Broadway and the Economy
New York City is known for their abundance of theatre, culture, and the exciting world of Wall Street. When thinking of the economics of New York, many think of the stock exchange and don't think of the theatre. But in reality Broadway theatre is running New York, while creating jobs, creating money, and its constant production of new shows, it is changing economics around the world. When moving to New York City and trying to find a job, it can be very difficult and quite nerve racking but it is getting increasingly easier because so many jobs are being created. There are so many different aspects of a production that take so many people doing different jobs. From writing the show to producing to opening night, many shows are worked on by close to one thousand people on average before the official opening night. To see the production of “Wicked” at The Gershwin Theatre, it takes 211 people to run each performance; there are eight performances a week! (Contray, “How Many People
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You can have an amazing script and an amazing music score but nothing will come of it unless you have the money. In many situations, a great show never gets to see the light of day for one of many reasons. It could be a lack of funding or no backing behind it, but in all situations, it comes down to the producers. An average Broadway show has around thirteen producers who go out and find investors. They do this by holding events and galas to raise awareness of the show. Shows will smaller budgets like “Book of Mormon” can be funded in months but shows like “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” which had a whopping budget of 79 million dollars, can take years to fund. In most cases, shows with huge budgets won't be able to pay back their investors, but that is the game of investing in a risky business. ("Making a Broadway Musical: Part III."John Kenrick;"How Much Does It Cost to Put on a Broadway Show?" Broadway
Mos Def attempts to shine light on the vast inequality that exists in New York City, despite it being one of the wealthiest cities in the world. New York City, “draped in metal and fiber...
A musical is typically created as a result of several different professionals such as lyricists, choreographers, playwrights, and composers working together, since the different aspects of a single production involve many different elements and areas of expertise (Cohen 246).
As in all genres, the musicals have had its share of failures. Some worthy dramas have been pressed into service and musicalized and sometimes butchered in the process, and audiences have had to watch a fine play diluted into a mediocre musical. But the successes have been many and spectacular and they have left a long lasting effect on the American art and culture.
Motion pictures from Hollywood had taken Broadway’s place as the king of entertainment. The main reason behind this was that because it was culturally relevant and coming out with new flashy techniques such as Todd-AO and Cinerama.
Dumenil, Lynn, ed. "New York City." The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History. N.p.: Oxford UP, 2012. Oxford Reference. Web. 8 Apr. 2013.
The fashion industry is a prime example of the changes to the United States urban economy. Cities can be defined by their density and scale, and New York has one of the highest population, employment, and density levels in the country. New York City is home to the nation’s largest “fashion cluster”, which is due to New York’s historical role as a center for apparel design, production, distribution and marketing. Fashion is strongly aligned with the new creative thrust of economic development and urban policy. The fashion industry is already an economic engine for New York City, due to the fact that creative people and innovations can be strong initiators of urban growth.
First of all, Broadway is the heart of the American theater. The only other theatre district in the world that compares to Broadway is the theater district in West End of London, England. Just how big is Broadway? “Located in and around Times Square, the roughly thirty-five legitimate Broadway theaters form the backbone of one of the most highly concentrated entertainment districts in the world along with London’s West End” (Simonoff). The city of New York has had a professional theatre district since the eighteenth century. As time went on, the district slowly moved uptown to Broadway. In the early 1900s, the Time Square theatre district had a total of seventy theaters. These theaters were “scattered roughly in the area between Thirty-ninth Street, Fifty-ninth Street, Sixth Avenue, and Eighth Avenue” (McNamara). Today, there are approximately thirty-five theaters in the Time Square area. It’s true that today, the number of present day Broadway theaters has been cut in half from the number of theaters there once were. However, this decrease in the number of theaters does not mean that Broadway is extinct.
One of the very first electrified streets in the United States was Broadway. This gave it many opportunities to become a large icon for our nation. As we know now it is one of the most well-known places for great entertainment. However Broadway was not always the iconic entertainment center it is today; it was stolen, had New York City emerge around it, and persevered through many difficult economic and cultural times.
