Bold New Horizons Take the Stage at Performing Arts Administration Panel
The theater business never stared down a crisis more dramatic than the 2020 onset of a global pandemic. All across the world, stages went dark for an unscheduled and indeterminate intermission, cheating audiences out of performances they rely on to inspire awe and wonder, and leaving theater managers, along with producers, performers, orchestras, and crew, decidedly off-script and in search of solutions to keep their industry solvent.
Boston University’s Metropolitan College (MET) has for more than 25 years held a leadership position in educating tomorrow’s arts professionals by offering graduate programs in Arts Administration. In an effort to support the field in the decades to come, on Saturday, November 6, 2021, MET brought together leading directors, producers, innovators, publishing professionals, and theatrical operators from across the Broadway industry for Broadway: Emerging From the Pandemic, a Nederlander Worldwide Entertainment-produced discussion addressing the evolving landscape. Those gathered to share insights, lessons learned, and visions for the future included Nederlander Worldwide Entertainment CEO Robert Nederlander, Jr.; Bryan Campione, creative director of Playbill Magazine; Michael Coco, GM of theater operations for The Schubert Organization; producers and BroadwayHD co-founders Bonnie Comley and Stewart Lane; Steven Schnepp, president of Broadway Booking Office NYC; Susan Mickey, director of the BU School of Theatre; and Michael J. Bobbitt, executive director of the Massachusetts Cultural Council, who served as moderator.
As Metropolitan College Dean Tanya Zlateva remarked to the audience at the College of Fine Arts’s newly renovated Concert Hall, the disruption of recent years served as a clear reminder of the vital role performance and theater plays in our individual and communal lives. “[We] faced an epidemic that destroyed the rhythm of our everyday life,” Dean Zlateva said. The preoccupation with health and medical realities amid a blight of social isolation called to mind essential lessons. “We realized how much our well-being—at work and at home, even if routine—depends on the arts and their power to challenge our emotions, intellect, and imagination,” she said.
Beyond their entertainment value, the arts are also a major economic driver across the country and world. Broadway played a major role in reshaping the New York tourism industry in the 1970s–80s, after all, and as Michael Bobbitt explained, the creative industry was responsible for $919 billion in GDP for 2019. “That’s bigger than agriculture, education, and construction combined,” the Massachusetts Cultural Council executive director said. “We make a lot of money for this country.”
But as Tony Award-winning producer and panelist Bonnie Comley outlined, the disruption was of a similarly massive scale, as the March 2020 shutdown of Broadway’s 41 theaters cost 100,000 individuals their jobs. And it wasn’t just in Times Square—all across the country, touring Broadway shows are counted among the most profitable and reliable programming for local performing arts centers.
Amid those dark days, signs of hope glimmered through, as Comley’s fellow award-winning producer Stewart Lane reminded. For the first time in the history of American theater, the United States government stepped in with meaningful support for theater owners, producers, actors, and performing arts managers. Congress approved the Shuttered Venues Operator Grant, which dedicated $16 billion to shuttered venues across the country.
“This was a major step forward in our industry,” Lane observed. “It was the first time ever they actually recognized the American theater as an economic force in the economy for jobs and finances.”
The funding helped avert further disaster, but the professionals were faced with a mandate to evolve. As cofounders of BroadwayHD, a service designed to supplement the theater-going experience by capturing performances through vivid videography, Comley and Lane were well positioned to help connect shows with audiences even in times of isolation. Theater-by-video was not a new concept, but it was one for which producers had long held reservations out of concern for diminishing theatrical audiences. The pandemic shifted the market, for audiences as well as producers, allowing BroadwayHD to take root not as a competitor for live shows, but as a complimentary marketing arm for them. “A really well-done digital capture makes you get done viewing and say, ‘I need to go to the theater. I need to buy a ticket and put my butt in that seat,’” Comley explained.
Some tried-and-true ideas were also called into question, as Bobbitt reconsidered the subscription model for theater-goers. Subscriptions offer discounts to those who can afford them, according to Bobbitt, which he sees as a betrayal of the spirt of equity and diversity many artists and arts organizations seek to affirm. The time has come, in his estimation, for new ideas for loyalty programs.
The incoming generation of leaders agree that it’s a time for new ideas. Rose Quan (MET’20), who earned her MS in Arts Administration during the pandemic, noted that concurrent to the global medical health crisis was a widespread awakening to the perils of social injustice; including police violence, systemic racism, and a blight of violence towards Asian Americans. Quan was curious as to how these developments might manifest themselves in the theatrical industry, and what the panel thought of story and script revisions made in light of changing tastes.
“The pandemic, [and] the horrible impact it had particularly in our world, gave time for pause and for thoughts and for reevaluation,” Nederlander offered.
“The world has changed,” Comley added. “One of the remarkable things about what happened after George Floyd was murdered is that it became an education to all of us, certainly all of us white people, of how BIPOC people perceive the world.”
As creative director for Playbill Magazine, which not only services Broadway shows but also productions in 27 American cities, Bryan Campione saw meaning in the widespread openness to new attitudes. “Broadway has not changed in so long,” he said, lauding the priority placed on inclusion and uplifting new voices of theater. “It’s making it nicer,” he said of the developing outlook. “It’s making it so that everyone feels that they are being seen and heard and respected, because respect is what it really comes down to at the end of the day.”
When it comes to tomorrow’s theater professionals, Susan Mickey, director of BU’s School of Theatre, sees nothing but promise. For as much as has changed and must change further, for as different was the world may be and feel, artists and arts professionals should trust in the approach they take to affecting the world. “We still want to be able to communicate, think critically, collaborate, solve problems, have a wonderful work ethic, and be creatively adventurous,” Mickey said. “That is not going to change. If we can connect with the foundation for how we educate emerging artists, they will go out there on this precipice and jump off and change the world [for] a different future.”
Forging those connections between artists and audiences will ultimately fall to the administrators capable of capitalizing on new opportunities in outreach, engagement, and coordination. Mickey sees good cause to trust in those who have most rehearsed for the rigors of the part.
“I have faith in this generation in spending their time in higher education in order to grow as artists that will become the leaders of the next generation of great theater makers,” Mickey said, earning from her fellow panelists and members of the audience that most prized of theatrical currencies—applause.