Ken Davenport - Opinions from a Broadway Producer

When creative teams earn their stripes . . .

It's not in the two years prior to the first preview.

It's in the two weeks prior to the opening night.

When choosing your team, especially your director, make sure you have a set that can deliver within the choking restrictions of that 3-4 week period known as "previews". 

Limited rehearsal hours, stagehand schedules that don't mesh with actor schedules, prohibitive overtime costs, miniscule lead time to build new scenery or costumes, and immediate audience feedback, are just a few of the things that a creative team has to juggle with when fine or not-so-fine tuning their show before opening night.

It requires a different set of muscles to run this obstacle course as compared to the marathon of pre-performance development.

But your team needs both sets of muscles if your show is going to run.

Doing our part to turn out the vote.

Ok, ok . . . maybe we were trying to get some press too.

First-Time Voters Offered Free Tix to Off-Broadway's My First Time

The cool thing?  We've already had people redeem their tickets. 

I've never been so thrilled to give seats away.

The economic climate puts a spotlight on the "non-profits."

Ooohhhh, it's getting nippy out there now.

Skirmishes between the non-profit vs. profit producers started last year, as cries of "Not fair! Not fair!" were heard from many profiteers who raged that productions like South Pacific were unfair competition, since they were designed without the need to be solely dependent on ticket sales.

My take has been that they are more than welcome to come to the club . . . but if they're getting a reduced cover charge (with unions, creatives, the government), then so should we . . .  especially with some of the exec. pay that's going around.

We talked about this a long time ago, but Philip Boroff went public with it yesterday in an article on Bloomberg.com that is sure to set off a lot of folks, especially with timely buzz words like "excess" being tossed around.

As it should.

I'll reiterate what I said in my previous post.  Get paid as much as you can, guys and dolls.  I'm not on your board.  But don't complain that you have it tougher than the rest of us and deserve a bigger break.

In fact, one of my readers just told me he got a call from one of these theaters recently asking for a donation because they were facing a "budgetary shortfall."

The truth is?  We all have it tough.  And why the commercial producers get the bad guy rep while the NY non-profits look like Angels in American theater, I'll never understand.

You don't see any commercial producers buying any theaters in the last few years, do you?  Yet how many non-profits have?

Watch out NPs.  It's not the CPs you have to worry about making a fuss.  It's the unions and creatives. 

Because when they read articles like Philip's, they're going to start comparing the size of their paychecks to yours.

And, well . . . it does matter.

A marketing double whammy.

Air New Zealand got all guerrilla on us this week with the human billboard campaign featured below.  They had an 'open call' for 30 heads to be stamped with their marketing message and sent out into the streets of LA.

What's great about the campaign is that they got double their money's worth thanks to their cranial creativity.  How?

• The bald billboards will be effective on their own.
• The idea of the bald billboard generated press that would make a presidential candidate jealous (click here to see the Google search results for "bald heads new zealand" to see how many times this campaign was written up online).

As a former employee of mine wrote when she emailed me about this campaign, "Wouldn't this have been great for this show?"
 

A 'Wicked' good benefit that you can see for free.

I've got a few extra free tickets to see the Wicked benefit below just for my blog readers.  Who wants?

And kudos to the Green Monster for doing a performance of songs and scenes cut from the show.  It's that kind of content that makes fans feel like they're even more on the inside and gives them something to buzz about to their friends ("Did you know that Defying Gravity was originally called . . . ")

The benefit is tonight, so email me wicked fast if you're interested . . . before the sand in the hourglass runs out.

While a great review from the NY Times doesn't mean you're a hit . . .

 . . . it's still nice to get one.  :-)

What do Michael Bennett, Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins and David Merrick have in common?

This blog was inspired by a Producer who sulked into my office yesterday, concerned that he had peed-off a few of the folks that were working for him.

So I asked him the same question as the title of this blog.

What does those four guys have in common?

Answer?

All four of them made some of the most significant contributions to the American Theater.

And all four of them were known as difficult personalities who were hated by a gaggles of people, included many that worked for them.

A woman once smacked Fosse with a dance bag after she felt poorly treated at an audition.  His response?  He stopped the audition and announced that dance bags were no longer allowed in the room.

Bennett was called "amoral" by James Kirkwood, co-author of A Chorus Line, who said, "Michael would do anything--anything--to get a show on.  The cruelty was extensive."

Robbins named names when he testified before the House Un-American Activites Committee in 1953.

And Merrick?  Well, what didn't he do. 

While these are the extremes in behavior, they are also the extremes in success.  While I'm certainly not advocating cruelty or betraying your friends (as I also believe that every Producer should read this textbook), the message is the same.

In any business, it's important that people like your product, not your personality.

Making the most ($) out of what you have.

Midtown Manhattan real estate is some of the most valuable in the country, which is why it drives me up a proscenium to know that our theaters are empty about 75% of the time.

Imagine how much lower rents for Broadway shows could be if we could find ways to generate income during the off hours.

Corporate events, matinee movies, commercial shoots, children's shows, museums . . . there should be departments dedicated to making the most of the space we have, and its found money could be used to subsidize other activities.

Want the coolest example of this I've seen lately?

The Guggenheim recently announced a new installation called Revolving Hotel Room.  The purple part?  The installation is a hotel room . . . inside the museum.

Yep, you (and a guest) get to sleep inside one of the coolest museums in the world for up to $799/night.

The best part?  They are calling it "art".

It's art alright:  the art of coming up with creative uses for your space that generate income and even more importantly, generate more press than you could could dream about . . . while you're sleeping in your comfy bed in the middle of the Guggenheim. 

Favorite Quotes: Volume XI

I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, so I heard this Mark Twainism a lot:

If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.

I've made some modifications to it so we can apply it to our industry:

If you don't like what someone writes about your show, just wait 24 hours . . . because there's a new newspaper every day.

The new TKTS booth: will it attract more tourists?

The big question for me about the new booth is not how long it took to construct or how beautiful the glass steps are. 

The big question for us Producers is . . . will the new design sell more tickets? 

The TSA and TDF were without a doubt on the right track by using a spectacular new design to make the booth a tourist attraction, in hopes that it will sell more tickets.

One of the best examples of this theory I've ever witnessed was when I went to see Altar Boyz in Korea.  I took a bus tour of Seoul that had three stops:  The Ancient Palaces, A Buddhist Temple, and a Ginger Tea Museum.

The Ginger Tea Museum was the last stop.  Except that it wasn't a Ginger Tea Museum. 

It was a Ginger Tea Shop. 

Sure they had a couple of photos on the wall showing how Ginger grows and a paragraph on the history of its healing power, but this was no Metropolitan Museum of Modern Ginger.

By making their shop a museum, they attracted more tourists, and they sure as heck sold more tea (I wonder how much of a kick back the bus company got for including them on the tour).

If I owned a Broadway Theater, I'd build a Broadway Museum in it, charge admission and offer a discount to the show that was currently on the marquee (why is there no Broadway Museum in the first place?). 

If I owned an Off-Broadway complex?  I'd do the same but probably not charge admission, because the Off-Broadway world needs the marketing.

And then I'd find my own bus company . . .

Sometimes the best way to get people to your show, may not be your show.  But you shouldn't care how you get the horse to water, as long as it drinks (unless, of course, it takes the horse 2 years to the get to the water and costs millions over budget).