How much would you pay to be in the same room as Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, watching them work? Is that price in the mid-hundreds of dollars? And would you double it to nearly a thousand for a slightly better seat?
The 15-week limited Broadway run of William Shakespeare’s Othello, featuring one of our greatest living actors in the title role (and another, pretty damn good actor as Iago), is betting that at least some people would. Orchestra-level advance tickets to the show run between $216 and $921, depending on where you sit (those $216 tickets, more in line with what a less starry straight play might charge, are at the far side of the row, which at least means you’re getting a slightly lesser chance of catching Covid or the flu alongside your mild discount). It’s the latest innovation in live-theater pricing, where you no longer need to visit a scalper to get price-gouged. But if you do peruse the second-hand sites, you could fork over that same grand to see the revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, starring Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr – an intriguing cast to be sure, albeit all a bit further down the list of greatest living actors than Washington.
High prices have been part of the Broadway scene in particular for ages, and it’s not just Broadway where prospective event attendees are feeling ticket sticker shock. As far down the event totem pole as movie tickets, you can find extensive complaints about how much of an expensive rip-off they are compared with staying home and streaming something on Netflix. To be fair, though, going out has always cost more than staying home and watching TV – and if you actually like going to the movies more than you like complaining about prices, several theater chains now offer subscription services that bring the average per-movie spend way down. Pay $20-25 a month or so (depending on your location), and you can see 10-30 movies (depending on the subscription). Suddenly a weekly trip to the multiplex can cost as little as $5. Even concerts, despite the persistent cruelty of Ticketmaster and the rigged pestilence of the “resale market”, have a little more flexibility. Yes, there are some ridiculously overpriced VIP packages to see Beyoncé on tour this spring, the kind of deluxe non-deal where you can spend the price of two plane tickets to Paris for a decent seat, shorter merch lines and a plastic laminate. But there are also plenty of seats available for well under $200, a fire sale compared with Othello.
There are supposed to be similar bargains afoot at Broadway’s TKTS booths in Manhattan, where same-day tickets to various shows are available at a heavy discount if you’re willing to wait in line. But a heavy discount on $500 prices is still pretty far out of budget range for a lot of people, even as a splurge – and a limited-run, star-studded show like Othello or Glengarry Glen Ross will probably not pop on the TKTS boards anyway. Broadway, lacking thousands of screens or arena-sized venues, is playing the scarcity card, even with eight shows a week. And they’re not necessarily incorrect to do so; true enough that audiences are paying for something that’s harder to replicate at home, or anywhere. The live-theater energy can certainly pay off for the crowd even if they’re not witnessing a new stone-cold classic.
(I personally saw uproarious reactions greet two very different recent shows, Purpose and Buena Vista Social Club, as crowds vocally ignored plenty of shortcomings; that’s the magic of the stage, baby!) Producing live shows is also expensive and harder than ever to recoup. A big artist can sell a lot of merch on tour without selling out every seat, but Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark wasn’t exactly making up for lost revenue with T-shirt sales. A short, marquee run like Othello stands a decent chance of turning a profit – and if it doesn’t, it’s done in 15 weeks anyway, without turning into an open-ended quagmire.
So far, the Othello gamble has paid off; the show set a record for the biggest-grossing week for a non-musical in Broadway history. Still, these prices, coming at a time when consumers are paying through the nose on staples like eggs, do raise the question of who exactly live theater is supposed to be for. It seems like even some Broadway players can’t avoid these nagging doubts: Hugh Jackman and producer Sonia Friedman have collaborated on Together, a company with the goal of making live theatrical productions more accessible. Though the announcement is a little vague, it sounds as if the stripped-down nature of the project (which will include readings as well as fully productions) might also strip away some of the Broadway-production bombast that keeps prices high.
The question is, will audiences show up for humbler projects, or will shows like Othello mostly create an appetite for glamorous and spectacular enticements, even for straight non-musical plays? The Guardian’s review of Othello, for which the show graciously simulated a real consumer experience by not providing press tickets, suggests that some Fomo over this particular production might be misplaced, describing a production that exists mainly to showcase its stars (the show hasn’t fared any better with other critics). That’s what audiences are paying for, of course, yet plenty of great shows have offered so much more. (Think of Hamilton, which launched careers rather than relying on marquee names.) At the movies, shelling out $15 to bask in a star’s charisma and skill for a couple of hours might be a fair-enough proposition; if that becomes the norm for Broadway but at 40 or 50 times the price, the gawking economy may not hold. Then again, maybe it’s enough for audience members to be, to quote a more boundary-pushing Broadway smash, in the room where it happens.