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PAR TIS AN REV lEW
scalpers. Times Square is no place for anyone who is not well-heeled.
Rather than compete with television and the movies for the spectator
of modest means, Broadway has apparently chosen to survive the
financial revolutions of the last fifteen years by becoming a luxury
institution.
To judge by the statistics (as box office prices continue to climb,
Broadway attendance this year is up almost a million), a substantial
luxury audience exists which is growing
all
the time. But this audience
attends the theater out of somewhat different needs than in the past.
Wealth and leisure have always been accompanied by intensive cul–
tural interests; today, as prosperity spreads from the few to the
many, these genuine interests are subordinated to motives of social
aspiration. The recent intensification of the hit-flop mystique indi–
cates that a degree of anxiety and duress now accompanies theater–
going.
If
plays were once enjoyed primarily for their intrinsic value
as escape or entertainment, they are more important today for their
external resonances, either providing the spectator with essential cock–
tail party chit-chat and a sense of self-improvement, or bestowing on
him
some of the prestige afforded, say, by a subscription to
Horizon.
When one considers the meager enjoyment to be obtained from most
Broadway hits (movies are cheaper, more convenient, more con–
sistently entertaining), only something as powerful as social pressure
can explain the spectator's eagerness to endure backache, boredom,
and baby-sitters for the uncertain delights of a few hours in Times
Square. In such an atmosphere, the reviewer's admonitory phrase,
"Not To Be Missed!" takes on more sinister connotations. To miss
the current hit is to risk contracting a serious case of social B.O.
Under these conditions, Broadway has found it necessary to lure
its patrons mainly from the various strongholds of conspicuous con–
sumption-and this naturally means a sustained assault on Subur–
bia, where so much of the city's wealth and power is being deployed.*
*
Aware that early suburban apathy towards the theater stemmed partly
from the various discomforts it imposed, canny producers have been adjusting
certain Broadway traditions to make theater attendance more convenient. Matinee
curtain times have been moved up
to
2 P.M.; a 7: 30 evening curtain will soon
be introduced; theater ticket booths have been placed in Grand Central Terminal
and Pennsylvania Station; show trains speed the spectator non-stop from his
home to the theater and back; and suburban shopping centers even offer theater
tickets as a premium for green stamps. Broadway apparently is willing to do any–
thing-short of setting up branches in the suburbs like the large department
stores-to tap that large audience which hovers on the borders of the city.
