Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Is New York Over? Part 2 - Broadway

Episode Date: December 18, 2020

Is New York over? It’s a question that’s hotly debated these days. We will return to this question from time to time over a number of episodes in the months ahead. Last week we hosted two experts from the Manhattan Institute to look at the future of subways. On this episode, we take a look at Broadway. The industry of live theater and arguably the beating heart of midtown Manhattan, Broadway has become big business -- and a big employer; it’s central to New York City’s economy. But on March 12, the lights on Broadway went dark. The ecosystem of employees and employers that populate this live theater ecosystem scattered.To help us understand the short history of Broadway’s economic boom and where it goes from here, post-Corona, is a writer, public intellectual, and culture critic, John Podhoretz. John is editor in chief of Commentary Magazine and host of Commentary’s award-winning daily podcast, he’s a columnist for the New York Post, a book author, and was a film critic for the Weekly Standard. When will Broadway return? What would it take to bring it back? And what will Broadway look like when we get out of this mess?

There are worrisome signs that New York was not going in the right direction. At some point, the music's going to stop and we're going to all have to deal with the consequences of what's going on here. And then the music didn't just stop, like the music stopped and the record was smashed and the record player was thrown in the garbage. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor.

Is New York over? It's a question that's hotly debated these days. We will return to this question from time to time over a number of episodes in the months ahead. Last week, we hosted two experts from the Manhattan Institute to look at the future of subways. On this episode, we look at Broadway, the industry of live theater, and arguably the beating heart of Midtown Manhattan. Broadway has become big business and a big employer. It's central to New York City's economy.

Broadway has experienced skyrocketing growth over the past several decades. Think about this. In 1980, Broadway shows drew audiences of 6 million people, generating about $500 million in revenues. In 2019, pre-corona, Broadway attracted some 15 million theatergoers and close to $2 billion in revenues. And that doesn't even include all the other derivative jobs that are generated from millions of theatergoers attending shows each year. According to New York City's tourism agency, in a typical year, there are 66 million visitors to New York City, generating 70 plus billion dollars in economic activity and seven billion dollars in tax revenues. According to the organization Broadway League, close to

15 billion dollars of that economic activity and 100,000 jobs here come from people going to shows and visiting restaurants, hotels, using transportation, and all the other local services tied to the theater experience. But on March 12th, the lights on Broadway went dark. The ecosystem of employees and employers that populate this live theater experience scattered. To help us understand the short history of Broadway's economic boom and where it goes from here post-corona is writer, public intellectual, and culture critic John Podhoretz. When will Broadway return? What would it take to bring it back? And what will Broadway look like when we get out of this mess? This is Post-Corona. I am pleased to welcome my friend John Podhortz here today. Hi, John. Hi, Dan.

I'm actually psyched I get to say, hi, John, like back at you, because I'm used to you saying hi to everyone on the Commentary Magazine podcast every single day, so I get to do it right back at you. Welcome to post-corona. John, for our listeners, is the editor-in-chief of Commentary Magazine, I think one of the most important journals published in the United States today. I highly recommend it. He's the host of the Commentary Magazine podcast, which produces an episode every single day, five days a week. Used to just be a couple days a week, but then during coronavirus, they decided to go daily.

He's a columnist for the New York Post, and he writes about politics and public policy and cultural life. And in another life, he not only co-founded The Weekly Standard, one of my favorite magazines, but he was the film critic for the weekly standard and in almost every single issue was a weekly magazine he produced a film review john how many film reviews have you written like in your career at least through the weekly standard era good guy close close i mean all in all probably close to a thousand close to a

thousand right so john basically was what they called the back half of the magazine which was to some the most most important part of the magazine and he's also written a lot about theater and he's written theater reviews and he's written about the state of the theater world both the cultural side of the theater world and the business side of the theater world, and he has been following pretty closely what's been happening to the theater world in this corona environment we're in and thinking about where it's going, which he's written about for the New York Post. So John, that's what we want to talk about today. So I just want to take you back to early March. So in early March of this year, there were over 30 productions running on Broadway, including eight new shows and previews.

And according to you, there were rehearsals. According to your writing, there were rehearsals for another eight productions that were set to open just this past spring. And so that's early March. So everything's thriving. It was on March 1st that the first reported death of an American from coronavirus became known to us, and nobody was really paying attention. Dr. Fauci was not a household name. The big news on March 1st of that year was

not that an American had died from coronavirus, but as Scott Galloway points out, the most important news on March 1st, according to the press, was that Mayor Pete had suspended his campaign. And then that's March 1st. And then March 12th, all these productions are suspended. So in a 12-day period, everything stops on Broadway. I want you to take us back to where you were at that time. So there you are, middle of March, and you hear Broadway Goes Dark. As someone who follows the theater world closely and writes a lot about it, was your reaction, oh, this is just a temporary blip, you couldn't imagine a million years that would actually have some kind of permanent cloud over it? Or did you sit back and say, wait a minute, this is really bad for the theater industry, and I'm not sure how this ends? did not anticipate that we would be here at the end of 2020 with the central cultural product of the most important city in the United States and possibly the world

