The New York Times-20080127-Shows Survive By Sharing A Stage
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Shows Survive By Sharing A Stage
Full Text (1067 words)IF you are thinking of taking in a show at New World Stages, the Off Broadway theater complex on West 50th Street, you had better take a close look at your ticket before you go inside. Going to see Altar Boyz? O.K. That has a typical evening curtain time of 8 p.m. But if you're attending My First Time, the hour is 7 p.m. The family-oriented musical Pinkalicious runs sometimes at noon, sometimes at 2 p.m. As for Naked Boys Singing -- well, that could be either 6 p.m. or 10:30 p.m.
The reason New World Stages seems to have more arrival times than Grand Central Terminal is that it has become the epicenter of Off Broadway's latest survival strategy. It's called piggybacking, and it involves two shows saving production costs by sharing a stage, often lighting and sound equipment and even a crew member of two. Not everyone can claim all the prime slots of course, so showtimes are divided up and staggered.
At least three pairs of Off Broadway shows are perched on each other's shoulders. At the 47th Street Theater, Forbidden Broadway: Rude Awakening and Dai are roomies. Altar Boyz and Naked Boys Singing split Stage 4 at New World Stages, while My First Time and Pinkalicious both call Stage 5 home. When the Australian cabaret artist Tim Minchin moves in on March 3, Stage 5 will become the scene of a piggybacking triple-header.
Carl White, a producer of Naked Boys Singing and a general manager whose company, Martian Entertainment, runs Altar Boyz, claims to have devised the model, though he doesn't take credit for the name. Kevin McCollum called it that, he said, referring to the Broadway producer best known for Rent and The Drowsy Chaperone. We were in a meeting and Kevin turned to me and said, 'Tell me about the Martian Piggybacking Model.' And it stuck.
Necessity forced Mr. White to rethink the playing schedule of the long-running comedy Naked Boys Singing. It was post-9/11, and the show was at the Actors' Playhouse still, he said. We were in our fourth year. The dew was off the lily, as it were. The show was a mainstay. It was breaking even, but it wasn't doing what it had done. We wanted to do everything to keep it going.
When the producers of My Big Gay Italian Wedding, a show for which Mr. White was general manager, approached him in search of a theater, the producer spied salvation. They wanted to be downtown, to be in Greenwich Village in a gay community. Me and my business partner Tom Smedes came up with the idea of doing the shows in rep, which is not a new concept, but it's not really applied to commercial theater.
The owner of the Actors' Playhouse agreed to the arrangement. The necessary union agreements were forged, with salaries and benefits prorated. Naked Boys took six time slots and Wedding got two. It worked very well, Mr. White said.
When Wedding closed, Naked Boys hit hard times once more, and the landlord exercised the stop clause, the contractual point at which a theater owner can eject a production for low attendance. The show was homeless. Instead of giving up, Mr. White installed the production in the Julia Miles Theater on West 55th Street, the home of the Women's Project company, eventually piggybacking on one of that company's plays.
Naked Boys then began hopscotching around Midtown. It joined forces with a show called Who Is Floyd Stern? at the 47th Street Theater, then bounced back to the Women's Project. Finally Naked Boys moved to New World Stages, bunking with Musical of Musicals and, when that attraction folded, Altar Boyz.
I don't think we would have gotten into its ninth year in New York City if we had not been able to do this, Mr. White said.
A show must travel light to fit the piggybacking mold. Cumbersome sets and lengthy running times are verboten. The biggest challenge we have with this model is making sure the show works perfectly in the space and on the set of its partner production, said Ken Davenport, a producer of Altar Boyz and My First Time. Sometimes the stage must change hands in as little as a half-hour. And neither show can be a stage hog if the collaboration is to work.
You're trying to get 13 or 14 shows a week into a schedule that really has 8 optimal spaces in a way, said John Freedson, a producer of Forbidden Broadway, which plays eight times a week, while Dai plays seven. Both sides have to do some compromising.
Mr. White said he frequently fields inquiries from other producers about the setup. We are competing with every entertainment media out there, he said of commercial Off Broadway. We have to find ways to challenge our own model.
He admitted that the model is less about making a profit every week than about increasing a show's profit margin, because essential operating costs have been slashed.
Mr. Davenport explained, You can shared lighting packages, sound packages, staffing. He said he believes that piggybacking will be an increasingly popular producing model in the future and even took the theory a step further. To his thinking, the old Off Broadway world of eight shows a week is dead and buried.
Ninety percent of all Off Broadway shows close within the first six months, Mr. Davenport said. My shows have all run six months plus. I'm a big proponent that the eight-shows-a-week model for Off Broadway does not work. There is not enough demand for that kind of supply. That's just an arbitrary number that someone assigned a long time ago.
Mr. Davenport said piggybacking would dictate the form of shows to come. I think shows will be designing and developing themselves in order to fit in this model, he said.
To Mr. Davenport this is not necessarily a bad thing. No one is getting rich Off Broadway these days, he said. We could take some scaling back of the physical production anyway. This is a very practical reason.
[Illustration]PHOTOS: Naked Boys Singing, top, and Altar Boyz, center, share Stage 4 at New World Stages, while My First Time is at Stage 5, also alternating with another show. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHESTER HIGGINS JR./THE NEW YORK TIMES; NICHOLAS ROBERTS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; RAHAV SEGEV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)