NEW YORK, NEW YORK - OCTOBER 13: People walks past Aladdin at the New Amsterdam Theatre on October ... [+]
New York City’s Broadway is among the hardest hit by the pandemic. Theaters have been closed for months and theatre workers have been out of work for almost a year. Meanwhile, 15m people saw a Broadway show in the 2018-19 season, so that’s a lot of ticket sales that were lost in 2020, and as we enter 2021.
One new documentary out as part of the virtual 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival (NYJFF) is On Broadway, directed by Oren Jacoby, which premieres online on January 22.
This star-studded documentary pays tribute to one of the most vibrant legacies of New York City; Broadway, its history, magic and all its stars. Including interviews with Alec Baldwin, Hugh Jackman, Helen Mirren and Christine Baranski, the film sheds a light on the hisotry of how Broadway came to be, the real estate m oguls who made it happen, the talents who elevated the district and its challenges, over the decades (notably, the gentrification of Times Square).
“This is what Broadway is about,” Albert Poland, a general manager and producer of many Broadway shows, says in the film. “Great theater is a mirror to the human condition. To us, as people. despite our differences. that we're really all the same and that's what theater shows us.”
Jacoby talks about Midtown, bankruptcy and some of the greatest luminaries interviewed in the film.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 08: The St. James Theater closed during the coronavirus pandemic on April ... [+]
What side of Broadway did you want to show, and what part is most overlooked?
Oren Jacoby: I wanted to tell the relatively unknown story of how close New York once came to losing its legendary theater district. In the early 1970s, Broadway had grown so unpopular, and Times Square was considered so dangerous, that the commercial theater business almost disappeared in New York City. In fact, the richest of the Broadway theater owners were effectively bankrupt. Things got so bad, they couldn’t make payroll, and the city proposed tearing down all their theaters and replacing them with parking lots. I decided to tell the story of Broadway reinventing itself. Broadway learned to reach out to a more diverse group of artists and to turn, more and more, to the non-profit theaters that had grown up in New York and around the country, as a source for new material and talent.
What happened?
A new generation with different kinds of artists started revitalizing Broadway, so it could stay abreast of the times and keep up with its audience. It was about developing entertainment that reflects what America really looks like in terms of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and most recently, gender identity. But the lifeblood of Broadway’s resurgence has been the timely appearance, every ten years or so, of a visionary artist who shakes up the very idea of what the theater experience can be, from Michael Bennett to August Wilson, and Trevor Nunn and Julie Taymor to Lin Manuel Miranda.
What is the future of Broadway considering the pandemic?
No one knows the answer with any certainty. But we should take encouragement from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s announcement last week that if vaccinations can proceed smoothly through July, he hopes we can start going back to theaters in the fall. Theater lovers can also take encouragement from what happened when the Plague forced London theaters to close for two extended periods between 1603 and 1606: Shakespeare, though unable to produce a single play during this gap, used the time productively, writing many of his greatest tragedies: Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, and the comedy All’s Well That Ends Well. Maybe some great new American plays are in the works right now.
Who, in your eyes, really changed Broadway for the better?
Along with Bennett, Wilson, Nunn, Taymor and Miranda, the creators of groundbreaking shows like Evita, The Lion King and Rent helped save Broadway by introducing rock ‘n roll and pop to invigorate musicals, and draw younger, and more international, audiences. For me, the most positive developments on Broadway are owed to playwrights, and to the courageous and dedicated producers like Joseph Papp or Manhattan Theater Club’s longtime artistic director, Lynne Meadow, who devoted long careers to finding new voices to shake up American theater. But at the center, the artists we always look to, to excite and recharge Broadway, are the extraordinary actors who are willing to forego the much larger salaries offered by movies and TV and return to the stage, year after year.
What does Broadway mean to you?
Broadway cannot survive and there can be no living theater without great playwrights. In our time, these have often been writers who try to strip away complacency and confront us with some reality we have never truly faced. Among the best are August Wilson, Athol Fugard, Sam Shepard, Edward Albee, and more recently, Tony Kushner, Jez Butterworth and Suzan-Lori Parks.
With offices remaining empty, will Midtown ever be what it was?
Like the heyday of Studio 54, I wouldn’t say Midtown was considered that cool even in the days of Studio 54. In those years, the epicenter of real NY coolness was always downtown, below 14th Street. But in the years since, as Broadway pulled itself back from the brink, culminating in the 2019 season when we filmed the documentary, Times Square became a vital economic and cultural hub for America’s greatest city. It created thousands of jobs and drew millions of people, proving that the arts are essential to a thriving city and a vital society. They reflect who we really are. Nothing is cooler than that.
Watch the film, On Broadway, here, beginning January 22, 2021.