shuttered not only having been shuttered for almost nine months, but shuttered indefinitely when the theaters closed on March 12th, the idea was they were going to reopen a couple of weeks later. And then there was a second suspension through April. It was not until May, I believe that it became clear that they could not reopen. And that basically then, I don't think it was that nobody was paying attention to the coming of the coronavirus. As I recall, even at the beginning of March, people were starting to be somewhat hesitant about going out,

about going to restaurants. People I knew who were restaurateurs or store owners were reporting catastrophic fall-offs in their business as people were getting more and more anxious about infection and contagion. But certainly, the depth and length of time of this cultural suspension was something I don't think anybody, the one person that I knew who was incredibly worried and taking unbelievably seriously the threat of the coronavirus was you. And I say this because you actually, I believe in part because of what you do for a living, you were looking at this in terms of the economic, the macroeconomic impact and how to function in a new market environment. And I remember we had a friend who was scheduling a bat mitzvah.

And I said, ah, she's not going to have to cancel the bat mitzvah and i said ah she's not gonna have to cancel the bat mitzvah and you were like oh yes she you bet she is and i'm like oh come on it was like at the end of the month oh come on i mean that's ridiculous obviously okay people will be careful you know they'll want to be careful like that but you were like you have no idea what's coming down the pike. So the person that I knew who was most concerned about this was you. So I don't think anybody in the theatrical community or anything like that had sort of thought through seriously the prospects of pandemic, although we know from theatrical history, and I'm talking about theatrical history dating back to the ancient Greeks, that theaters opened and closed

based on plagues all the time that was one of the things that during the Elizabethan theaters there were plagues threats of plagues right yeah this is actually why there is there's still a person in London there's still an official in London who has the authority sort of in and of himself to shut the theaters down because he basically is a sort of plague watcher. And so, yeah, I mean, the movie Shakespeare in Love takes place just as a plague is ending in Elizabethan England, and Shakespeare has writer's block.

He's on the hook to write the play that's going to reopen the Globe Theater, and he can't do it because he has writer's block. So, John, I just want to set the table here in terms of what the theater scene means for New York City's economy. Some of these numbers I went through in the introduction. So in a typical year, New York City receives about 66 million visitors to the city, which contributes 72, according to the New York City tourism industry, it contributes approximately $72 billion in economic activity and $7 billion in tax revenues. And where the theater industry fits in, the theater industry does about $15 billion in revenues per year and employs about 100,000, in a typical year, and employs about 100,000 people.

So it's a lot of people. So this is like a new phenomenon that the theater scene is contributing these kinds of numbers to New York City's economy. Now, you've written that this only began, the path for this began in the 1990s. And before the 90s, Broadway was a much different place. It was dominated by Eurocentric productions, and it was nowhere near the big boom business that it is today. So can you just first explain what was going on in that earlier phase, pre-90s, why it wasn't such a big industry? And then I want to talk about how it became a big industry right well so um uh the the number the numbers

that you were citing you know 15 billion and 100 000 jobs that is i think a general number for everything that is related to or ancillary to theater because i think people come in they go to dinner before the theater they stay in hotels and they're Because I think the Broadway theater itself, I think, generates about $2 billion in direct sales. Right? So $2 billion in direct sales. But in 1980, for example, it was $500 million. So over the course of 40 years, it quadrupled in size. And Broadway, before 1980, was famously thought of as the fabulous invalid, a weird bespoke form of show business entertainment,

often run by sort of eccentrics, weird producers, people who are sort of throwing stuff up to see how it would go, very hand-stitched, not very professional in the way that we sort of imagine American industries to be professional, much quirkier and individualistic. And then- Can I ask you, at that time, was part of the business launching shows in New York and then sending them on tours around the country? Oh, yeah. It still is. But I mean, a lot of this was just a kind of, as I say, like a hand-carved industry dominated by creative people and eccentrics and a lot of people who were skimming money off the top and playing games with budgets and stuff like that. And then Broadway had also gotten into a much weakened position from where it had been 20 or 30 years earlier because the neighborhood, Times Square, that hosts these, I think then there were 35 theaters, now there are like 40 theaters, had deteriorated,

had become crime-ridden and pornography-riddled, and tourism was way down to New York because of crime and its bad reputation, and New Yorkers, people who lived in the suburbs, didn't want to come into the center city at night to go to the theater because it was dirty and dangerous. And so the theater had sort of gone into this secular decline that was reversed when shows like Cats and Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables hit, all of which were not in the classic American musical form. They weren't sort of snappy, you know, dancey comedies. They were much more sort of operatic, thematic, fake Puccini scores by Andrew Lloyd Webber and more spectacle than they were plot-driven

