How Is Live Theater Still Alive?

It has become fiendishly expensive to produce, and has more competition than ever. And yet the believers still believe. Why? And does the world really want a new musical about … Abraham Lincoln?!

What is theater? It’s the same as the oldest human endeavor of all, which is gossip. People are talking to each other and you’re listening to them. You’re making assessments about their moral character, about their intentions. This guy’s not trustworthy. She’s ambitious and is concealing it. There’s nothing more basic to what human beings do than observing people interacting and talking about it among themselves — gossiping. So theater is the most fundamental art of all.

That's something Rocco Landesman told me. Landesman is a Broadway producer and the former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. He's produced several hits — Big River, a Guys and Dolls revival, Angels in America, The Producers — and he wound up running Jujamcyn Theaters, the third-largest Broadway landlord. So, when a Freakonomics Radio listener wrote in to say they’d always wondered about the economics of live theater, and that we should make a series about it, Rocco was one of the first people I thought of. Not just because he knows things (there are plenty of people in the industry who know things) but because he's willing to say them, which many people aren’t. For instance, I asked him about a couple of recent Broadway disasters — $25 million musicals that bombed.

It’s a terrible investment, the Broadway theater. Why do people invest? They can’t help themselves. They fall in love with the shows.

So on this week's episode of Freakonomics Radio, and the next two, I talked to Rocco Landesman and dozens of other people — actors, writers, composers, choreographers, and, as usual, an economist or two — to ask a very basic question: In a time with so much entertainment, including an infinite stream of digital and virtual entertainments, how can it be that this expensive, hand-made, live-every-night art form even exists? In the series, we take a hard look at theatrical finances, we try to figure out what drives the creators, and we follow a brand new musical, from the very beginning to what will someday be the end. Please take your seats; our show is about to begin.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “How Is Live Theater Still Alive?”, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.