Just this time last week I was sadly noting the passing of Clive Barnes, at one time the most powerful theatre critic on Broadway (when he was in post at the New York Times for over a decade from 1967, rather than his subsequent days at the New York Post, which he joined in 1978, proving that it was the paper and not the person that the power resided in). And in a video tribute posted on the New York Post website, one of those who bore generous witness to his craft was Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organisation, who said, “”His enthusiasm for the theatre was reflected in his reviews, which were never cruel and did not involve any personal attacks on people in the business.”
But this week came the news that Schoenfeld has now followed him into the great theatre in the sky, and an even more powerful figure has duly left us: indeed, in a New York Times profile exactly three years ago, Jesse McKinley called him “by most accounts the most powerful person in American theatre”.
That piece, however, went on to reflect an anxiety that has now become a reality: “His succession and what it means for Broadway remains a dominant mystery in an industry famed for its uncertainties.”
One leading producer, Jeffrey Seller, whose production of Avenue Q is in a Shubert house, commented, “No one has a clue. But if they put a ‘Help Wanted’ sign out, you can be sure a lot of people would sign up.” The organisation itself is notoriously secretive: according to the same New York Times feature, it is so insular “that getting a clear read on anything is next to impossible. ‘It’s the Kremlin in there, circa 1962,’ said one dramatic artist who has worked with the Shubert Organization before (and hopes to again)”
Schoenfeld himself wouldn’t be drawn on the subject when asked - “These are matters that are best left undiscussed”, he says in the piece; and in a column in the New York Post yesterday, Michael Riedel reports the following exchange he once had with him: “What do you mean, ‘When I die …’, he boomed when I brought up the delicate question of his successor a few years ago. “If I die,” he amended. “And if I die, I will die behind this desk.”
In fact he died at his Madison Avenue apartment, fresh from attending the New York premiere of Hugh Jackman’s new film Australia, in the early hours of Tuesday morning. And his passing therefore creates a huge vacuum in a Broadway he personally helped to regenerate and rejuvenate.
As former New York Times drama critic Frank Rich commented in an editorial appreciation in the paper yesterday, “Guys and Dolls may be coming back to New York this season, but its Runyonesque Broadway is long gone. One of the last ties to that fabled past was Gerald Schoenfeld, who died Tuesday morning. He was 84. Gerry and his longtime professional partner, Bernie — Bernard B. Jacobs, who died in 1996 — ruled the Shubert kingdom absolutely and sometimes even wisely. It is not an overstatement to say that they saved New York’s commercial theater industry — and, implicitly, Times Square — when everyone else had left it for dead.”
The two - now immortalised (at least until the next re-naming game happens on Broadway) in the names of two Shubert houses that now bear their names, the Schoenfeld and Jacobs, previously respectively the Plymouth and Royale) — took over control of the Shubert Organisation in 1972, after previously working for it as its in-house lawyers. And they set about transforming its role from within and without.
As an obituary in yesterday’s New York Times by Bruce Weber puts it, they “took over the Shubert Organization at a time when both it and Broadway were in a severe downturn, and they were largely credited with saving both. They turned their theatre concern into a modern and financially potent enterprise, largely through their acquisition of three shows that became major hits — Pippin, Equus and, above all, A Chorus Line…. The three shows together did much to rescue New York theatre. Indeed, Mr. Schoenfeld believed that a great show was the best advertisement for Broadway as a whole, and that people who had a good time at the theatre once were likely to return.”
Only last Thursday Schoenfeld was at the opening of Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Dividing the Estate in the Shubert-controlled Booth Theatre, and the New York Times reports LCT’s artistic director Andre Bishop saying that he greeted him before the play began: “He put his arm around me. He said: ‘My boy, do you know what Lincoln Center Theater did when it put on South Pacific? By producing that show you lifted up all the boats.’”
Frank Rich was there, too, and reports of Schoenfeld, “He loved the theatre. He loved being in the theatre. He loved his theatre. The last time I saw him was Thursday night, as he presided over another opening night (Dividing the Estate, at the Booth). He, of course, buttonholed me about some issue he wanted covered, and urgently, in The Times. That dark errand done, he lightened up as always, presiding over the center aisle like a lord merrily indulging the subjects invited into his manor. His last opening was a hit, but so was the entire Shubert venture. Gerry Schoenfeld was so successful at turning a dilapidated sideshow of 20th-century show business into a modern corporation that impresarios of his old-school theatricality are now all but extinct.”
Schoenfeld managed to put his own unique stamp in turning a private family business into a massive theatrical corporation that created a new template for Broadway theatre ownership and its rights (and in particular its air rights, the sale of which became just one tool in funding its financial regeneration) and responsibilities, as it became active in theatrical production and not merely a receiving house for the shows of others. Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber have, of course, gone the opposite route, turning themselves from producer/creator to theatre owners; but there are important lessons to be learnt from Schoenfeld’s reinvention of the Broadway model that turned the Shubert Organisation into the pre-eminent theatre chain there and made Schoenfeld personally its principal player.
It may have been in what was done behind-the-scenes that the made the Shuberts tick; but it was his own force of personality that gave it its public face. And as Rocco Landesman, president of the rival Jujamcyn Theatres, says in the New York Times, “God knows he could be exasperating, but he was my best friend in the business.”
Landesman credits Schoenfeld and Jacobs with putting the commercial theatre “on a sound business footing. He really saved commercial theatre. The Broadway theatre as we now know it is largely the achievement of Gerry Schoenfeld.” And another veteran Broadway producer, Emanuel Azenberg, comments, “His whole life was working in the theatre. I didn’t agree with him on any number of things, but I never, ever questioned his commitment. I’ll miss him. I’ll miss arguing with him.”
Leave a comment