... And Another Boffo Season

By RICHARD CORLISS

Grosses keep growing on Broadway, but so do expenses

Question: In today's theater, what keeps swelling like a star's ego?

Answer: Broadway grosses. More people are buying tickets, and paying more for them, than ever before.

As theater folk welcome Nicholas Nickleby to help launch the new season, they can look back on the 1980-81 year and pat their pocketbooks with pride. Attendance was 11 million, up 15% from the record-breaking year before, and box-office receipts tallied $196.9 million, almost quadruple those of the 1969-70 doldrums. A new generation of out-of-town and foreign visitors who love New York also love the New York theater; one-fourth of Broadway ticket buyers are from outside the metropolitan area. A new generation of entertainment consumers, attracted by television commercials, half-price tickets made available on the day of the performance, and the ease of ordering by phone, has developed the Broadway habit, presaging financial health for years to come.

For the eighth straight year --since the commercial theater snapped out of its early-'70s slump --the Great White Way is coated with happy black ink.

Even so, the custodians of the inkwell--the producers, directors and theater owners--disagree noisily over just how successful Broadway is, and what that success means. Bernard Jacobs, who with his partner Gerald Schoenfeld helped restore to grandeur the venerable Shubert Organization --and with it much of Broadway--sees a cloud in the silver lining. "As grosses increase," says Jacobs, "so do costs. Move the decimal point over a few digits, and you're in the same place you were 54 years ago." In 1927, he notes, a straight play could be produced for $10,000 to $40,000 and a musical for $35,000 to $70,000. Last year it cost $450,000 to bring Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July to Broadway; and Ballroom, Michael Bennett's intended successor to A Chorus Line, was a $2 million flop --figures that help explain the dizzying rise in ticket prices (see chart).

Producer-Director Hal Prince attributes Broadway's boffo box office to "a very few very big hit musicals. The moneymen tend to become cautious when they see how huge the profit is with those shows --and how big a gamble trying anything else is." Producer Alexander H. Cohen puts it another way: "Broadway is too successful. Hit shows are running longer, and there are fewer theaters available than in the past. That makes for a major booking squeeze. With space at a premium, the theater owners may soon be closing shows that are making a profit in order to make way for shows that might do better. There will be no room for the modest success. But let's face it: Broadway is a business. Making bucks is the bottom line.

"The new season will aim for the big hit by distilling familiar formulas: stars and songs. On a good night, Broadway will have more stars than there are in Hollywood. Elizabeth Taylor spent the summer in town with The Little Foxes, and this fall a quartet of grandes dames will lend their incandescence to the stage: Katharine Hepburn in The West Side Waltz, Claudette Colbert in A Talent for Murder, Anne Bancroft in Duet for One, Joanne Woodward as Shaw's Candida. And then, and always, there are the musicals. At least 16 have been announced, including one potential gem that begins previews next week: Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along, directed by Hal Prince and based on the 1934 Kaufman and Hart comedy. With Company, Follies and Sweeney Todd, Sondheim and Prince yanked the Broadway musical into the Age of Angst. This time they have dared to move backward--to tell a story in song of some ambitious young people in reverse chronological order.

Ever since Broadway rose from its financial sickbed, it has relied on the medication of music to keep it young. The musical has certainly done so, with long runs and hot stars. A Chorus Line has formed 2,544 times since 1975, and an orphanage full of Annies has sung Tomorrow for 4 1/2 years, eight shows a week. The Pirates of Penzance is the flagship in a fleet of lively revivals. Lena Home prowls the stage like a liberated tigress, purring and growling out a couple of dozen standards in a voice as supple and gorgeous as she is, and proving that Broadway still needs her when she's 64. Some shows have jettisoned the libretto and returned to basics: all singin' (Ain't Misbehavin'), all dancing (Dancin'). all burlesque (Sugar Babies) or altogether (the revival of Oh! Calcutta!). Indeed, Broadway is almost only singin', only dancin': of the 26 shows now running, 17 are musicals.

Nothing sinister here; no conspiracy to impose the melodious common denominator. Like any thriving business, Broadway creates a product to satisfy a market. Just now the market--the tourist from Tokyo, the matron from Larchmont, the executive with a visiting client and some free time --appears satisfied to sample the easy pleasures of a revue, a revival, another ho-hummable show. "If you want to know why musicals do so well so long," says Neil Simon, "just walk down Fifth Avenue. All you hear are foreign languages. Musicals they can understand." Adds Joseph Papp, who as head of New York's Public Theater acts as the Shubert of the theatrical subculture: "Broadway is one big ice-cream factory."

