Theater at Any Price?

...I hope to say more subsequently about this audience...

...And for every lucky Any Wednesday, there are five or six unlucky "Any Thursday's" and "Any Holiday's" which are nearly identical in setting, the type of gags, and the type of characters that inhabit them, but which fold on Saturday night...

...The Odd Couple, which opened late last season, had recouped its entire investment more than eight months before the tax repeal, and at that time Saint Subber the producer had said, "All I can say is, 'Wow!' " Subber also produced Barefoot in the Park, so perhaps an additional wow is in order...

...It makes no sense for Mr...

...This sounds plausible, fair, objective, and innately American...

...It is not much inferior to those of Paris and London in some respects, but let the French and British worry about that...

...Jack Gelber's Square in the Eye, Herbert Lieberman's Matty, and Ronald Ribman's Harry, Noon and Night belong in this category, which is, of course, no category at all, because each of them has a distinctive kind of theatrical flair, puts up its own guidelines and, more or less successfully, hews to them...

...The theater in New York is irresponsible, illiterate, and inefficient...

...and a number of tickets set aside every night until shortly before opening time (but wouldn't the lines at the hit shows be jammed and the lines at the flops be thin or non-existent...

...If this gentleman is willing to raise his bid to $150 or even $200 per ticket (as he certainly is, expense allowance or not), neither Mr...

...To the shows, that is, where the extra income will be added profits, not a matter of survival...

...All very democratic apparently...

...And if Marat/ Sade's prosperity is due to more than the coincidence of a good play meeting appreciative reviews, perhaps it is attracting a second, usually unreached audience which has little connection with the one that pays more for a pair of seats at The Odd Couple than most men pay for a suit...

...Clearly, most theatergoers have a choice of nights for most shows...

...But since more ice is made on hit shows than on the others, the Wharton proposals would bring income not to the theater as a whole but to the shows that are booming...

...Wharton is concerned with "bringing income to the theater industry and its investors and diverting it from speculators...

...Wharton's own integrity is beyond question...

...Right now, however, I am picturing the not-so-smug look on the face of the person who (a) has not yet bought tickets for a show, the person the producer still wants to attract-but at $25 a throw...

...Then one inquires what they mean by a good serious play, and finds they are thinking of All the Way Home or Blues for Mr...

...it is because of a worsening of Broadway's inflationary situation, too much know-how chasing too little art...

...Wharton, who appears to be the captain of the icebreaker, is actually using his vessel to nudge a few of the larger floes in toward the shore -or should one say bank...

...cheaper seats at the back of the theater to be subsidized by the $25 ones up front* (but don't higher prices in one section of the house subsequently drive up prices all over, especially on hits...

...In other words, the producers would like to get their hands on some of the ice that has been floating to the scalpers...

...This is true...

...If this is not "bargain basement sale philosophy," S. Klein is Tiffany's...

...Wharton asks: "What sense does it make that the man who can run fastest to the box office should have an advantage over the man willing to pay...

...This plan has been adopted in modified form by Harold Prince, the president of the League, for his forthcoming musical Superman...

...The producer is looking for a smash comedy...

...For years they have parroted the old cry that there are not enough theatergoers for good serious plays...

...It may take time before we see such plays as erratically placed markers toward a possible, eclectic American drama of the future: plays that will not crowd out a 1,200-seat auditorium night after night and not pull the wool of O'Neill's mantle over their authors' eyes (does anybody still want to be O'Neill's successor...

...I can think of no more effective way of frightening off potential customers and encouraging speculators than to turn the ticket market into a stock market, a chaos of fluctuating prices...

...It will thus enlarge the present gap between hits and flops...

...It talks wistfully of a number of reforms: box offices that sell tickets for all theaters, not just one (but wouldn't the increased costs of coordination between box offices force prices up?-or at least mean a commission on all tickets, since box office managers would in effect become brokers...

...This limitation is ridiculous...

...Wharton wishes to promote advance sales, to stabilize every show's future...

...They have no taste of their own and five times out of six they misjudge other people's when they try to redraw the lineaments of last season's sockaroo...

...or who (b) has already paid $25 for what looked temporarily like a hit and turned out to be something else, for which tickets are now available for $7...

...Wharton says they do, can he not see how much more incentive they will have under his system to push those same tickets, to the neglect of the others...