or comedy-driven or something like that. And that was what sort of saved Broadway from itself in the 1980s, but it was creatively kind of disastrous. And then just... And back then, did it have a foreign invasion feel to it? Totally. Oh, totally. Not only did it have a foreign invasion feel,

there was a sense that these largely British people, though Les Miserables was written by French composers and lyricists, were coming in. They wanted to come in. They wanted only to have British actors and performers in the shows, which was bad for American performers

and for the actors' equity, the union that governed Broadway. And they were doing things their own way. And none of this was you could sort of reproduce. Like there didn't seem to be any school that was being built by Andrew Lloyd Webber or something like that that people could make shows in the model of. And this wasn't really sort of an American form. Something else was happening. So just as New Yorkers no longer wanted to go to the theater and tourism started growing again in New York,

there was this kind of spectacle theater that was really good for tourists and foreigners because in a lot of what you didn't need to know English to go to see cats. First of all, you couldn't understand the words anyway. And second of all, it was mostly people walking around looking like cats and sounding like they were singing operetta. So it was not in great shape, but it was sort of surviving. And then just around the time that the New York Renaissance began, which began in earnest in the beginning of 1994, but there were signs or traces of improvements or things on the margins sort of a couple of years earlier. Just at that time, there was suddenly a creative resurgence in the American theater, and particularly in the Broadway theater. One triggered by the other, or just the two at a time?

I think it's sort of, I don't want to compare it to, you know, why was it that every genius in world history was born in Florence within 20 years of each other. But it's sort of like you couldn't have one without the other somehow. New York couldn't have revived itself fully without the revival of this unique cultural experience that you really only can have in New York. Not that other cities don't have theaters and stuff like that. But the American theater in New York. Not that other cities don't have theaters and stuff like that, but the American theater is New York and it is Broadway. And so New York being New York needed a healthy Broadway and Broadway needed a safe New York. So somehow the minute that all of this started to converge, it all just happened all at once.

That's the weird part of it. And so by 1996, 1997, you had seven or eight different shows, American shows that had opened that were massively successful. The Lion King. Rent. Rent.

Rent, which was a show about New Yorkork in its darkest days that's the funny part about it is rent was a broadway commodity show about junkies and and strippers and people in snm shows uh dying of aids on the lower east side and then you know basically people were buying you know 50 t-shirts from Rent on Broadway. It was made by this young guy, right? This John Larson? Yeah, this 35-year-old guy who, in a classic showbiz melodrama story,

died three days before the show was about to open. He was 35 years old. He had an aneurysm and he died. And so that was part of the kind of mythos of Rent that made it this legendary show that exploded and ran for 10 years and made scads of money and made Broadway interesting to an entirely new, younger audience. But just so the show, so is Rent Chicago? Chicago, which was a revival of a successful but not very famous show from the 1970s.

The play Angels in America, the two-part play angels in america and then the lion king which was and so it which by now interestingly enough 23 years after its opening the lion king is the single most successful entertainment franchise thing that has ever been made. In any genre of entertainment. In any genre. The most successful single presentation in show business history. It's made something like $8.2 billion. Wow.

The stage version. Because there are 50 productions all over the world that never stop running. And it was inventive. It was a total reimagining of this very successful property, this Disney cartoon. But again, central to this mythos of Broadway in New York, The Lion King was staged in a theater, in a classic old theater from the turn of the century that had been totally dilapidated, had been a second string movie house, and then briefly a

porn theater called the New Amsterdam. And then it closed and it was shuttered. And Rudy Giuliani said to Michael Eisner, the head of Disney, this neighborhood will be cleaned up. You should buy this theater. I will make sure that there is no crime on your doorstep. And three years later, they opened the Lion King in the New Amsterdam Theater, in this magnificently restored theater and there it is this gigantic imaginative success that uh that basically enshrines the fact that broadway has now become a central key feature of the revivified new york so that by that and then you know as the years progressed then it became this center of american York City tourism.

And not just New York City tourism, but the industry. I mean, a typical year in recent years, these Broadway shows, like Lion King, like you mentioned, but it also happened to Hamilton. These shows originate in New York. They become a big deal on Broadway. And then they send them touring around the country. So in recent years, you could have 40-plus Broadway shows touring in a given year to some 200 cities across the United States. The headquarters of that industry is New York City. Right. And this fact that New York City has an industry that no other city has, this Broadway industry that throws off or produces close to $15 billion in

revenue and is directly or indirectly responsible for 100,000 jobs. That's a feature of New York that no other city could possibly have. Only Los Angeles, because it is host to the motion picture industry, has anything remotely comparable to it. So then take me to the more recent phase. So that's sort of, there's the pre-rent, let's call it, the pre-rent era, which is a Eurocentric era. Then you've got the rent Chicago, you know, Lion King era. And then you get into the more recent era, which is Book of Mormon, Hamilton. I mean,