The ingredients that are essential to a hit musical according to, Jack Viertel are the characters, story, and point of view. These are created after starting a play from scratch and creating an outline of where you want the story to go. Finally, the process ends with readings and rewrites to get it just right. Viertel also says that you have a general idea about whether a play will succeed in the first read through if it has these qualities. If it does, then great and if not a decision has to be made on whether it is possible for the play to be successful through additional rewrites to create the essential qualities needed in a hit musical.
People have dreams of what they want to do or accomplish in life, but usually musical theatre is just pushed into the non-realistic void. It isn’t a dream for me. In the past four years, musical theatre has been clarified as my reality. Musical theatre has been the only thing I have seen myself wanting to do. My first love was The Phantom of the Opera, seeing how I watched it almost every day and it was one of the first shows I saw. Of course, I started doing all of those cute shows in middle school and making a huge deal about it to my family and friends, but I have never felt so passionate about something. The minute I get up on that stage I throw away Riley for two and a half hours and it’s the most amazing feeling! Being able to tell a story
New Amsterdam became New York and changed hands from the Dutch to the English. But it is not only Dutch place names and styles of architecture scattered across the five boroughs and all of the Empire State that beat witness to this moment in history. The values of openness, tolerance, liberalism and engagement with the world remain the hallmarks of New York, city and state alike. They have made it one of the economic, intellectual and cultural centers of the
To conclude, New York City is one of the most densely inhabited metropolitan collection of cultural diversity in the world in which structures our temperament. New York City applies an imperative influence upon trade, economics, mass communication, skill, style, and education. Frequently it is known that New York City is a crucial core for global politics and has been depicted as the ethnic headquarters of the globe. New York City has been known as a melting pot of culture and as this prolong throughout towards the current day, the city has become ornate with distinct cultures. You can easily experience many aspects of different cultures by going to the different ethnic neighborhoods that exist throughout the city.
Theatre has heavily evolved over the past 100 years, particularly Musical Theatre- a subgenre of theatre in which the storyline is conveyed relying on songs and lyrics rather than dialogue. From its origination in Athens, musical theatre has spread across the world and is a popular form of entertainment today. This essay will discuss the evolution and change of musical theatre from 1980-2016, primarily focusing on Broadway (New York) and the West End (London). It will consider in depth, the time periods of: The 1980s: “Brit Hits”- the influence of European mega musicals, the 1990s: “The downfall of musicals”- what failed and what redeemed, and the 2000s/2010s: “The Resurgence of musicals”- including the rise of pop and movie musicals. Concluding
The Lion King musical is a well-known musical that has taken the stages of Broadway, West End and the rest of the world by storm (The Lion King, 1997). Regarding the process of the musical, Artistic Director Julie Taymor’s first thoughts for choosing the Lion King as the next big thing on stage, was classed as ‘impossible’ due to the film’s lack of theatrical material (The Lion King, 1997). Therefore, staging this particular work contained a great deal of uncertainty and the need for taking huge risks. Taymor (1997) suggests how ‘the Lion King was the worst idea possible to create a stage show.’ It has become evident that a number of significant barriers had to be overcome to secure the practicality of the production. In view of this controversy, this dissertation will critically analyse the success of the Lion King by exploring two significant aspects that have helped to make the musical a success. Firstly, the essential components that make up this theatrical production will be explored and secondly, the roles of each producer within the Lion King and their combined and individual influences they have had from the production will be evaluated. By analysing these two central themes, this paper will show how and why this musical has developed and achieved its phenomenal success.
For thousands of years, people have been arguing that theatre is a dying art form. Many people think theatre is all just cheesy singing and dancing or just boring old Shakespeare, but there is much more to theatre than those two extremes. Theatre is important to our society because it teaches us more about real life than recorded media. Theatre has been around for thousands of years and began as a religious ceremony that evolved into an art form that teaches about the true essence of life. Theatre can incorporate profound, and provocative, observations of the human condition that can transcend time; lessons found in Greek plays can still be relevant to the modern world. People argue that the very essence of theatre is being snuffed out by modern