Tony Award leaders today affirmed their decision to bar Broadway co-producers from the stage of the David Koch Theater on June 16, while offering the investors and bundlers a consolation prize: live shots of them elsewhere in the theater on Broadway’s big night.
According to a Tony Awards memo circulating this afternoon, a “Voice of God” in the Koch Theater will announce a specific category during a commercial break and invite co-producers to gather in the lobby off the first tier. When a winning show is named, the triumphant cluster will congregate on a riser for their live moment on primetime television.
On prior Tony nights, winning co-producers in the categories of best musical, play, musical revival and play revival rushed the stage en masse. Today’s plan eliminates that spectacle while denying a prized perk for those who fund much of the Broadway season and often incur large losses. Whether co-producers invest or raise funds from others, they generally make money only when a show earns a profit.
Co-producers have long complained about feeling under-appreciated, particularly by the Broadway League. (An image making the rounds this week speaks to their discontent.) The trade association of theater owners and producers presents the Tonys with the nonprofit American Theatre Wing, via Tony Awards Productions.
Co-producers were previously informed that they must be seated in the orchestra to be permitted onstage, which created a scramble for the $2300 tickets. Later, some were told they they weren’t welcome onstage no matter where they’re sitting. According to today’s Tony memo: “Only guests who are seated in the orchestra will have access to the orchestra and stage, and we are asking that only lead producers for a production go on stage to accept an award.”
There was a plan — now scrapped — for co-producers to gather on the Lincoln Center plaza prior to the telecast for a “group video pan” to be shown during the acceptance speeches. Today’s memo said the idea wasn’t feasible, without elaborating, and noted that co-producers now must buy tickets to the ceremony to appear on television.
The League-controlled Internet Broadway Database remains a related bone of contention. About a year ago, the trade association modified the high-profile registry in a way that partially hides the names of many co-producers who share credits.
Say two co-producers jointly raise $500,000 for a shared above-the-title credit and a percentage of the lead producers’ adjusted net profits. Their names would appear with a slash (/) between them. Or they may create a new entity with two other co-producers and each of the four raises $125,000.
In either scenario in the past, the show in question appeared on all the co-producers’ individual IBDB pages. For recent shows on IBDB, one must generally type both names “slashed” together or the name of the entity to find the credit, although there are exceptions.
The League has told co-producers that it made the change because of a surge in shared and organizational credits. An “IBDB Task Force” is said to be studying how to represent shared credits on individuals’ pages. A League spokeswoman didn’t respond to emails for this story.
By cross-checking the Playbill for the 2024 revival of Cabaret with IBDB, for example, I counted more than 70 Cabaret co-producers who weren’t given credit for the show on their individual IBDB pages.
In another omission, producer Hal Luftig isn’t credited on his individual IBDB page for the David Byrne-Fatboy Slim musical Here Lies Love, even though his name is the first to appear above the title. He shared his producing credit with Kevin Connor, the managing producer of Hal Luftig Productions, and it appears as Hal Luftig/Kevin Connor.
Co-producers, who regard IBDB as an essential tool for documenting their bonafides and researching other people’s, detect snobbery at work. Indeed, some old-timers say the number of co-producers above the title — approaching 100 at some shows — is as embarrassing to the industry as the stampede of co-producers who previously rushed the stage at the Tonys.
Incidentally, two of the Tony Best Musical nominees, Hell’s Kitchen and Suffs, premiered at the Public Theater. In a not-entirely-unrelated development, Public Theater production workers scored a high-profile victory by voting to unionize with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). The vote was 178 to 11, according to a post today on the workers’ Instagram page.
Co-producers who want a seat at the table and space onstage at the Tonys might consider organizing themselves.
