Tony Awards Officers Ask Placing Writers to Rethink Broadcast
Why It Matters: It’s Broadway’s largest advertising second.
Broadway producers and business leaders say that the annual awards present is a crucial advertising device for the business, and notably essential to the monetary well being of recent musicals.
Broadway reveals should not have the outsize advertising budgets of Hollywood movies or tv sequence, so they should discover different methods to construct consciousness, and the awards ceremony has historically been an essential component of that.
The ceremony advantages the theater business in a number of methods: the reveals that win awards usually promote tickets to theatergoers wanting to see probably the most acclaimed productions, and people reveals that stage thrilling or transferring musical numbers on the published usually see a field workplace bump in consequence.
Background: Theater attendance remains to be down because the pandemic.
W.G.A. members are putting for higher compensation and structural adjustments to the way in which writers relate to studios, streaming providers and networks because the leisure business evolves.
At the identical time, the theater business remains to be making an attempt to recuperate from the disruptions introduced by the coronavirus pandemic: Broadway attendance this season stays about 17 % decrease than it was over the last full season earlier than the pandemic.
One signal of the present financial problem: Four of the 5 reveals nominated for greatest new musical this yr are dropping cash most weeks, as a result of the reveals price extra to run than they’re making on the field workplace. Those reveals — “Kimberly Akimbo,” “New York, New York,” “Shucked” and “Some Like It Hot” — are particularly hoping that successful prizes or exhibiting off their manufacturing numbers on a tv broadcast may assist them promote tickets. And the nominated present presently doing one of the best on the field workplace, “& Juliet,” would welcome an opportunity to carry out earlier than a nationwide viewers.
What’s Next: A choice may are available in days.
Conversations between theater business leaders, union leaders, and CBS are ongoing. The Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, which collectively current the Tony Awards, are hoping to resolve the disaster quickly.
It seems extra doubtless that the Tony Awards must discover a manner ahead and not using a televised broadcast on June 11, however in an business constructed on optimism, some theater officers are nonetheless holding out hope that pleas by theater artists to their Hollywood colleagues may yield a compromise.
If a broadcast proves inconceivable, many business leaders seem decided at hand out the prizes as scheduled, both at a nontelevised occasion or just by asserting the winners. But there are additionally some who assume the ceremony needs to be postponed till the strike is settled, in order that it may well stay on tv.