talk about this more recent phase, because it feels like it went to a whole other level. Right. The producers, Hairspray. So what you have is, despite 9-11 uh and and obviously the horrors visited on new york and 9-11 you have new york in a good mood and new york is in a really good mood and people are enjoying living here and there's a lot of optimism and enthusiasm and the this is reflected in the in the spirit on broadway where shows open people and just sort of flock to them enthusiastically uh the producers in 2001 Wicked in 2003 Hairspray around the same time Mamma Mia which was actually a London import um the Book of Mormon in 2010 or 2011 and then kind of culminating with this astonishing thing oh and then the show in the heights which was the first show by lynn manuel miranda and then this astonishing feat hamilton

this three-hour um rap musical uh biography pageant uh about the founding of the United States and the founding father, Alexander Hamilton, that becomes the first genuine cultural phenomenon to emerge from the new Broadway with far-reaching, you know, the album sells to kids all over the country know about it, know who Alexander Hamilton is. Books about Hamilton start to sell. Lin-Manuel Miranda hosts Saturday Night Live. Yeah, and Lin-Manuel Miranda himself becomes a cultural touchstone. He's doing ads for American Express on television. And then when the pandemic hits and it turned out that Disney spent $75 million buying just a filmed version of the stage show that had been filmed in 2016, was going to release it to theaters around Christmas time this year, when that didn't happen, when they knew that that couldn't happen and they decided to release it on July 4th during the

pandemic from what we can tell because they don't provide honest reporting, that too was a cultural phenomenon. Tens of millions of people, if not more, watched it, subscribed to Disney Plus because of it and all that. So you have this, the theater, which is of course very small. At any given night at Hamilton, there are like 1,200 people in an audience, right? So multiply the classic thing that was always said about it, like the least successful TV show on any given night will be seen by more people this is i think less true than it was but more people that have ever seen a shakespeare play in the history uh you know since shakespeare's first productions were staged but hamilton kind of breaks that mold and these shows which run for

20 years break that mold and i'm just saying that culturally in New York, all of this was of a piece with the kind of, New York's just fantastic. It's safe, it's clean, it's fun. There are places to eat, there are things to do. You gotta go there. It's pulsing with energy and enthusiasm. And you go see a show or two.

And it doesn't matter how much it costs. Like Hamilton, to get into Hamilton generally costs, there was something like an average ticket price of $420 per ticket. Oh, but they were going for, I mean, $800, $1,000. But I'm saying average. But I'm saying the average between, yeah, not just scalping and all that. You couldn't get a ticket, and if you could. And so it was all of a piece with New York's just unbelievable self-confidence about itself and its future and its present and, you know, everything was just great somehow. in like just when you walk through times square i mean if you walk through the intersection between broadway and seventh avenue on a typical day i would walk through that that scrum every single

day on my way home from work because i get would take the 42nd street to times square subway station i'd walk through times square just i mean it was what you would see there was both wild interesting and terrifying yeah it was like it was like uh there was like there's a concept in economics or sociology called the catastrophic success. And New York had started achieving what you might call the catastrophic success, which is that it was so popular, and it was so great, and it was so that it was impregnable. Yogi Berra once set of a restaurant that it's so crowded nobody goes there anymore you know it was like that like the last place you wanted to be was walking through time square because it was so busy and alive now i work just south of time square you

walk through it and it is horrifying and heartbreaking because it's you three guys in an elmo costume and five junkies lying on the sidewalk. And then some Japanese guy taking photographs. Like, that's it. Blocks and blocks. And this was a place that they had to shut three-quarters of it down and increase the size of the sidewalks because there was nowhere for anybody to walk.

It had gotten so crazy busy. So that was the condition of Broadway before the virus hit, and the condition of the city before the virus hit. Now, there were other signs of trouble in New York City, if you want to talk. I know you talked to Rahan and Rahan Salam and Nicole Gelinas about this, that there are worrisome signs that New York was not going in the right direction, you know, sort of increase in quality of life problems, dirtier subways, general feeling of less safety,

and stuff like that. All this, of course, has now been wildly exacerbated by the end of Eyes on the Street, the fact that there are people out and about. And so the streets have largely been taken over by people who are street people rather than ordinary civilians. And Midtown is a ghost town because no one is working in the office buildings and all of that. And so what you got there was things aren't going necessarily as great as people seem to think they are. And it's like at some point the music's going to stop and we're going to all have to deal with the consequences of what's going on here. And then the music didn't just stop. The music

stopped and the record was smashed and the record player was thrown in the garbage. And here we are dealing with the consequences. And the consequences for this industry, again, like this 100,000 jobs, the steel industry in the United States doesn't employ many more than 100,000 people. If you think about it, it doesn't sound like that many people out of 330 million people. But that is a major American employer or employment system that was literally cut off. It was folded up and put into hibernation. And the core of it is what you described a moment ago, 1,200 people piling themselves into a theater twice a day, a few days a week, once a day,

one or two days a week. But that's it. Some theaters, twelve hundred people, some theaters, five hundred people, whatever. It's a few hundred people piling in like, you know, cheek to jowl to have this shared experience. And can you imagine when people are going to be comfortable doing that again? I mean, they're experimenting with it in London. They were at least this last week or two, from what I understand, where they were opening theaters, although now because of the new phase of lockdowns in the UK that they've shut it all down. But in the last few weeks, the last couple of weeks, they were experimenting with opening theaters at half capacity.

