I think that many media companies will not be able to resist the symbolic value of owning a Broadway theater. Get ready for the Netflix theater, the Amazon theater, the Epic Games theater, the Dreamworks theater, and on and on.

All will run live theater shows like Fortnite and Trolls World Tour as sort of spruced up versions of touring ice shows for children. Broadway might become midwestern-style family entertainment if a number of theaters are sold. 

But Broadway does not make a lot of money, and is more for awards and acclaim that you are a “real artist” making “art.” So of that grouping I think only Jeff Bezos would be happy to take the kind of losses that you have to take in Broadway to get Tony award recognition. I think that he is the most likely to be able to adopt the mindset of many Broadway producers. 

Broadway had already lost a lot of its experimental attitude and edge pushing over the last 20 years or so. What was closed when Broadway went dark for the quarantine? Well, musicals that were mostly combinations of hit songs with a convoluted plot written around them, most likely inspired by the success of Jersey Boys – which continues to make money in many ways. People are designing around that. 

The most innovative and interesting Broadway theater either was a hit or a miss. The Great Comet was an amazing, innovative, new musical, as was Hamilton, but the difference is so great there that one wonders what to model. Both seem to have a similar formula, but one just really hit. 

The formula of Rent, another monster success that was risky was to take an old opera and modernize it – something out of the Oscar Hammerstein school of musical-writing. This is the sort of thing he had Stephen Sondheim do when he was teaching him how to write musical theater. 

Hamilton is taking historical characters and retelling their lives through contemporary forms of music. But The Great Comet wasn’t doing that? I mean, Chernow’s book is almost as long as War and Peace. And there are a lot of historical moments in both that aren’t entirely narrative. But I guess the question is what is going to hit a nerve – something you can’t ever predict. 

In rhetoric, my field of study, we often say that the rhetor can call into being the audience that he or she wants to have before them. This is done by the rhetor addressing who they imagine will be out there, and what they want them to be receptive to. The rhetor creates an appetite among the people to be a certain kind of person, or push forward a certain attitude or set of values, and then the rhetor addresses that concoction.  I wonder how hard this would be to do in Broadway?

My feeling is that great American theater has always been pushing audiences to a better version of themselves by making them the promise that if they accept something a little bit off from what they would ask for, they will be a lot better off for it. Instead of whistling the catchy tunes as you walk to the subway, you are perhaps considering how to feel about the central characters, and how the music amplifies the ease or difficulty you have in accepting the attitude you have. 

I think this element of theater is one of the best elements of it, and the Broadway musical is a very powerful and creative form of theater for the exploration of how to make audiences better groups of people. Or maybe what I mean is that well-constructed theater has the power to force audiences to reconsider who they are while they take on the role of an observer. They are asked to take in a performance as a group, and the group is called into being as a theater audience in particular ways, then they watch actions and reactions, declarations and engagements between people who could be them or could never be them, then they are asked to leave with all of that experience. What are they meant to do? I think they are given a rare shot to reflect on themselves as not-themselves, or as an audience to a play reflect on motives that could very well be their own in similar circumstances, which a well designed play might hint to them are pretty close to their own circumstances. In short – Burkean identification/division. I know you are so surprised.

In the end I think rhetoricians are concerned with this same thing if they really investigate what they are asking audiences to do when they speak to them. After all they are speaking to the construct they have made of them in their mind, the words are always addressed to who the rhetor believes to be out there. Theater does this too with the hope that the performances will be believed. And if they are, what changes? What stays the same?

I hope that there are still Broadway theaters left to explore these questions after the pandemic comes to an end. I hope they can hold out. I know that they are supposed to begin reopening after Labor Day, which seems too late, but it might be too early. We don’t know enough about the virus to say either way yet.