Right now Broadway is full of interesting double acts: you can see The Ritz, Terrence McNally’s bathhouse comedy, and also Young Frankenstein that features as its second act showstopper the Gershwin classic ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’. Young Frankenstein’s cast includes one of Broadway’s loveliest ingénues, Sutton Foster; meanwhile, off-Broadway (at 37 Arts) there is a “straight” musical version of Frankenstein, too, and it coincidentally features Sutton’s older brother, Hunter, as Victor Frankenstein.
Perhaps Hunter could have been sent a few blocks north last night to take over as Frederick Frankenstein (pronounced Fronkensteen, of course) in Young Frankenstein, since Roger Bart was out (and will be for most of the week apparently, suffering from a slipped disc, someone told me last night). [CLICK BELOW TO CONTINUE READING]
Not that the audience’s attentions were directed too earnestly to this fact: the sign in the foyer (and the slip in the programme) read simply read, “At this performance the role of Frederick Frankenstein will be performed by Matthew LaBanca” – not, as is typically the case, also specifying who usually plays the role.
A friend who was also at the performance last night didn’t realise, until I told him in the interval, that it wasn’t in fact Bart playing the role; he assumed it was! That’s either a credit to the understudy’s physical similarity, or my friend’s distance from the stage in the rear orchestra (stalls). Whereas Broadway has typically had a one-price-fits-all policy in the orchestra (on the basis, I was once told, that people don’t like to buy inferior seats, so if there was a price differential the lower price tickets would be impossible to shift, which leads producers to sell them all at the same price), Young Frankenstein has – from the off – introduced differential seating, with so-called premium seats at up to $450 a shot (and the front row, sold by lottery draw, at $25 each).
It was, of course, in the immediate wake of The Producers smash-hit status that the notion of premium seating was first introduced six years ago, a policy since adopted by every Broadway show; but it does mean that on a hit show – or one perceived to become one – the “regular” price will only secure you the worst seats in the orchestra, not the chance for the best ones. Michael Riedel recently revealed that premium tickets for Billy Elliot, opening on Broadway next year, will be “only” $300 each – and wrote, “One thing is clear: Broadway has turned its back on the working and middle classes. If you’re not rich, if you don’t have a loft in SoHo or a three-bedroom on the Upper West Side or a house in Westport, get lost, we don’t need you, you can’t afford us. If you really want to take the family to a show, check out the Ice Capades.” For a musical like Billy Elliot that is about the struggle of working class British miners, there’s a double irony in the fact that it will become the prerogative only of the wealthy to get to see it.
Sometimes, of course, there’s a very specific reason to charge a premium: I remember that when Naked Boys Singing – a show that is about exactly what it says on the label, and a film version of which has incidentally just been released here – first opened at Off-Broadway’s Actors’ Playhouse, the front two rows were sold at a higher price, so those patrons could get a “close-up” view: some parts of an actor’s anatomy need magnification that only getting up close can provide. On one of the occasions I saw the show, I ran into an old-time British pop star (who subsequently became a theatre producer, which is how I knew him) there, and he uncomfortably blustered that he wasn’t sure what it was he about to see but had been told to see it with a view to bringing it to London. I told him to check out the title on his ticket stub! And then I checked out that: he was sitting in the centre of the front row!
The same theatre also housed a long-running show about the gay porn industry called Making Porn, which benefited from the same intimacy. Porn, of course, is now so mainstream that the cast of The Ritz, as I previously noted here, includes sometime gay porn star Ryan Idol as one of the bathhouse patrons; actually, seeing him dressed in a towel, he was wearing far more than I’ve seen him ever before. I love his Playbill bio that legitimises his credits (and former profession) by declaring, “Ryan Idol is the creation of Marc Anthony Donais” and going on to explain that he “began his modelling career as a centrefold for Playgirl magazine and rose to international fame as a star in adult films, before retiring to pursue a career in business, writing and acting.” One of his previous New York acting credits was in Making Porn.