How does this industry work like that when you have those kinds of constraints? You know, this I think is the ultimate question for your podcast that experience is only going to answer, which is what are the long-term psychological consequences of this period? And there's been a general sense that like the minute that it's all over, everyone's going to flock back, right? They're going to flock back to theaters, flock back to

movie theaters, are going to go to amusement parks. Everyone's going to pent up demand. It's going to be crazy and it's going to be fantastic. And there's just going to be, it'll be like the roaring 20s after the pandemic and World War I. It's just going to be it's it'll be like the roaring 20s after the pandemic and world war one it's just going to be amazing and i don't know if that's really true in the way that people hope that it's going to be true you know if we go through a year and a half or close to a year and a half having come to the or a lot of of people feeling like other people are carriers of contagion and threat, the notion that we're just going to be back in LAX, standing on a 500-person security line, shuffling six inches next to another person, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we're infinitely adaptable and we'll just forget and it'll be over. But I think it's going to take a couple of years for people to get back into the mode of not implicitly thinking, or enough people,

let's say, because not everyone's going to feel this way but enough people to feel i don't know this is too close or any you sit down and someone's too close to you right yeah this is this argument of nicholas christakis who just wrote this very good book who published a very good book called apollo's era where he basically says even if even if the vaccines are effective but but they're not 100% effective, and assuming you don't have 100% adoption, so it's one thing to be comfortable in your immediate social circles. It's something entirely different to walk into a theater with hundreds of strangers and be packed in there with them or walk into a sports arena with tens of thousands of strangers.

You just do the math. Right. with him or walk into a sports arena with tens of thousands of strangers. You just do the math. Right. Well, think about the math there because doing things like going to the theater can be kind of unpleasant. Broadway theaters were built at a different, just like airplanes, if you have a successful show, you want to pack people in like Sargeant. Every available piece of space that can be filled by a seat that would be bought, you know, paid for is profit. So you want to put as many seats in as possible. You want to, you know, have people come in as much as possible. So what would it mean for the theater to accommodate people who are not going to be comfortable sitting directly next to somebody

they don't know and literally having their arms, sharing an armrest with somebody they don't know. Well, so let's say the theater has to have half as many seats as it had before and the seats are spread. They can do this with theater. These seats are not iron welded into the floor. Well, then they're cutting their, they're cutting their, not only their profit, but they're cutting the possible gain in half. And then how are they going to make money? Because a lot of these things don't make that much money. You know, they make money off T-shirt,

they make money off this, but they, you know, so what are they going to do? Raise ticket price? Well, then there's some point at which you can't raise ticket. You can be Hamilton and sell a ticket for $800 or Bruce Springsteen on Broadway and sell a ticket for $800. But if you're bringing in a new production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, people aren't going to pay $800. So can you have a show in a theater built for 1500 people that has 500 seats yes can you do it profitably probably not so what happens then now people aren't really in this game to make a lot of excess money you know that's not exactly what it is like actors need to make money stagehands need to make money producers want to make some money ain money but people it's not actually like you're going into this because it's a gold like because you you want to make right it's not it's not a big like tech ipo right so so the answer is there'll

be some of it but then you have to start ratcheting back all sorts of expectations like the producers will go to the stage hand union and say you know we can't have 20 people working backstage on this show because we can now only afford 10 extra hands because we only sell 500 tickets instead of 1200 tickets and are the stage hand unions gonna say that's fine with us we'll let you have you know we'll we'll we'll see to it that our our our union now is 50 unemployment when it was at full employment before i mean all kinds of incredibly difficult conversations are going to happen that aren't necessarily going to go the way people want them to and you don't even know if it's going to work. Or it will work,

so none of this is necessary, because Christakis will be wrong, and I'll be wrong, and people will be like, yeah, I'm going to the ballpark. I'll do anything. I've been cooped up inside for two years. So that's enough. I have the vaccine. I'm vaccinated. My family is vaccinated. I'm not going to give it to anybody. And no one who has it is going to give it to me. But what happens when it's flu? What happens when someone sneezes next to you? Like that's what I don't really get. So we're talking about the demand side.

