What started as an existential crisis for Broadway’s nonprofit producers turned into a windfall.
Thanks to a resurgent but fickle stock market, insurance payouts, cost-cutting and emergency grants from the federal government and foundations in response to Covid-19, Lincoln Center Theater and Roundabout Theatre Co. emerged from the 18-month industry shutdown wealthier than when they entered it.Continue Reading
March 2020 ushered in a three-ring crisis for the Equity-League Health Trust Fund, the healthcare plan for theater actors and stage managers.
As the industry shut down indefinitely in response to Covid-19, the fund’s biggest revenue source, employer contributions, largely dried up; its stocks plunged amid a pandemic-induced market crash; and actors and stage managers lost their livelihood. In response, the trustees overseeing the fund’s investments sold all of its publicly traded stock, which as of May 31, 2020 was valued at $25 million, or 23 percent of total net assets of $107 million.
As a result, the fund missed most of a stock market rebound that would’ve generated millions of dollars. The liquidation may slow the fund’s recovery from the shutdown — at a time when few Actors’ Equity Association members, its primary constituency, qualify for even basic coverage and Broadway grosses are off by a third from two years ago.Continue Reading
What the Constitution Means to Me and Hadestown, two of the most of the acclaimed Broadway shows of the season, were both developed at New York Theatre Workshop. Last night, Artistic Director James C. Nicola received an Obie Award for lifetime achievement and discussed theater’s role as a haven and a vehicle for rebellion. An excerpt of his acceptance follows:
Somewhere along the way, I understood the absolute primacy of sitting in a dark room, with other people, watching other humans re-enact, ritualistically, that which we lived in daylight outside the holy space.
While accepting a lifetime achievement award at the Obies last night, Founding Artistic Director Jeffrey Horowitz described how an apartment fire helped him create the nonprofit Theatre for a New Audience.
Thank you to Michael Feingold and the OBIE Committee….Over four decades ago, when I was an out of work actor, on a very hot and humid New York summer’s day, while waiting for that big break to come, I decided to engage in a little D.I.Y. and polyurethane the wooden floor of my studio apartment. Continue Reading
Eric Falkenstein, who helped finance the nonprofit Manhattan Theatre Club revival of August Wilson’s Jitney, is trying to give it another life on Broadway in a commercial production.
“There are a lot of producers who say they want to jump on board,” Falkenstein said in a brief interview a day before it won the Tony Award for best revival of a play.
Donald Trump may be the only major-party presidential candidate in history with a Broadway producing credit, but that hasn’t won him much support in theater circles.
“All he was was a big investor,” said Richard Seff, who wrote the 1970 comedy Paris is Out!, about a longtime married couple planning a European vacation that played 112 performances at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. “He didn’t have any input,” Seff said about Trump’s role. Now an 89-year-old reviewer and columnist for the website DC Metro Theater Arts, Seff recalled the second-generation real estate developer as a pleasant, stage-struck 23-year-old.
Jason Robert Brown said a tweet from a fan inspired the Sept. 12 benefit concert of his two-character musical The Last Five Years.
The composer, lyricist and performer has worked independently with Joshua Henry (Aaron Burr in Hamilton in Chicago) and Cynthia Erivo, a Tony Award winner for The Color Purple on Broadway. About a year ago, “Somebody tweeted, ‘Oh my god, you have to do The Last Five Years with Cynthia and Joshua,” Brown, 46, recalled in an interview. Continue Reading
EXCLUSIVE: Second Stage Theatre has less than two years to repay a $16.5 million mortgage on its new Broadway home.
In April 2015, the nonprofit completed its long-awaited purchase of the Helen Hayes Theatre. The “amazing moment,” as Artistic Director Carole Rothman put it, should help raise the profile of the 37-year-old company and the contemporary American plays and musicals it produces, which have won three Pulitzer Prizes since 2010. But in buying Broadway’s smallest venue, Second Stage accepted a big burden.Continue Reading
UPDATE, with responses to Melania Trump’s speech: Jayne Houdyshell said last night that she didn’t mind missing Melania Trump’s live speech at the Republican National Convention, which conflicted with the New York Civil Liberties Union’s summer fundraiser. “Theater people are my peeps, and I don’t know a single Trump supporter,” Houdyshell said at NYU minutes before the benefit. Actors’ objection to Trump: “We know acting when we see it.”
Houdyshell knows acting better than most, as she won a Tony Award last month for her role in the Stephen Karam drama The Humans. “I never heard Donald Trump say anything that rang true to me,” Houdyshell continued. “His thoughts and beliefs seem to change moment to moment, depending on who he is talking to.”
EXCLUSIVE: The Culture Project, a 20-year-old, perennially cash-strapped East Village theater company that’s best known for the anti-death-penalty drama The Exonerated, filed for bankruptcy protection this week.
The June 29 filing was under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy code, generally referred to as “reorganization bankruptcy.” “It’s a dispute with the landlord and we hope to resolve it in the bankruptcy case,” Culture Project lawyer Joel Shafferman said in a brief phone interview. He declined to elaborate, but said the filing won’t affect Simon Says, a commercial production about a psychic starring Brian Murray that’s renting the Culture Project’s 199-seat Lynn Redgrave theater. It’s scheduled to begin previews on Wednesday.