Television, whose commercials have lured many young people to Broadway, has also shaped (or dulled) their tastes; anything alive and kicking may look like a masterpiece. There is no question that, as a museum of musical art, Broadway delivers. But the function of any popular art is to serve the intelligent heart as well as the expense account. The commercial theater should be able to do better. Many sympathetic observers believe it will. Surely, in the past, it did.

For decades in America, Broadway was the theater. When the strumpet muse spread her skirts some time after the turn of the century and settled down in Manhattan's West 40s around Times Square, she attracted both the top musical talent and the premier dramatists. Berlin and Rodgers and Kern and Porter spun out romantic dreams and ironies in 4/4 time. There was room too for a gaggle of deft farceurs like George S. Kaufman, who populated Manhattan penthouse sets with pretty people and funny lines, and for O'Neill, Miller, Williams and Albee to illuminate the dark side of the national soulscape. But scan this week's Broadway listings and you will find only four new dramas (including Peter Shaffer's superb Amadeus), two thrillers, and one magnificent spectacle that defies categorization (Nicholas Nickleby). There is not a single comedy. Good talk--the locking of minds between playwright and playgoer--has almost vanished.

But something else has happened. Now, all America is the theater. In Los Angeles and Louisville, Washington and New Haven--and in Manhattan, beyond the theater district, down on the Bowery and up on 73rd Street--the young and the restless have started shouting: "Hey, let's put the show on right here!" Energetic companies are serving as incubators for tomorrow's Broadway playwrights and leading actors. Hal Prince is emphatic and enthusiastic: "Off-Broadway and the regional theaters--especially the regionals --have become our lifeline. That's where the serious nonmusical theater finds its authors and its audience."

The companies offer new homes to old masters: the most recent plays by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were first staged off-Broadway. Neil Simon wanted to stage his recent farce Fools at the Mark Taper Forum, "but that is supposed to be for young playwrights. Not me, I'm too established. That's ridiculous. It's the play that's important, not the playwright." Veteran actors like Edward Flanders and Nancy Marchand are treated to the sense of being young and adventurous again. Says Mar chand, who last year commuted between Lou Grant on television and the handsomely revived Morning's at Seven on Broadway: "There are good theaters all over the country. You can feel it; something is growing."

The artistic directors of these companies--Gordon Davidson of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, Marshall W. Mason of the Circle Repertory Company in Greenwich Village, Lynne Meadow of the Manhattan Theater Club, the indefatigable Joe Papp--have become modernist avatars of the old-fashioned impresario. They have nurtured writers and actors who leaped to prominence without spending much, if any, time on Broadway. Steve Tesich had written only a few off-Broadway plays when he won an Academy Award for his screenplay Breaking Away. Meryl Streep made her name with Public Theater productions; Christopher Reeve and William Hurt honed their craft at the Circle Rep. All have returned "home" between big-budget movie schedules.

By any standard, these companies have demonstrated their importance not just to their own communities but to the commercial theater. And they have reaped the most significant rewards: profit and honor. Three of the most successful musicals of the 1970s--Grease, A Chorus Line and Annie--originated off-Broadway or in the regionals. Eleven of the last twelve Pulitzer Prizes for Drama have gone to plays initially produced off-Broadway or in the regionals. Three of those prizewinners emerged from the Public Theater, two from the Mark Taper Forum, two from Jon Tory's Actors Theater in Louisville.

This year's winner was Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, a mordant comedy with a Mississippi drawl. The tale of her play's peregrinations helps illustrate the new and winding road to Broadway. Crimes was first staged in 1979 at the Actors Theater in Louisville, then soon afterward at the California Actors Theater in Los Gatos, St. Louis' Loretto Hilton and the Center Stage in Baltimore--all to uniformly rave reviews. Next, the Manhattan Theater Club decided to put it on. Meanwhile, Independent Producer Burt Sugarman bought the movie rights, reportedly for $1 million. While the play was scoring again at the Manhattan Theater Club, Warner Theater Productions and the Producer Circle secured it for Broadway.

