Life beyond Broadway…. (as Broadway shutdown continues)….

And there is plenty of it. Broadway has increasingly outpriced itself and been turned into a playground for the rich – with tickets reaching a staggering $450 for Young Frankenstein (one of the few shows ironically unaffected by the strike), that perception is being reinforced. As Local One, the union of the striking stagehands, has said, “Cuts in our jobs and wages will never result in a cut in ticket prices.”

In an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, their drama critic Terry Teachout looked at the state of Broadway, and offered this observation on the power of critics in New York: “It is not for nothing that New York is the place where the critics are the most powerful and the toughest in the world. It is the audience, year after year, that has been forced to elevate simple fallible men into highly priced experts because, as when a collector buys an expensive work, he cannot afford to take the risk alone: the tradition of the expert valuers of works of art, like Duveen, has reached the box office line. So the circle is closed; not only the artists, but also the audience, have to have their protection men—and most of the curious, intelligent, nonconforming individuals stay away.”

In fact, it wasn’t his own quote, but was written by Peter Brook in his book The Empty Space, 39 years ago. So nothing has changed. Except the prices, that have made external validation for the expense likely to be incurred even more pressing: whereas the top price for Broadway tickets was $11 when Brook was writing — $64 in today’s dollars – they are now double that. Teachout asks, “Is Broadway really twice as good today as it was in 1968?” He proceeds to compare then and now: “I recently looked up the theater listings in the “Goings On About Town” section of the Nov. 23, 1968, issue of The New Yorker. Zoe Caldwell was starring in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Lee J. Cobb in King Lear, Dustin Hoffman in Jimmy Shine, James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope, Lotte Lenya in Cabaret, Donald Pleasance in The Man in the Glass Booth and Maureen Stapleton in Plaza Suite. You could also see new plays by Brian Friel and Arthur Miller, as well as the long-running original productions of Fiddler on the Roof, Hair, Hello, Dolly, Mame and Man of La Mancha. Case closed? Well, maybe not quite. As I look back over my pre-strike Broadway reviews of the past year or so, I find lurking amid the dross a fair number of memorable shows, including Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia trilogy and Rock ‘n’ Roll, the Manhattan Theatre Club’s unforgettable revival of Mr. Friel’s Translations, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s 110 in the Shade and Pygmalion, John Doyle’s perception-changing rethinking of Stephen Sondheim’s Company and Frank Langella’s sensational star turn in Frost/Nixon. I would gladly have paid a hundred bucks to see any one of these shows.”

But Broadway is no longer the only game in town nowadays, or the epicentre of American theatre that it might once have thought itself as. As Teachout goes on to say, “What has changed since 1968 is that America’s regional theater companies took a huge leap forward in seriousness and significance—without pricing themselves out of the reach of ordinary playgoers. The top ticket price at most of the major big-city regional houses is roughly $60, which is what you would have paid last month to see Primary Stages’ wonderful Off-Broadway production of Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate. That’s not cheap, but it’s doable, and the further you venture off the beaten path, the less you’ll pay to see shows for which no artistic apologies need be made. Triad Stage of Greensboro, N.C., charged a top price of $42 for the brilliant production of Tobacco Road I saw there in June. As for the unforgettably fine revival of Brian Friel’s Aristocrats mounted by Chicago’s Strawdog Theatre Company that I reviewed six weeks ago, it cost $20 a ticket—$3.50 in 1968 dollars.”

Off-Broadway has been having its own producing problems in the last few years: important commercial off-Broadway houses, from the Variety Arts and Promenade to the Douglas Fairbanks, have shuttered. But at least there are a slew of producing companies, from Playwrights Horizons and New York Theatre Workshop to Manhattan Theatre Club and Roundabout (both of which also have a permanent Broadway presence now) to keep new work coming through. Off-Broadway has also crept ever closer to Broadway, geographically speaking, with the opening of New World Stages (formerly Dodger Stages), a five-theatre complex on 50th Street just off 8th Avenue, that I previously blogged about back in September 2005.

I have actually been there three times now on my current visit to New York. As I reported here yesterday, once was to see a one-off charity run-through of the new production of The Homecoming that has been locked out by the strike from beginning performances. But I also finally succumbed last night to seeing Altar Boyz, which opened there two and a half years ago but I’ve been avoiding studiously. When I once blogged here suggesting that I knew exactly what it would be like without needing to see it, many fans rushed to its defence. Well, now I can confirm: it is exactly what I thought it’d be – but at the same time, it was surprisingly enjoyable, too. (Five cute-ish, wholesome boys singing pastiche pop songs: what’s not to like? But you can stay at home and watch your old Take That videos for free.)

But I was also more intrigued, in the Playbill to Make Me a Song that I saw there on the weekend, that it contained a biography, amongst its producing credits, for something called “Off-Broadway”. And this was nothing more than a definition of what it is, for theatregoers who might have been uninitiated to it: “An intimate New York experience, Off-Broadway is the home of such long-running shows as Stomp, Blue Man Group and the world’s longest-running musical, The Fantasticks. Off-Broadway audiences were the first to be up close to such hits as A Chorus Line, Godspell, Rent and Driving Miss Daisy. Of the last 11 Pulitzer Prize-winning Dramas, 10 were born Off-Broadway.”