What you're basically describing is consumers, audience, attendees, and whether or not they'll have the same demand level for it for all the reasons you're saying. What about the supply side? Could you describe a little bit about how the ecosystem works of talent and both acting talent, production talent? All these people travel from around the world to make it in New York City theater, and how much does the industry depend on that ecosystem being at full capacity? Well, you know, this is a very interesting question because there are many competing factors, right? So the presumption that, you know, we're just going to reopen, and it's going to reopen, and then all the shows that were hits before are going to come back and

be hits, I think, again, is very questionable. The bloom is off the rose on some of these things. The feeling that you have to see Hamilton or you'll die is vitiated when you haven't had two years to see Hamilton. It reopens. And whatever that pressure was isn't really there anymore. That cultural pressure has lessened. You'll need new things that people are desperate to see that will be created. And maybe there's been a lot of creative ferment during this downtime because people have nothing to do. So they might be writing,

they might be coming up with brilliant things. But Broadway is going to go through a tough period, having earned $2 billion in ticket sales in 2019. There is no way that it's going to get anywhere near that in the first year that it comes back, because I think the glamour of, oh yeah, now I guess I should go see the Moulin Rouge musical, which seemed exciting at early 2020 when it opened, but now it's fall of 2021. It's like, yeah, I guess I could see it or not. I don't know. I mean, how is that excitement going to be generated? At the same time, if New York goes through a terrible downshift in real estate values, in commercial real estate, this and that and the other, one of the positive ancillary consequences would be that it would suddenly again be affordable for a creative class of young people

who have increasingly found it impossible to live in the city and create work in the city to come in. They can rent some space and start a black box theater somewhere. Maybe there'll be deregulatory efforts made by the city council or the city of New York to encourage this because there's going to be so much excess capacity that that's one of the things that cities always seem to do when things go bad is they try to help the creative class to make the place jazzier. So, you know, if half the spaces in Midtown storefronts and stuff are empty, you know, what if somebody puts a theater in, you know, in a storefront, puts up felt and whatever,

and black curtains and some sound baffles, and stages something. That is actually how Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway were created from the 50s to the 80s, where the guy Howard Ashman, who wrote The Little Mermaid and Aladdin and Little Shop of Horrors and stuff, he had a theater in the 1970s called the WPA Theater, which had been a Chinese restaurant. And he just sort of opened it and rented it. It's a classic New York store.

I mean, it's amazing. And there has been very little of that lately because it's financially impossible. And also you have this weird feeling, it's like, eh, who needs it? If it's good, it'll come here. They'll make it happen. They'll do it in these other theaters. But you could have a kind of creative ferment

that is born of financial necessity as the city kind of collapses. And then that will also help revive it. Right. So, you know, there was a sense like what you're describing earlier that it can't be screwed up. During the heyday, it couldn't be screwed up. You know, five terms of Giuliani and Bloomberg, the city was basically run well. In many respects, it was transformed that even if you had de Blasio as mayor, it didn't matter. The city couldn't be screwed up. And you said the city was starting to be screwed up.

And then obviously coronavirus exacerbated it. But it sounds like what you're saying is, but the Broadway industry was really screwed up, not because the city was in worse shape, but because this pandemic just devastated it. Right. Well, we know the industries in America that are in terrible danger because of the pandemic, not just here, but elsewhere, right? We know restaurants nationwide or in most more populous states are in catastrophic, potentially life-ending positions.

We know exhibitors, right? Malls are in terrible shape. Movie theaters, AMC movie theaters, the largest chain in the country, says it's going to go broke at the end of January. And basically any industry that requires lots of people to be in tight spaces together. Yeah, for a considerable period of time. Now, that isn't to say that there isn't going to be a movie theater industry.

If AMC goes bankrupt and someone comes in for pennies on the dollar and buys up their leases or their spaces and reopens, when it reopens, they won't have the legacy costs that AMC has. And they can maybe make something fresh and new that AMC was unable to do. It's not that it'll go away, because that's a big company. But the individual small businessmen who run restaurants and, again, like the ancillary businesses, say, around Times Square, a deli, a place where you go in to buy a Snapple iced tea or something, they may collapse and no one's helping them. We didn't have a second stimulus bill. It hasn't happened yet. No one's helping any of those people. So the interesting question is, can they screw up the recovery of New York after coronavirus?

Absolutely. In fact, I'd be surprised if they didn't, because the way you don't screw it up is do what you can to get out of the way of people trying to restore the economic life of the city. But that is not how the politicians in and around New York function. They function by getting their hands, their mitts into everything and screwing around with things and saying, no, no, that you can't, that's, you have 800 square feet. You're going to need three fire exits. You can't, oh, you're not going to have three fire exits. You know, you better blow, you know, you're going to have to tear down

a wall to the street in order to, you you get or you have to do this you have to do that the the the thing that's necessary is like we're in crisis let people do what they have to do to open a business and then you have this entire city bureaucracy that's like oh just a moment buddy there was a there's been some of this good right which is like they said okay fine open up these you know these shacks outside your restaurants to keep going. Outdoor dining. Outdoor dining, quote unquote. Yeah.