For a playwright who has already won a Pulitzer and a fat movie contract, how much voltage is left in finally seeing her name go up in lights on Broadway? Says Henley, 29: "Broadway is still a great place to be." A run on Broadway, adds Gordon Davidson, "is still the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for young playwrights." The same holds true for performers who may have attained higher profiles--and fees--in other media. Richard Thomas, who appeared on Broadway as a child actor before going on to The Waltons and other television roles, recently took over the lead in Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July. "Coming out of television and being reaccepted on Broadway confirmed my legitimacy," he says. "For an actor, if you can please a Broadway crowd, you've made it."

But unlike earlier hopefuls who yearned to conquer Broadway, today's young playwrights often find, as Davidson notes, that "Broadway needs them more than they need it. Broadway can't generate its own plays; the costs are too high, the risk too big. So producers look for plays developed at regional theaters --or rather, they watch for the New York critics' reviews of regional plays. Critics are still important to this kind of drama, and it helps to know that the man who'll be reviewing your new show already likes it." Mason says the same thing, but accentuates the negative: "Unless you can count on a rave from Frank Rich of the New York Times, you're in trouble."

Perhaps you are in trouble if you need to count on a critic's rave in the first place. Then you are playing the Broadway game. Says Joe Papp: "As long as we do plays on our own terms, it's fine if they move to Broadway. We get recognition and money. The danger comes when a repertory company starts planning for Broadway."

Most of the regional plays that get to Broadway deserve to be there: their subjects touch the mainstream audience; they deal with life-and-death themes in what Papp way calls "a nice, Elephant Man, cerebral, Children of a inoffensive Lesser God, Fifth of July and The Shadow Box bring eloquence and some caustic wit to TV-movie topics: disease, deafness, disfiguration, dying. But they can hardly be said to occupy the theatrical avantgarde, once the exclusive terrain of off-Broadway. Now that is the liberated space where JoAnne Akalaitis' Mabou Mines mix media like a Molotov cocktail, where Robert Wilson stages all-night hypnotic ballets and Charles Ludlam scrambles sexes, genres and audiences' minds.

If there is one playwright who straddles the abyss dividing the radical theater and the more accessible regional fare, it is San Francisco-based Sam Shepard, 38. Shepard is the most ambitious and powerful dramatist in the U.S.; his plays cut to, and through, the heart of outlaw America. And outlawed they seem to be: Shepard has never been represented on Broadway--not with Buried Child, which won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize, or with his best play, the ferociously poetic The Tooth of Crime (1972), which never even made it to off-Broadway.

The same artistic politics that dominate the U.S. theater, characterized by conservatism on Broadway and moderate liberalism in the regionals, can be found in the commercial and subsidized theaters of London. But the time when Americans suffered spasms of cultural inferiority toward the mother country has long passed. "Except for the National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company," Jacobs argues, "theater in Great Britain is a disaster." Adds Mason: "We're in much better shape over here. Only the Royal Court Theater in London has a system for creating new plays. The U.S. is where it's happening. Go to Germany, to Rumania --they all want American plays."

It is true that there is a new balance of trade between the theatrical nations. Ten of the 45 shows in New York are British; six of the 30 shows in the West End are American. Broadway and Shaftesbury Avenue have become two-way streets. The ruck of English popular comedy can be every bit as disposable as last year's Broadway sitcom. But when British theater is good, it is very good indeed. The best Broadway play (Amadeus), the best Broadway musical (Evita), the best new off-Broadway play (Cloud 9) and the best off-Broadway revival (Entertaining Mr. Sloane) are all of English extraction.

Then there is Nicholas Nickleby. Says Elizabeth McCann, one of the producers of the show: "The great lesson to be learned from Nicholas is that New York desperately needs a large scale subsidized repertory company. Our producers must depend so completely on the ticket buyer --rather than on a partial subsidy--that we must produce what the largest number of people want. I suppose the old saw is still true: 'Theater must succeed as a business, or it will fail as an art.'

"This is the dilemma that faces Broadway artists and entrepreneurs. The Shuberts and Nederlanders have demonstrated that show business can make money. The R.S.C., and to a lesser extent artists on Broadway and off, prove that it can make vital theater. The challenge ahead is to reconcile these opposites, and to do it on Broadway. "Broadway at its best gives the best people the resources to do their best," says Prince. The Fabulous Invalid cannot be killed off by an overdose of mediocrity; it can be rehabilitated by frequent injections of imagination and daring. As long as someone has a story to tell or a song to sing, and as long as someone else is willing to sit down and listen--for two hours or 2 1/2--Broadway will be as good a place as any to do it. --By Richard Corliss. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York and Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/New York, Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.