Were it not for the 19-day strike of stagehands that shut down most of Broadway last November, the figures released for the Broadway season that ended on May 25 would have broken all-time records, as reported here. While the shows grossed approximately $937.5million (including an estimate for Young Frankenstein, which alone amongst Broadway’s shows isn’t disclosing its takings), compared to the previous season’s record of $938.5m, it is estimated that were the strike not to have intervened grosses would have reached $975m. So that means that the strike - which didn’t, coincidentally, affect Young Frankenstein — cost approximately $37.5m in direct earnings.
But while the box office takings go ever skyward - partly propelled by the ticket prices that do, too (but also by year-on-year increases in attendances, which in the season just reported clocked up a paid attendance of 12.27m, against the previous year’s 12.3m, and which are estimated would have been 12.9m if the strike had not occurred) - so do the costs of putting the shows on in the first place and keeping them running, which is why the producers were seeking the concessions they did from the stagehands.
It’s a similar story in the West End.
As one London producer recently told me, “The fundamental problem with the West End is that producers have to create an aura of success to keep the whole edifice going”; but the reality is that most shows don’t even recoup their investment. According to the Society of London Theatres, just three in ten productions returns to their investment - and only one in ten actually makes a profit beyond that.
As I recently wrote in a feature for The Stage about Equity’s attempts to raise the game on their members’ salaries in the West End, “It’s true that there’s a lot of money coming through the doors of the West End - last year the Society of London Theatre recorded record attendances and the resulting income, with 13.6million tickets sold (up 1.25m on the previous year) generated a record £470m - but those figures don’t translate into record profits, merely record income, which of course has also been partly generated on the back of an ever-spiralling ticket price for the consumer. Money is, of course, sometimes being made; the edifice would crumble entirely if it wasn’t the case.”
It’s a high-risk business; but as I wrote in that Stage feature, “Most of that risk is currently assumed by the producers and their investors, not by the actors, whose weekly salaries are paid as long as the show is running, regardless of the business it is doing. ‘If a show is in trouble and isn’t selling well but I want to keep it going, I will go the royalty holders and seek waivers or reductions in their entitlements to payment, and the theatre owner may help out, too, on the rental; but I can never go to the actors to reduce their wages,’ points out one producer.”
And if theatre is an art that is written on the wind, gone once the curtain comes down for the last time except in the memories of those who have seen it, its foundations are built on sand, not rock, and it doesn’t take much movement to have shows come tumbling down.
The post-Tony Awards blues - where shows that failed to get recognised or register a bump in their takings after the Tony telecast - has already taken hold on Broadway: Cry-Baby closed last weekend, and A Catered Affair (down 23% last week on its previous week’s takings, and now set to close on July 27). Some 36 new shows opened in the last season, and though final reckonings of which shows still running are going to turn out to be profitable are yet to be made, it’s obvious which shows won’t have recouped: the early closures of Cry-Baby, A Catered Affair, The Farnworth Invention, The Homecoming, Is He Dead? and - after just one performance — Glory Days are certain to have put them in the deficit corner.
The West End isn’t, of course, focused around a single event like the Tony Awards to arrange its season around - indeed, it is striking that the Oliviers (arguably the most high-profile of the London awards round) saw most of the wins this year go to shows that had already closed: as I wrote here at the time, all but two of the productions to receive awards had long gone. But we’re still experiencing a summer clear-out, as I wrote last week in a Guardian blog; even if we don’t have a clear-cut theatrical “season”, as they do on Broadway, we’re still powerless to resist the seasons.
It's hard to weep too hard for producers when they say they can't reduce the actor's salaries when the shows box office isn't strong. Lets remember that the actors still have to show up 8 times a week to perform where the lighting designer doesn't. Producers can't get salary reductions from stagehands either. In fact, when it comes to reducing expenses the only people that will take reductions are those who don't have to show up for work.
Furthermore, ATG and RUG and Nimax and Mackintosh / Delfont own theatres and produce for their own theatres - they get rent from themselves, they also get the income from the bars ( which they don't share from their investors, service charges on ticket bookings - again not shared with investors, and the selling of theatre programmes ( the proceeds of glossy brochures give something to investors but the regular programmes which feature extensive paid advertising do not) . So while it may be true that 3 out of 10 West End shows recoup or show a profit - the others fill the producers coffers in a very satisfactory manner. It's their investors who suffer.
It's also hard to weep too hard for producers' not being able to reduce actors' salaries because in the opposite scenario, if the show is a hit, other than a star being able to ask for more on a contract renewal if s/he is one of the reasons that the show is successful, actors make what they make regardless of box office. It's not a profit-sharing situation. Musicians et al make what their collective bargaining agreements entitle them to, no more or less.