...His broker in New Jersey had charged him $75 a ticket for Fiddler on the Roof and $50 for Barefoot in the Park...

...Most of the more enticing plays that land on Broadway are imports...

...But if the trouble with brokers today is that they push tickets to hit shows, as Mr...

...Wharton and his statistician, Professor O. Glenn Saxon, noted that ticket prices from the 1930s to 1960 had risen, but "not sufficiently to pass on the increased costs" of production...

...Who can blame them...

...Speculators will always be with us...

...If the play turns out to be a smash hit, just picture the smug look on the faces of the advance buyers...

...Meanwhile, the play that ought to have a break, that makes its own modest forays into experiment, the play I would call the middleweight, is greeted with universal indifference, and more often than not betrayed by an unsympathetic staging...

...With support from such legislators as Senator Javits and the then Congressman Lindsay, the League finally got the tax repealed...

...Actors' Equity seems unable to help its pool of continually unemployed members...

...In other industries, when the demand for a non-expandable commodity increases, the price goes up...

...Wharton nor a choir of angels can convince me that he will not get those tickets...

...They will be getting bigger commissions on the hits for which the price scale is higher...

...Under the system he advocates, "the $3 ticket which now sells for $4.50 at a sales outlet would sell for $3.50 the lowest price ticket might well sell for $1.65...

...It is tempting, however, to add that the theater in New York has operated more and more by mass production, to judge by the product, and that, in an efficient industry, mass production methods lower unit costs, and therefore lower prices...

...If the Wharton proposals are accepted and lead to higher prices all around, taller hits and wetter flops, producers will be tying themselves more securely than ever to a set of conditions in which they cannot operate save for the odd fluke, and separating themselves more definitively from the audience a forward-moving theater needs...

...theater seats do not come in a "fixed supply" until the producer sets a date for the closing night and sticks to it...

...Rather, I blame the producers for taking immediate cognizance of the opinions...

...Further on, he writes, "Assume that a play could announce a $7 top for advance-ofopening buyers, and the $25 top after opening...

...Charlie...

...The reviewers are not to blame for holding the opinions they happen to hold, or for expressing them as they do (though the appointment of Stanley Kauffmann to the Times is the most cheerful event in the professional theater this season...

...Any Wednesday was so badly knifed by reviewers in Boston that it could hardly stagger to New York, where its wounds were miraculously healed by a dose of friendly notices...

...Alongside such canine exclamations of pleasure the Wharton Report with its hard luck story on behalf of the beleaguered League, is a sober, insinuating document...

...It means that the least affluent buyer pays the biggest toll...

...But radical ones...

...If you move a play from a 1,200 seat house to a 2,000 seat house, its charm disappears...

...it does not induce brokers to squeeze a buyer into taking front orchestra when he would be content with center balcony...

...The theater in New York is desperately in want of reforms...

...Its theme is: higher ticket prices for people who can pay, lower prices for people who can't-an open market responsive to supply and demand...

...if you try to use two theaters, you need two productions...

...The depressing truth about hits and flops in New York is that the outstanding difference between them is the length of each run...

...If this past season is the shabbiest in memory-and what season isn't...

...How many $3 ticket-buyers go to a broker in the first place...

...Wharton points out that at present ticket brokers make a standard commission of $1.50 on every ticket, whatever its price...

...The very week that reviewers nitpicked holes in Minor Miracle they overlooked the same or similar deficiencies in Generation...

...If there are 1.200 seats in a theater, there are just 1,200 tickets for seats to any performance...

...Producers have neglected, not to say estranged, this audience...

...And if he doesn't want to ante up the $1.50 commission he can always go directly to the box office...

...On January 1 of this year when the excise reduction came into effect, a number of productions (including such money-spinners as The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park, Any Wednesday, Generation, Luv, and Funny Girl) did not remove the full 10 per cent, their managements incredibly pleading increased costs as the pretext...

...Will the latter ever buy a ticket again early in a run...

...The report plays variations on the Lefkowitz proposals...

...The present system is at least equitable in one particular...

...Last year I sat next to a Canadian real estate man on a plane...

...In an earlier pamphlet written for the League, Mr...

...it wastes energy opposing the entry to New York of "foreigners, when it ought to be planning reciprocal arrangements that would send American companies overseas and so provide work and experience for American talent...

