The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [136]
Disney may have a better record of creativity than Clear Channel, but the two companies operate under the same economic constraints. A big musical costs as much as $12 million to produce, and perhaps $400,000 to $500,000 a week to run. If the show is a flop, it’s a catastrophe. But if it’s a hit, it may gross $800,000 a week, which means that it will begin breaking a profit within a year and a half. A straight play would be much cheaper to produce, but the profit potential is far too modest for a company of Disney or Clear Channel’s size. More important, success on Broadway means that the show is ready for the road; and it is the road that makes theater a business worth pursuing for Disney, as for Clear Channel. As Chris Boneau, a theatrical publicist, puts it, “Broadway is now a form of international branding.” A hit musical is a global product.
Thus, by the fall of 2003, when productions opened in Sydney and Amsterdam, there were ten versions of The Lion King playing around the world. The initial cost of the play had already been absorbed; the road productions only had to earn more than they spent each week. This they did, with a vengeance. Although a ticket in New York generally costs more than a ticket elsewhere, the New Amsterdam has fewer seats than most of the other theaters where The Lion King will play. In 119 weeks, according to Schumacher, the show grossed $125 million in New York and $147 million in Los Angeles. Beauty and the Beast may be idiotic rather than ideographic, but the same economics apply. At its height, in fact, Beauty had eleven shows going at once.
Schumacher’s ability to attract gifted writers and actors, and his own ambitions, make it unlikely that Beauty and the Beast will happen on his watch. But even The Lion King is not Oklahoma!; the language and characterization were stamped out in the Disney tool-and-die factory. Disney is itself the limiting factor in a Disney musical. What’s more, the company’s other current long-running Broadway hit, Aida, is considered neither as hackneyed as Beauty nor as inventive as Lion King. Perhaps that perfectly acceptable middle is where Disney will come to dwell. The projects closest to completion when I spoke to Schumacher were Tarzan, The Little Mermaid, Mary Poppins (a collaboration with Cameron Mackintosh), and a medley of songs from Disney films. Might they not turn out to be much of a muchness?
Calculations of profit do not determine everything on Broadway—not by a long shot. People have been pouring money into difficult and unlikely shows since O’Neill’s first hit, Beyond the Horizon, in 1920. Broadway backers will continue to delude themselves about a show’s merits, or its potential popularity, until the end of time. But giant corporations like Disney or Clear Channel face issues of scale that necessarily change their calculations; investments are not worth making if they can yield only a modest profit. And the imperative of mass appeal sharply limits one’s options, in theater as in every other art form. In fact, the dimensions of the theater audience mark out the borders both of corporate pandering and of corporate aspiration. Clear Channel will probably never dumb down theater as it has radio, because the theater audience is too small, too adult, and too variegated to make that strategy worthwhile. On the other hand, neither Clear Channel nor Disney is likely to nudge theatergoers very far from their comfort zone, because there’s simply not enough money in discomfort. The one thing one can safely predict that both companies will do is to keep