The yellow brick road to Broadway

Watching musical theater is dreamlike. How about being part of it? This month I wrote my first song for a Broadway style musical theater play. It was challenging and very rewarding to see the author smiling as he listened to it. One song approved, 24 to go. I hope audiences have the same reaction when they hear and see the song being performed by actors who will be wearing unusual handcrafted costume, moving around a fully decorated stage, with exceptional lighting, on a big theater packed with a paying crowd that decided to deposit their hard-earned money at the box office after being attracted by a huge advertising and promotion campaign… PHEW! This is the yellow brick road to Broadway. And this isn't half of the hard work and huge structure required to make a musical show to happen.

It is like putting on a movie. You deal with armies of professionals from the most diverse specialties and everything they create has to come together. As it is in movies, the cost of a Broadway show is measured in millions. But movies are analogically or digitally reproducible and distributed worldwide. The theater show is live, requires cast and crew to be there, in front of the audience, and every night is a new night - for better AND worse. The success of last night's show is no guarantee of how good this one will be.

Just like in the movies, there is inflation on Broadway. And this is not a new phenomenon, as producer Hal Prince explains, on an interview for the PBS documentary "B'Way". "On 1954's 'Pajama Game', we needed 250 thousand dollars, and we ended up getting 169 thousand. By the time I did 'Follies', in 1970, it cost 800 thousand dollars to do, and it was the most expensive musical ever made. You can't get much for 800 thousand dollars today." Take Julie Taymor, who brought "The Lion King" to the Broadway stage with the help of Disney and approximately 25 million dollars. The show is still running worldwide, with a return that is now over 4 billion.

Be it 1954 or 2013, if you want to make it into Broadway, you've got to have what it takes to convince audiences to pack your theater on a daily basis. "Wicked" did it and is still doing it, being among the top 3 biggest current money-makers after 10 years on the run (click here to check weekly statistics on shows). We also wish luck to the production of "Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark" (another groundbreaking work by Julie Taymor), that started with a huge deficit due to bad accounting in the beginning of the project. If it sells out each and every night, it might get even in about two years. See the whole story in this NYMag article. No safety nets. This is both the beauty and the curse of live entertainment.