Seven Ways To Get Me Back Into A Theater

I think we all remember where we were when we read about countries reopening their theaters by having audiences do temperature checks, wear masks throughout the show, and walk through some sort of disinfectant fog before entering.

I remember thinking, I can barely get an audience to come see a show if I pick them up, buy them dinner, and wash their car afterwards. You want me to ask them to walk through a MEDICINAL SPRAY?

So I started playing a fun new game with my friends.

It was called, informally, "What Show Would You Swallow Glass to See?" because, let's face it, we're only about one step below that in terms of what we're asking of people who begrudge us asking them to turn off their cell phones in case their six-year-old calls wanting to know if he can watch a rated-R movie before bed.

(For the love of god, Jennifer, I'm trying to do Pinter up here. Just tell little Mikey he can watch Bloodsucker 7 on Hulu tomorrow night and hang up. You're already confused by the plot, and now we'll never get you back.)

Then I thought about playing a more serious version of the game that was really just meant to be a hypothetical, theatrical Truth or Dare exercise.

And because I'm still a Buzzfeed boy at heart, I had to turn it into a list.

So here we go--

Seven Ways To Get Me Back Into A Theater

7.  Broadway, you've been flirting with the Lady Gaga in Funny Girl idea for too long now, and it's getting cruel. Make it happen. I will walk through the fog and pay an ungodly amount of money to do so. I would love to say my interest will eventually wane, but I think we both know I'm bluffing.

6.  Please start work-shopping your ideas before you sink millions of dollars into them. And by work-shopping, I mean focus grouping, and by focus grouping, I mean--Ask literally anyone you know if they want to see something before you bankroll it.  Some Like It Hot: The Musical?  Our Town with Dustin Hoffman?  The 28th Revival of Fiddler in five years?  I'm not saying there's no chance that these will be good, but why start out with lack of interest against you?  Broadway has the ability to assemble some of the most brilliant creative minds of our time and then they ask them to make a musical out of The Fast & The Furious. It's not that I don't want to hear Cheyenne Jackson with a shaved head singing a new Jason Robert Brown song called "This Family Drives Stick," but please just entertain the idea that there are better uses for everyone's time and energy.  Which leads me to--

5.  Do more things like the movies. I know, I know. But even though films and the film industry are not perfect, they have become way better at determining what audiences want and don't want, whereas theater, in general, has come to some kind of offensive consensus that if you dumb something down enough, or if the composer has a big enough Instagram following, the resulting production will be a hit. No matter how many times this proves false, it's the model they keep adopting. Why? Because it seems as though the alternative would be to do your homework. That's my 8th way you get me back into the theater--Do Your #$%-ing Homework. I'm not going to harp on the way theater mines film for source material. That doesn't bother me. What bothers me is you were already on track to run out of the obvious films before the pandemic began, and somehow you still haven't made a musical out of Moonstruck. Read books. Read plays--those things half my friends refuse to audition for. I'm open to watching somebody put show-tunes to a cookbook if it means I'm at least surprised. Just start making it a habit of passing by the low-hanging fruit. It's rotten, and Dustin Hoffman seems determined to eat it all anyway.

4.  Find the next great composer/lyricist team. Start with talent and then build the project around the talent, not the other way around. We got Promises, Promises because David Merrick wanted to work with Neil Simon and Simon wanted to do a musical version of The Apartment with Bob Fosse and Burt Bacharach, and so it came to be. Granted, it's not The King & I, but it's still a way better show than most, because it was born out of someone's interest, not someone interested in a check. Somehow we've reached a point where film has become driven more by passion and audience appreciation than theater. We have to change that.

3.  When I say "focus group," I'm talking about asking artists. Not audiences. Yes appreciate them, but understand that they are not a real thing. They are ethereal. An ever-shifting mass of...who knows what? But artists? We're pretty steady. You know where to find us. You work with us. Trying to figure out what an audience is going to want is like letting the tail wag the dog using his cell phone in the middle of Act Two (John, please, this play won a Pulitzer).  An actor, director, or designer can tell something is going to flop even before the first read-through. That doesn't mean they're always right, but they're right more often than producers are, and since they're the ones you need on your side if you don't want people hearing that your show is a train-wreck while it's still in rehearsal, help them feel some pride in what they're doing by choosing projects they're excited to work on.

2.  Nobody is going to be sympathetic anymore to hearing how expensive it is to produce theater, because what we're learning about most industries is that some of you, when you hit a certain level, aren't at all interested in sustainability. That's the keyword: Sustainability. Before we reopen theaters, the people in charge, at all levels, need to sit down and look at how they're going to come back in a way that is fiscally responsible. It is insane for every show that gets to a certain level to immediately become a multi-million dollar project. The fact that we just accept that most large-scale theater projects are going to lose money and that most regional theaters can't survive off ticket sales is nuts. This is a business. And right now, the rest of the country is watching businesses--some of them that have been around for a century--close because the numbers don't add up anymore. It's not going to be enough to say that theater doesn't work that way. It has to work that way. The Lewis Carroll Philosophy of the Performing Arts where 2 + 2 doesn't have to equal 4, because it's Art is not going to fly.  Crunch the numbers. Make doing this fiscally viable and it'll be a lot easier to get the rest of the world to take the industry we're in seriously.  Yes, we bring in a lot of money, but we also lose an inexcusable amount of money. The restaurant industry does too, and that's why they're going through a reckoning right now that was brought about by the pandemic, but was also a long time coming. Learn from that. Come up with a new model. The old one was broken anyway. Theater is never going to be a sure thing, but it shouldn't be sure to fail as part of its very existence.

1.  Did I say Gaga in Funny Girl?  I'll say it again. Gaga in Funny Girl.  Seriously, I've got my mask. I'm ready.