Listen to Alden Ehrenreich! He’s Right About Broadway Pricing

Don’t boo him, he’s right! After accepting the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in A Play, Alden Ehrenreich spoke to the press room about theatre accessibility.

“I think that theatre is the art form that we need,” the Becky Shaw winner told the gathered reporters, “in many ways, as a country. Theatre is a place where we go and tell stories that have a humane core. I have a strong belief that the Lincoln Center Theater Archive should be made public. It is in one library with one set of headphones, and it is a shame that people around this country cannot witness it. I really think that the future is going to be in being able to film these shows, and for audiences all around the world to be able to get to experience them. It’s not as powerful an experience as the real thing, but to experience a version of it that is recorded is still very legitimate. Somebody’s going to see that play in Nebraska and say, ‘Oh, I want to go and be a theatre actor.'”

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Center houses professionally filmed archival copies of just about every show on Broadway. There are thousands of videos. It’s called the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive or TOFT. The videos aren’t necessarily the best quality. But they are an incredibly valuable resource available by request on an appointment basis. As of right now, you just have to watch the plays and/or musicals on a small screen under the watchful eye of an employee. And you can only request to watch a title once, so make it count.

Ehrenreich’s suggestion is to create a TOFT app, basically.

“We need to institute a streaming model,” Ehrenreich continued, “where we can create other ways of making money on these shows so that prices can go down in the actual house. For this art form to survive, it has to be more affordable. Theatre cannot be a leisure activity of the rich, and if there’s anything we can do to make it more accessible, both financially and across the globe, we have to do whatever it takes.”

That’s the most important thing: doing whatever we can to make sure that theatre is financially accessible. It’s not just students who can’t afford to go to the theater anymore. (In fact, NYU students on their parents’ health insurance probably have more expendable income than most… anyway!)

It’s a bummer for the rest of us when ticket prices are astronomically expensive. It’s also detrimental to the art form. When theatre is, in Ehrenreich’s words, “a leisure activity of the rich,” it caters to the rich. The productions become less intellectually and artistically challenging and more conventional. Culture becomes stagnant and conservative and, frankly, boring.

So, why can’t all Broadway shows stream on Netflix?

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as pointing a camera on a stage and uploading it to the cloud. Playbill did a good piece on this a few years ago, actually, if you want a deeper dive. The short version? It’s expensive. It should be! Just about every single department (actors, musicians, costumes) on a Broadway show is unionized. A typical show works with about 13 different unions with different contracts and pay structures. They require residuals. If you’ve followed any writer’s or actor’s union strike in the last few decades, you know that this is often an uphill battle with the streaming powers that be.

Simply put, it costs tens of millions of dollars to film a Broadway play or musical. As big as the demand may be, it’s still a financial risk and a potential logistics nightmare.

This is why some recent productions like Waitress, Spongebob, and Hadestown, which recently released a trailer for its own pro-shot, choose to do so in London. They have different rules there and government subsidies. (Oh, to have leadership that cares about funding the performing arts!) It’s also why London theatre has resources like National Theatre Live at Home and the Globe Player.

At the end of the day, theatre is still worth investing in.

However, that doesn’t mean Ehrenreich is being naïve. Just because something is difficult doesn’t mean that it’s impossible or worth advocating for in a public forum. The right minds can figure something out. There has to be a way to pay theatre professionals what they deserve and keep prices low. It’s worth looking into on a larger scale!

We could start with, for example, productions of plays that are in the public domain and would not have to worry about licensing fees. That includes works from playwrights like William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Susan Glaspell, and August Strindberg. Just a thought!

In the meantime, from one privileged theatre enthusiast who does live in New York City (but does not restrict herself to Broadway or even professional theater) to you: please do not turn your nose up at productions in or around your home town. Regional, touring, amateur/community, student, all theater everywhere can offer the powerful experience and humane storytelling that Ehrenreich is talking about.

(featured image: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions)

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