Originally published in print, September 2021.
One of my more embarrassing traits, that I tend to keep under wraps until I get to know someone better, is that I am a former theatre kid. I don’t mean this in the way where I studied drama, wrote plays or possessed any kind of talent at all – I mean the kind of theatre kid that unironically obsessed over Broadway musicals, had ‘showtunes’ as my top genre on Spotify for four consecutive years, and may or may not have had a fan account on Instagram at one point.
Like many of the things I obsessed over as a teenager, I now tend to distance myself from that part of my life, and even the casual enjoyment of these things feels like it has to come with a disclaimer attached as they become more convoluted and complicated in our current times. Getting older often means realising that some of your favourite things are inherently problematic, and that there is very little in terms of entertainment that is without flaws of some kind – and one of Broadway’s main issues, arguably, is its total lack of affordability.
It’s a well known fact that Broadway tickets are incredibly expensive. Despite the fact that there are 41 Broadway theatres currently in operation in New York City, and millions of fans for countless shows worldwide, it seems like attending a show in one’s lifetime is a privilege reserved for a small percentage of the population. For a popular show in the height of it’s run it can be a hundred dollars or more for nosebleed tickets, and sitting in the orchestra could cost a full week’s paycheck. The most infamous example of these ludicrous prices was the Hamilton craze that began in the Summer of 2016 – the demand for tickets and their outrageous prices became so well known that it was written as a punchline in several sitcoms and movies. Hamilton did run a ticket lottery for each performance in which lucky winners were able to purchase an orchestra ticket for only ten dollars, in homage to the titular founding father who features on the ten dollar bill, but this didn’t change the fact that tickets went up to as much as thousands – an unreachable goal for the vast majority of fans of the show.
Despite the fact that most fans of Broadway shows will likely be unable to afford tickets, or even be able to get to New York, actors in the industry remain vehemently opposed to ‘bootleg’ recordings, while doing very little to actually improve accessibility. While bootlegs can be an issue in terms of distracting the performers or disturbing your fellow theatregoers, many industry people are so aggressively against it because they believe they are theft, and that people shouldn’t get to see a show unless they pay for it themselves. There is something quite ironic about a subset of people who are paid extremely well to partake in a career most can only dream of suggesting that teenagers on the internet watching a recording somehow devalues their work. Regardless, it is an unfortunately widespread opinion that many have taken to social media platforms to complain about.
There have been a handful of professionally recorded shows in recent years; Miss Saigon had a 25th anniversary recording released in 2016 and the cast of Newsies reunited in 2017 to make a once off comeback after a hugely successful run in 2011. In 2020, professionally recorded versions of Hamilton and Bandstand were released, one on Disney Plus and one for a limited run that fans paid to rent through Playbill. These recordings meant that these shows were available to watch in high quality for the first time, albeit at a small price, for a fraction of the cost of a live performance. This was the closest one could get to simulating what a real performance was like without actually travelling to New York, and it begged a lot of questions as to why a lot more, if not all shows, shouldn’t follow the same practice in future. There are arguments that being able to access musicals as easily as you can access a film on Netflix erases some of the ‘magic’ of live theatre, and that watching it through a screen as opposed to in a room with an audience may devalue the medium of live theatre itself. I would personally argue the complete opposite – Broadway as an industry drives fans away through its lack of empathy for anyone other than the upper middle classes that can afford to drop a few hundred dollars on an evening’s entertainment without thinking about it. Schemes like the Hamilton lottery do help break down this divide, but creators such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, among others, who have been known to scathingly denounce illegal recordings need to think less about how much it bothers them that others may be able to enjoy their shows for free, and more about what can be done to make entertainment available to the masses as opposed to an elite few.
