Things I Learned While Making ...

a two-part series about the hottest show on Broadway, which is also the coolest show on Broadway.

We just published the second episode in a two-part Freakonomics Radio series about Stereophonic, a new play by David Adjmi, with music by Will Butler, formerly of Arcade Fire. (It’s not a musical; it’s a play about, and with, music.)

I hadn’t planned to make a series on Stereophonic. We had been working for a while on a series about the overall economics of the theater industry. This was prompted by a listener who suggested we do for theater what we had done for the airline industry.

So we did some foundational interviews, and I started seeing a lot of shows, primarily in New York and London. Some of them I liked fine; some I disliked; only one of them did I love, and that was Stereophonic. My reaction turned out to be wholly unoriginal: Stereophonic just won five Tony Awards.

Our series features interviews with Adjmi as well as the performers Sarah Pidgeon and Tom Pecinka, and the producers John Johnson and Sonia Friedman. I hope you will listen to both episodes — “How to Make the Coolest Show on Broadway” and “You Can Make a Killing, but Not a Living.”

Here are a few of the many interesting things I learned while making these episodes:

+ Producing a show in New York is about five times more expensive than producing the same show in London. Friedman says that everything in New York is more costly, including the rent on theaters, but that the top driver of higher costs is ... union labor: There are at least 13 unions with whom a theatrical producer will intersect.

+ Historically, the only people who shared in the profits from a successful Broadway show were the creators, producers, investors, theater owners — and occasionally a performer, if their name was a box office driver. But that seems to be changing. The cast members of Stereophonic — all of whom have been with the show since it opened Off Broadway, at Playwrights Horizons — collectively negotiated for a share of royalties as the show was transferring to Broadway. This may remind you of a much better-known show that also originated Off Broadway: Hamilton. Its cast members sent a letter to the lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, explaining why they deserved a share of royalties. Broadway economics being what they are, the Stereophonic performers should not expect this to be life-changing money. Here’s what Tom Pecinka had to say:

Even if you’re in a hit on Broadway — it’s hard. And so, unfortunately, if you just want to be a theater artist, you have to live a certain lifestyle. I don’t want to live that lifestyle. I want to live a different lifestyle. After this show, I want to get, like, on an HBO series, where I’m on 10 episodes or 13 episodes and I’m making tens of thousands of dollars per episode, so I can afford the life that I’ve decided — and I’m not ashamed of wanting.

+ Sonia Friedman, who has produced hundreds of shows all over the world, said she doesn’t go to bed in London until her shows in New York have at least raised the curtain. “And then,” she said, “I’ll usually wake up in the middle of the night just to check that they’ve gone okay.”

+ David Adjmi grew up in New York; one of the earlier shows he saw on Broadway was Sweeney Todd. He was eight years old. If you have seen Sweeney, you are probably thinking that eight is a terribly inappropriate age at which to see it ... or: it is a terribly appropriate age for someone like Adjmi, who was trying to figure out why people can be so bizarre, and where cruelty comes from. There is no obvious or visible connection between Sweeney Todd and Stereophonic, but as you speak with Adjmi, and read his memoir, and see Stereophonic another time or three, you may indeed find some connections, of the sort that only very good writing can create.

+ “Cost disease” is an economic concept that we usually think about in sectors like healthcare and education. The basic idea: In a typical industry, costs fall over time as firms become more productive by adding new technologies. But in industries that can’t exploit technology in the same way — in industries heavily reliant on actual, well-paid humans, for instance — their costs don’t fall. They go up and up and up. Coming into this series, I knew that the theater industry suffers from this cost disease; what I didn’t know is that the seminal academic paper on the topic focused on the theater and creative work.  The paper, written by the economists William Baumol and William Bowen, is called “On the Performing Arts: The Anatomy of Their Economic Problems.” It was published in The American Economic Review in 1965 and, despite its dry title, makes for a decent read if you are interested in this kind of thing. If would probably be even better if David Adjmi were willing to punch it up a bit.

Juliana Canfield, as Holly, in Stereophonic. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.