Mark Rubenstein whom she has worked with in the past. But even if she rarely works alone, she’s also not the only game in town: what about Matthew Byam Shaw, who brought Frost/Nixon to the West End, Kim Poster (currently, its true, adding to the roster of musicals in town with the transfer of Fiddler on the Roof from Sheffield to the Savoy, but more typically producing plays), Nica Burns (who may be more preoccupied with keeping her theatres open at the moment, but has regularly been a lead producer of plays) or Caro Newling of Neal Street Productions (who brought The Hound of the Baskervilles to the Duchess earlier this year)? We need more producers, its true; but let’s not snub the contributions of those that are still trying to plant seeds in the barren ground of the West End and hoping to end the play famine.