BROADWAY AND THE WEST END: THE COST GAP AS WIDE AS THE ATLANTIC

Making a new musical costs three to five times more on Broadway than it does on the West End. Here's why.

Bonjour from Paris, where I’m doing some reporting for an upcoming newsletter, and welcome to Jaques, your biweekly guide to the international theater industry. In this edition’s SPOTLIGHT STORY I pick apart the complicated knot of factors that make creating a new Broadway musical so, so much more expensive than making the same musical for the West End. But first: a look at what’s going on around the world.

ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS

• A big-budget stage prequel to the Netflix smash, Stranger Things: The First Shadow started West End performances of a special effects-heavy production directed by Stephen Daldry. Early online reaction is surprisingly sparse, but so far we know it’s a tense evening that comes with some pretty heavy-duty trigger warnings. Critics will weigh in when the show, produced by Sonia Friedman (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) and Netflix, opens Dec. 14.

• Speaking of the West End, Andrew Scott (Vanya), Nicole Scherzinger (Sunset Boulevard), Guys and Dolls and The Motive and the Cue were among the winners of this year’s Evening Standard Awards. Look for the latter, Sam Mendes’ staging of Jack Thorne’s play about John Gielgud and Richard Burton, to show up in New York any minute now.

• Results were released in the investigation of the suicide of a young company member at Tokyo’s well-known Takarazuka Revue. As detailed in local news coverage of the story, the 25-year-old’s decision to take her own life was spurred by “overworking and bullying by senior [Takarazuka] members that ‘compromised her mental and physical health,’ the family’s lawyer said.” Further stories and editorials in Japanese papers questioned whether Takarazuka was taking the allegations seriously enough, and the report led prominent comedian and filmmaker Takeshi Kitano to comment on the traditional showbusiness hierarchies that often lead to abuse. As described in the Japan Times, “Kitano added that the Japanese entertainment industry is in a state of transition, with things gradually improving, although much work to ‘remove these dark sides’ still needs to be done.”

• Kim’s Convenience, the play whose Canadian TV adaptation gained an international audience via Netflix, is heading to London. Adam Blanshay (Sunset Boulevard, Moulin Rouge!) produces the show at the Park Theatre (Jan. 8-Feb. 10, 2024), where playwright Ins Choi will take on the role of family patriarch Appa after originating the part of himbo son Jung in the show’s 2011 Canadian premiere. (On TV Jung was a breakout part for Simu Liu, now a Marvel superhero.) Another cast member of that original Canadian production, Esther Jun, will direct the London staging.

• Meet Michael Kunze, the A-list lyricist and book writer behind German hits Elisabeth, Dance of the Vampires and Rebecca as well as local-language translations of Cats, The Lion King and Wicked. A German news story timed to his 80th birthday includes the Kunze quote (via Google Translate): “I think that what is called a musical today is so diverse that one should actually speak of musical theater vs. popular musical theater. Because what I do is not Broadway musical or West End musical; it’s something of its own."

• Among the highlights of Hong Kong’s recently concluded New Visions Arts Festival was Book of Mountain and Seas, the vocal theater work by Chinese-American composer Huang Ruo and American puppeteer/director Basil Twist, and a staging of Philip Glass and Phelim McDermott’s theatrical meditation Tao of Glass. Also on the docket: The Old Man and His Sea, a new Hemingway-inspired stage show from Cantonese opera luminary Yuen Siu-fai and prominent contemporary theater artist Tang Shu-wing.

• Last week producers of Waterfall, the Maltby and Shire musical inspired by a Thai novel, hosted two invition-only screenings in New York of a live capture from the show’s recent Bangkok run. Produced by Thai firm Scenario Co. Ltd. and directed by its chairman Takonkeit Viravan, the English-language Bangkok run was the follow-up to the show’s 2015 premiere at Pasadena Playhouse and Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre. The two Manhattan screenings, showcasing a cast that included Broadway alums Josh Dela Cruz and Jon Jon Briones, marked an effort to elicit Stateside interest and get the show back on track toward Broadway, where producers first announced hopes to bring the show as far back as 2016.

SPOTLIGHT: TWO NATIONS DIVIDED BY A COMMON THEATER INDUSTRY

Spend a little time at the upstairs bar at Sardi’s and you’re bound to overhear it: Making a Broadway musical is shockingly / outrageously / unconscionably / pick-your-favorite-adjective expensive, and the price tag has only gone up since lockdown. For anyone on the business side of Broadway, it’s a topic of conversation as commonplace as the weather, and it usually comes paired with the wistful observation of how much cheaper it is to make theater in the West End.

Cheaper by, like, a lot: Theater pros on both sides of the Atlantic agree that producing on Broadway can be anywhere from three to fives times as expensive as it is on the West End.

The difference is so stark that it’s beginning to shift strategies on both sides of the pond. “In the last couple of years, London and the U.K. have become quite popular as a nice way of trying out a show less expensively,” notes Kenny Wax, the producer whose transatlantic transfers with partner Kevin McCollum include Six and Peter Pan Goes Wrong.

You can already see it happening with the likes of Burlesque, Sinatra and In Dreams, three Broadway-aimed musicals from largely American and North American teams all premiering in the U.K.

“It’s so obvious now that the Broadway model, the American model, is broken,” said Jamie Forshaw, the former Really Useful Group exec who is now executive producer at the U.S.-based Madison Wells Live. “It’s a given that everybody is thinking about London or Europe to develop work. I don’t think there’s a huge amount of choices.”

What’s responsible for the magnitude of the cost gap? In this issue’s SPOTLIGHT STORY, I break it down with:

• an explainer of big differences on both sides of the Atlantic

• a gloss on why Broadway’s box office potential dwarfs the West End’s

• the factors driving U.S. costs higher (it’s not just unions)

• the elements keeping U.K. risk lower (including a truly startling tax credit)

• a comparative budget-line breakdown of a hypothetical new musical that reveals how a $20 million production on Broadway can feasibly cost £5 million (~$6.3 million) in the West End

Curtain up, here we go.