But it was amazing because it sort of happened in a way that nothing ever happens here, which is it just happened in a week because everything. But let this come back. No, I have a better idea. What we should do is everyone should be forced to run things with net carbon neutrality. So then the city will be net carbon neutral and will be a model for the rest of the planet. And then no one will ever be able to open anything because they'll be so busy putting in LEED certified air conditioning equipment that costs five times what they can afford so could they screw it up could they screw up the reopening of the theaters yeah they could be like oh you know what just now that since we're

you're reopening in six weeks you know put in five elevators for the handicapped i mean i'm just not that any of these things isn't a wonderful thing to do or could be a wonderful thing to do it's just that's what interventionist liberal politicians do with their power. So yeah, Broadway could be in a terrible condition. And the weird thing is that I don't think it's, I love going to the theater, and I don't think there's a larger American drama here, but there is a New York City drama.

New York City is the most important city in America. And as I say, this is the unique feature of New York culturally. This is the thing. But if there's demand for it, there's clearly demand in the tune of billions of dollars for this unique feature of New York. Could this unique feature live somewhere else? If New York is going to screw up the post-corona reopening of live theater, couldn't this industry migrate somewhere else? Why does it have to be here? No one has ever figured out how to do it elsewhere. I mean, like I say, there are bits and pieces, but they all depend on the core, right? So obviously, we're now going to go through a huge experiment in this question about financial services, right? New York has been the center of financial services

in the United States pretty much since the founding of the country. And back in the 60s and 70s, there was all this talk, oh, you know what? Banks will go to Charlotte. They'll go to the Federal Research Triangle Park, and they're not going to stay here and deal with all these taxes and everything like that. And then the crime rate dropped and people wanted to live here. And suddenly all this notion that businesses were going to flee New York City vanished. But now it's back. It's back with a vengeance. So you have that possibility, which is the decline of the financials. And if that goes, since that throws off, you want to talk about throwing off cash for the city i mean the theater throws off cash with the financial services

industry is the city like there is no other industry in the city except for broadway as far as i can tell and you're talking about tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of dollars gone over 10 or 15 years and the city could never recover from that. But if you're talking about the theater, what New York has is the theater infrastructure that nobody else has. It has these 35, 40 buildings. It has these spaces. They are economically inefficient spaces, right? They have a huge footprint. They're often not part of another structure. So they're single use, big. They have a lot of property taxes they have to pay. You can't just take one and you could, like you can build a small version of one, but other places don't build them because

they don't have the density that you could say, okay, I'm going to have 66 million tourists here in a year. So I should need these facilities to entertain them. The only person who's ever done that is Walt Disney, right? That's what Disney World is, is a place that was – so Disney World was created. Meaning he made it out of thin air. He made it out of thin air. He made it out of thin air, and it is a theater, right? It's like it's 16 theaters and all these attractions. But basically, yeah, I mean, you could do it in Orlando, right?

Or you can do it, or Vegas, which has them, because it also is a kind of destination place for entertainment. But willing it into being somewhere else is not practical because this is an expensive thing to build the theater with a seats and a balcony and fire up to fire code with lights and and also it also often in in fallow times like these places can stay closed for six months at a time and not generate any revenue. So you also have to have an industry that is built to withstand that, which is one of the reasons why everything hasn't. The great organizations of the theater, the Schubert Organization to do with the actual

pandemic which is the debate over social justice the debate over history and interpretations of american history that led you to believe in a in a telephone conversation we had i guess it was last week where you said that even if broadway comes, I'm not even, like, could Hamilton even be made now? If Lin-Manuel Miranda and, what's his name, Jeff Seller, were out pitching Hamilton now, would the industry be willing to get behind it? Right. So Hamilton was as, you know, as fashion forward as you could get in multicultural America since it posits that the founding fathers can be played by Lin-Manuel Miranda's Puerto Rican. Daveed Diggs is – who played Jefferson is black. Jefferson was black. Aaron Burr was black.

Leslie Odom Jr. plays – Right. So the whole thing was this was the recapturing of the American dream or the American experiment with a multicultural eye. That was the whole genius of its presentation, that it was this hyper-patriotic celebration of American spirit and ingenuity and America's young, scrappy, and hungry, and just full of love for the American experiment. And now we've had the 1619 Project, and every liberal in America,

and people are desperately trying to prove that Alexander Hamilton, who was an early opponent of slavery and a supporter of the manumission cause and all sorts of things, actually owned a slave or may have owned a slave or something like that, and so therefore is canceled like everybody else. So I don't know that it could be done, or it could be done. The very quality that it had, which was this celebration of the United States from a new more liberal understanding of the United States, would be interfered with by the ideological demands of the moment that were not present when he wrote it in 2014. I look at this and I think, you know, the pressure is, is it, are you trying to produce a

