80 stories from Stage Money
We just got the cover design for our next book, Theater Careers: A Realistic Guide, to be published by USC Press this summer. We've reviewed the copy edited text of it. Next we'll see …
Do to other book assignments, I have been unable to update this blog. But it is not totally dead. I continue to update the links on the right: links to current news articles abou…
An excellent essay on arts funding from the federal government is "Federal arts funding: a trace ingredient in the sausage factory of government spending," by Aaron Andersen, posted on Creat…
A review of Stage Money appears in the May-June 2011 issue of American Theatre, the magazine published by Theatre Communications Group. Written by Richard Stein, executive director of …
The news came out yesterday that the Intiman Theatre of Seattle was canceling the rest of this season and laying off all staff. The board hopes to restart the theatre with a 2011-2012 …
It's been a while since posting here because we were finishing the review draft of our second book. Titled Theater Career Facts: What Students and Parents Should Know, it resembles Sta…
The Americans for the Arts, an arts advocacy group, just published its National Arts Index and the data aren't encouraging. The Index attempts to be for the arts what the Dow Jones Ind…
Backstage this week has a brief essay titled, "Need an Acting Job? Start a Theater Company." Please don't, at least, don't start one to get a job. "Why open a theater compa…
Our first review is in Southern Theatre, the journal of the Southeastern Theatre Conference (SETC). The reviewer is--full disclosure--a long-time friend of Jim Patterson but also a the…
In the Afterword to Stage Money: The Business of the Professional Theater the impact of the recession on the theater, particularly the not-for-profit theater, is examined. We write that stat…
In the Boston Globe, Nathan Rabin has an essay "The case for total failure" arguing for the importance of movie flops. He writes that flops have destoyed careers and bankrupted studios…
For a interesting and personal story of the impact of the recession on at least one theater and one theater-maker, read an op-ed piece in today's New York Times: "Recession Theater" by Ann H…
Third Way bills itself as a moderate think tank of the progressive movement. They recently published a tax receipt, an itemized list of what the average American household's taxes pay …
Nathan Lane took a vacation from the run of The Addams Family last week, August 24-29. I found out when I looked at the weekly grosses on Playbill.com. The Addams Family grossed …
Theatre Communications Group has just released their annual survey, Theatre Facts 2009. If you care about the regional theater in the US, you should peruse this valuable resource. …
The Alliance for the Arts has published a list of the 100 biggest not-for-profit cultural organizations in New York City, measured by budget. Nine theater producing groups are in the t…
The formula is being trotted out again. Two great stars"Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones"will revive Alfred Uhry's Driving Miss Daisy for a limited Broadway run scheduled to open …
If any students read this blog, they need to know about http://www.studentrush.org/. This new site brings together links to discounted and free tickets for theater, dance, museums, film, etc…
The Broadway season ended May 23. Income was up a bit; attendance was down a bit. Thirty-nine new shows opened in the 2009-10 season compared with 43 in the 2008-9 season. The de…
We've noted previously here about star salaries on Broadway and the impact of stars on Broadway box office. We noted that when David Hyde Pierce went on vacation from the Kander and E…
In a chapter of Stage Money titled "Shall We Dance: The Commercial and Not-for-Profit Relationship," we explore the many ways that the commercial theater--namely, Broadway and touring--and t…
Stage Money is available now from USC Press and should be available from Amazon in a short while. Hooray!The cover includes a quote from Steven Adler, author of On Broadway: Art and Co…
"Budgets" is not a misprint in the title of this post, for a commercial theatrical production has two budgets, the start-up budget that covers everything up to opening night and the operatin…
In our book Stage Money, we note repeatedly that the little off-Broadway show The Fantasticks has been an outlier--a very unusual example--in the financial history of commercial theater in A…
The New York Times has an interesting article today about the problems producers have now in licensing a Broadway theater for a show, because so many are dominated by long-running hits…
