The Pros and Cons of Producing a Broadway Musical

Last week, my husband and I had the distinct pleasure of watching two different high school productions of classic American musical theatre — Guys and Dolls and Oklahoma!  I’ll be the first to admit...  I love these shows.  The recognizable music, the well-known story lines and the familiar characters swathed me like a cozy afghan on a winter night.  I remember first discovering these gems in my youth, and it delights me to know that a whole new generation of young people is still enjoying them.

Yes, I realize my feelings are incongruous with being the executive editor at Pioneer Drama Service, where we pride ourselves on offering alternatives to these big name shows.  As I tapped my toe and hummed along to “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” I asked myself, am I being hypocritical?  My answer, in my own defense, is no.  There IS a time and a place for producing one of these icons of musical theatre.  On the other hand, there are also plenty of instances where it is not the best choice for a school or performing group.

Let’s start with good reasons to put on a Broadway musical.  Certainly, there’s an educational component in ensuring that your drama students have the cultural literacy of knowing these shows.  Though he denies it, our 18-year old son is awesome at our family game of “Name That Show” based on hearing just a few bars of a song such as “Adelaide’s Lament.”  And for Adelaide or for Sarah Brown or for Nathan Detroit, there are some great songs.  Face it, these shows are star vehicles, and if your school has the stars with ambitions to pursue a theatre major in college, as their drama teacher, you owe it to them to help build their résumés with these juicy roles.

But what if you don’t have many stars, especially males?  In watching both these shows, I was amazed at the number of talented male soloists and male chorus members these schools came up with, but I wonder how many schools really have this depth.  Guys and Dolls requires FIVE males with solo quality voices, and Oklahoma! is close behind.  Both these shows also require huge male choruses...  choruses that can dance as well as sing.  From Havana to the sewers of “Luck Be a Lady,” from “Kansas City” to the friendship between the farmer and the cowman, the guys were kicking up their heels constantly both nights.  Whew!  At least in Oklahoma! there was an equal size female chorus, which is better than I can say for Guys and Dolls.  That school valiantly placed additional girls as female gamblers, but between you and me, it really didn’t work.  But what else could they do?  They had a ton of girls who wanted to be in the school musical, and there are only so many missionaries or Hot Box dancers a show can handle.

Between the stars and the choruses, however, I noticed that both these shows were very thin.  The stars each have four or more songs (Curly has six!) and of course there are chorus numbers, but there’s not much in between.  Secondary characters don’t get much in terms of a moment in the spotlight, especially since the plots primarily center around the romantic entanglements of the main characters.  Perhaps this is just as well, for I also noted that the vocal ranges for these songs were clearly not written for student voices, unlike Pioneer Drama shows.  Even the stars struggled with some of the lower and higher notes.

As impressed as I was with the students playing Nathan Detroit, Curly and Ado Annie, I also felt a bit sorry for these kids.  Sure they memorized their lines and delivered great performances, but they didn’t get to act in the true sense of creating a character.  No, all they were doing was copying a character they’ve previously seen.  The closer they came to mimicking the exact characteristics of what was already in each audience member’s mind, the “better” their performance.  For instance, everybody pictures how Tevye or how Annie should be played, so there’s no escaping comparisons to those character-defining performances.  But then is this acting or merely imitating?  With lesser known musicals, actors have a chance to truly create and develop their own characters, because the audience doesn’t have any pre-conceived notions regarding how a particular role should be played.

There were plenty of other differences I noticed between attending these shows and our Pioneer Drama musicals, and they weren’t necessarily positive. 

• You should have heard the principal’s announcement before Oklahoma.  Absolutely no pictures.  Absolutely no videos.  And believe me, these kids will never have the fun of posting their favorite musical number on YouTube.  It’s really too bad for the kids, their parents and especially their out-of-town grandparents.  With Pioneer Drama Service, pictures and videos are always welcome, and we encourage posting on YouTube — that’s half the fun!

• Both these schools used a pit orchestra, which is great.  That’s how I got my start in musical theatre back in high school.  But what if a school doesn’t have the luxury of a band to rehearse for weeks after school with the cast?  Pioneer Drama Service has production/rehearsal CD sets available for every single large musical.  It’s great fun to burn copies of the vocal CD for each student (Yes, we allow you to copy the CDs for this purpose!), and tell them in two weeks you’re having a karaoke contest with the instrumental CD to see who’s learned the lyrics best.

• At two to two and a half hours, not including the intermission, these shows are generally about 30 minutes longer than ours.  That can be a nice evening of entertainment, but if you’re thinking about your cast members’ younger siblings sitting through the musical or you’re a harried director with never enough rehearsal time as it is, taking on a 150 minute show with 13-15 songs might not be your best option.  Directors at schools doing these huge shows generally have a lot of additional support from vocal coaches, choreographers, costume designers, set builders, etc., to keep them from going crazy.

• And oh, the snickers at some of the more dated comments!  Honestly, who wants to be cast these days as “just a girl who can’t say no”?  Not only the language, but the music is dated and old-fashioned.  The sad reality is that there is little new in Broadway theatre for high schools.  You’re not going to find a school edition of Spring Awakening or Book of Mormon, Jr.  And there’s no way your school board will ever approve of you staging Spiderman!  So if you want to do something fresh and different that has contemporary, up-to-date music, it’s the smaller publishers like Pioneer Drama Service that come out with several new musicals each year that reflect popular musical trends.

• Requirements to apply for rights months in advance (and risk of being denied), restrictive staging, limitations on changing the script in any way, logo usage restraints, pre-defined rental periods — all of these are also hassles that I know these noble directors had to tolerate as part of the price they pay for doing a Broadway musical. 

Speaking of price, this is probably one of the biggest reasons why some organizations should not take on a Broadway musical.  Pioneer Drama royalties for full-length musicals are fixed at $90 for the first performance and $80 for each additional.  Our materials for a large cast will run around $540 total, and the scripts are yours to keep.  Think these schools got to perform their big name musicals five times for only $950 total, including materials?  Ha!  The school producing Oklahoma! paid over $4800 for their rental and five performances!  That’s why they needed to charge $7 or $10 per ticket, which sadly kept away much of the student body.  The audiences were packed with family members, but whatever happened to students attending their own school musical?  The feedback we heard is that students gladly come see their friends in shows when tickets are only $2 or $3.  But with the income the schools need to cover the cost of doing a Broadway show, they have no choice but to double and triple their admission fees.  To me, it ruins the point of doing a school musical, no matter how famous and wonderful it is, if ticket prices prevent the bulk of your student body from attending.

As much as I love classic musical theatre, I am proud that we offer alternative full length musicals.  While some high schools can and should be producing Broadway shows, not every school has the resources — be it time, space, talent or especially money — to do it well.  For these groups, rather than setting up the cast and crew to fall short of the audience’s pre-conceived notions of what the show should look and sound like, let them thrive by putting on an outstanding production of a musical custom designed for success at the school level, even if it doesn’t have a recognizable title.