hit? Or are you now trying to produce a hit while making sure that you have a black costume designer and an Asian choreographer and that the cast is fully balanced in every possible way? And, you know, those sorts of things, as opposed to, I'm just trying to produce something that people want to go see, interfere with. It's already a near impossibility to create a successful cultural product. And now you're overlaying all of these ideological demands and responsibilities. There's a tiny theater down in Tribeca called The Flea. The Flea is a weird model. It does revivals and stuff. And so The Flea Theater has a small staff, and then it brings people on as associates who are not paid, but they

can do their work there they're paid per show or whatever they're not on staff and so it was at some point one of the heads of the flea was said was uh you know was racist or hadn't been good hadn't treated black people well and they he was dismissed and somebody else was fired and somebody else was hired who was to run it and uh and and then the people who were associated with the flea are still saying, it's not fair because you haven't hired us. And everyone isn't balanced. And the general impression and tenor from quotes from people who were fighting against the flea's existence are, we're here to burn this all down. We're going to burn this all down we're going to burn this all down it's this little off-broadway

theater a non-profit and the whole point is it we must destroy it i would like to destroy it because it is not living it is not doing what i think it must do at this time and if that's true of this tiny little theater uh that nobody really cares about god only knows what happens to any production of anything that doesn't that can be criticized for any reason and canceled there there before a friend of mine in the industry points out that you know unlike the hollywood system which which has this big finance machine that gets behind films, many of these shows are like the flea,

you know, they're these one-off entrepreneurs who try to get something going, and they live from project to project in the hope that one hits. Lin-Manuel Miranda was that one time. There is, that's all theater is. That's certainly all the commercial theater is, is every single production

is an entrepreneurial effort. It's a small business. It gets 30 or 40 people to invest in it. Unless it's being done by Disney, which obviously is a corporate chieftain that doesn't farm out its production response,

pays for its own development and production, you know, 40 people go in to invest. And they're not looking for a big return. They just want to be part of this. And every now and then, if you go in, you hit it big. I have a friend who's an investor in Hamilton whose kids' college tuitions are going to be paid for by it. He doesn't have much of it. He has a percent of it or something like that or even less. But he never expected that. He didn't put much money in.

He's a friend of Lin-Manuel Miranda's, and he will now – he hit it. It's like being part of buying Apple at 20. If you bought 10 shares, you would be in a lot better shape, right? Then if you bought 10,000 shares, you're a billionaire. And if you bought 10 shares, you're still better off than you were if you didn't buy 10 shares. Every theatrical production is such an effort. And if you start overlaying political correctness on it it's a very fragile

thing it's an ego it's a fragile ecosystem um and it's not yeah and what's more also it doesn't have the wherewithal to buy people off like in hollywood studio system they can create diversity programs they can they can create you know they can have 10 people on set to shadow thus and such. And yeah, it increases the budgets by $5 million per movie. But that's fine because it keeps the shareholders happy and people aren't going to scream at a meeting. And then the people who might boycott you or suddenly they have friends who are working in the industry and they they want to leave it alone theater doesn't have that those margins theater has no more cushion yeah no cushion yeah okay just in closing if there's one thing you could prescribe

to restart broadway post, what would it be? Wow, that's interesting. I would say that the thing that could get people back to Broadway is if there were a sense of the date certain, bring in 10 huge stars to do shows for six months. There is one such show that has been in the works now for a year and a half. That's Hugh Jackman

is going to do a revival of The Music Man. Which was in the works. Was in the works. It was canceled, postponed. It's supposed to be next year. Because of Corona. Right.

It should have opened in May or something like that. So he is a huge star and he's a Broadway, and he's a great singer and a dancer. And so he, everybody will want to see that. But if you had 10, if you had Bette Midler doing something, and you had Barbara Streisand doing something, and you had, I don't know, you know, Anna Kendrick, who was in the Pitch Perfect doings. If you had 10 major movie across-the-board stars

who were all appearing in Broadway at the same moment, in part to help this and also in part because they also could use some kind of a participation in a big cultural moment to get their careers back generating heat and enthusiasm after this period. That would be my prescription. And who cares what it costs? Or, you know, like,

do it so it's all, make it happen. Right. Well, I was expecting you to end on a crushingly morose note. I'm sorry. As you normally tee up for us a daily dose of crushing morosity on the Commentary Magazine podcast, but you shockingly, out of character, have like an upbeat plan. Well, that's because I didn't have a plan.

So now you know that I'm actually, in my heart, a cockeyed optimist but you know but i'm a studied pessimist john potthorst thank you for joining us uh hopefully we'll have you back that would be great as you know this is like my my favorite podcast aside from my own so all right so i'm sticking to weekly but you know i'm not i'm not doing five days a week yet. Take care. Thank you. That's our show for today. If you want to follow John Podhortz's work, subscribe to Commentary Magazine. Go to commentarymagazine.com and also subscribe to the Commentary Magazine podcast. You can also follow Commentary on Twitter, at Commentary. If you have questions or ideas for future episodes of Post-Corona, tweet at me, at Dan Senor.

Post-Corona is produced by Ilan Benatar. Our researcher is Sophie Pollack. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.