...they are an inescapable corollary of hit shows...

...Then they keep providing more of the same play, oblivious, it seems, to the fact that "Any Birthday" or "Any AH Saints' Day" stands only one chance in six of getting the reception they hope for-that is, five chances in six of the reception it deserves...

...Perhaps it means something that the most daring play to come along in years, Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, is doing tremendous business...

...I would suggest only that he starts out with a certain point of view, and note that his reportthough he received no payment for it-was written on behalf of The League of New York Theaters...

...Wharton to claim that "the industry" must not become "utterly dependent on the wealthy buyer," unless at the same time he suggests that all ticket prices be lowered so that there is no prestige in taking a client, a rich uncle or a fancy girl friend to a show that has nothing going for it but an exuberance of adjectives on the posters outside...

...The producers in New York with their sauna-and-warm-rub evenings have catered to an audience they despise but dare not desert...

...While the fabulous corpse continues to rot away, limb by limb, legal and theatrical cosmeticians are busily touching it up with greasepaint, a dab of carmine here and a shading of orange there, as though blood still coursed under that withering skin...

...He also talks about tickets as being "a non-expandable commodity...

...Ticket prices range (at this moment) from $2 through $12...

...Its purpose was not to promote better plays in democratic societies through an increase in AID allotments but to fight off the 10 per cent Federal Admissions Tax in New York City...

...A $3 ticket can be marked up 50 per cent, a $9 ticket only 15 per cent...

...New York State's Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz and his assistant David Clurman held hearings, indicted the odd ticket-scalper or two, pronounced righteously on the moral horrors of "ice," and finally came up with a "flexible pricing system" that would allow orchestra seats in the front of a house to go for $25 at the box office...

...This is bargain basement sale philosophy, but tickets to Fiddler or Virginia Woolf aren't basement sale commodities and the industry shouldn't let them be considered as such...

...All these plays except Generation were in their second or third season...

...John F. Wharton, the dean of theater lawyers, has prepared a report for The League of New York Theaters (made up of producers and theater owners, but not all of them...

...The pamphlet in question was grandiosely entitled Crisis in the Free World Theater...

...We have barns of theaters, many of them halfempty...

...The reviewer is looking for something to label a masterpiece (a word that, for everyone's sake, should be struck out of the critical lexicon), as though he would recognize it when it came...

...Here is where criticism and reforms might well be directed...

...He had taken clients to each show and was satisfied that the expenditures of $100 or $150, plus dinner at Le Pavillon or wherever, had been instrumental in closing deals that ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars...

...So it goes...

...We have some of the best lighting, scenic, and costume designers in the world and some of the most doltish producers...

...but may entertain and disturb that intellectual audience...

...They retreat before the reviews the next morning with a lavish display ad full of pinpricked quotes, or with an announcement framed in black...

...This is more gravy-train reasoning...

...Let us put aside those few maltreated items that close up shop before even the second-night reviewers can get to them...

...The Wharton Report is another smokescreen, wafting up from the legal hullaballoo about ice and gouging and mark-ups...

...David Merrick reacted interestingly to the Wharton Report by saying, "I loathe the whole idea...

...If there is a second audience, we might call it an intellectual audience, for want of a more appealing term-an undefined collection of people who expect to get more out of a visit to a theater than from the little screen at home, and not only something more but something different...

...I am not endeavoring to defend the status quo so much as to indicate that the Wharton "reforms" either will not work to the benefit of the theatergoer or, more simply, will not work...

...If I have a hit, I don't want to fleece the public I don't think any show is worth $25 a ticket, not even my hit Hello, Dolly...

...Couldn't the former wait indefinitely for the price to drop again to $7 or below...

...And if the top admission prices are driven up to an official $25 the speculative prices will climb further...

...and Howard Taubman told New York Times readers that the Wharton Report had "a wealth of provocative ideas, most of them practical as well as fresh " But to anyone who bothers to think about the consequences of the report and/or the version of it published in the current Playbill, it is more likely to seem misleading, badly reasoned, and ultimately irrelevant to theater's ills...

...Broadway commands an audience that spends some $50 million a year for tickets, yet it has almost no audience it can count on...

...He had flown down to New York for five days and seen six hits...

...Mr...

...Wharton's italics.] The assumption here is that a show is played for one night only...