Broadway Cashes In

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The New York Sun

Broadway is in the money this year: Ticket sales are up, attendance is reaching new highs, and corporate interest is red hot.

During the 2005-2006 season, more than 12 million people attended performances, an increase of 4 percent over last year, the League of American Theatres and Producers announced yesterday. Revenue shot up 12 percent, to $861.6 million, setting a new record.

A surge in tourism largely accounted for the increases, as did the variety of options on the stage. “This season was marked by tremendous new musicals and plays, offering audiences a diversity of shows from which to choose,” president of the League of American Theatres and Producers, Jed Bernstein, said in a statement. “Although the strong business results continue to underline Broadway’s revenue stakes in New York, increasing cost pressures have resulted in no increase in the number of shows making a profit. Broadway is still a high risk investment.”

Which could account for the rise in creative corporate sponsorships in theater. Most recently, the MCC Theater announced that it has partnered with the Kimpton chain of boutique hotels on the upcoming production of Neil LaBute’s “Some Girl(s),” opening June 8. Kimpton is providing furniture, lamps, artwork, linens, and other accessories for the set of the play, which takes place in several hotel rooms. The pieces will be borrowed from Kimpton’s Hotel Palomar in Washington, D.C., and will be returned after the play closes. Audience members, however, can purchase identical pieces from Kimpton’s retail Web site, www.kimptonstyle.com.

Crossover between theater and advertising is becoming notably frequent. Last week saw the first live commercial in a New York theater: Before a production of “Stomp” at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village, actors plugged London attractions for the tourist organization Visit London. The Broadway musical “Spamalot” has been endorsed by Hormel and Yahoo. And in a more direct move, Gran Centenario paid for product placement in Barry and Fran Weissler’s production of “Sweet Charity;” in a nightclub scene, a waiter’s line was rewritten, so that instead of offering a customer another double scotch, he suggested: “Gran Centenario, the tequila?” All of which pales in comparison to the venues that have found corporate sponsors: the American Airlines Theater, the Hilton Theater, the Cadillac Winter Garden, and most recently, the Off-Broadway Snapple Theater.

Mr. LaBute’s “Some Girl(s),” about a soon-to-be-married man paying visits to his exes, isn’t new to the concept of a corporate presence. The London production featured product placements (though there was no tie-in marketing). Characters wore costumes by British designer Nicole Farhi and carried expensive handbags by Mulberry, an English luxury brand. The Times of London made a joke of the fact that one character, who is supposed to be a stoner, carried a leather tote that in real life cost close to $1,500. For the New York production, the company worked with set designer Neal Patel to come up with the look for each scene.

Is the commercialism bad for theater? Allen Moyer, who has designed the sets of several Broadway and Off-Broadway plays, said this deal as part of a tradition of companies lending merchandise for plays – a process that lightens the financial load for strapped theater companies. Mr. Moyer recently designed the set for the musical “Grey Gardens.”

“We have an antique piano onstage, and the piano was provided by a company in the Bronx,” Mr. Moyer said. “They allowed us to use it for free, and then there was a placard in the lobby that said, ‘If you’d like to own the piano you see onstage tonight, contact so and so.'”

New York audiences have had other opportunities to purchase things they’ve admired onstage. Last year, the television and Internet retailer QVC partnered with the Broadway production of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” In that case, QVC provided all the jewelry for “Scoundrels,” which takes place on the French Riviera. QVC then marketed the pieces used in the show as the “Scoundrel Collection.”

In the case of “Some Girl(s),” Kimpton already maintained their Web site; the play simply provides another way of bringing people to the site. Once there, customers can shop either by category (“Bed,” “Bath,” “Organic”) or by hotel.

Even after so many situations of advertising intruding on art, the MCCKimpton partnership, like the “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”-QVC deal, seems to be a new step; it potentially changes the way the audience members will experience Mr. LaBute’s play. Instead of concentrating on the characters and the actors, they can study the set as though it were a show room. And if a scene drags, they can distract themselves by considering how that floor lamp would look in the study.

It’s a distraction that some find problematic. Gary Ruskin, the executive director of Commercial Alert, a watchdog group in Portland, Ore., predicted that promotional deals will eventually backfire. “It’s going to turn people away from the theater,” Mr. Ruskin said. “This intrusive commercialism is deeply unpopular.”

But Broadway babies aren’t saying good night just yet. Given the statistics on attendance and revenue, something seems to be working.


The New York Sun

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