The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (30 page)

The Lion King
offered irrefutable proof that “corporate theater” need not be a vaguely disreputable subspecies of the art form, like “dinner theater.” The show bore the stamp of a single creator far more plainly than did the overproduced musicals pulled this way and that by a dozen different investors. It was a Julie Taymor show on a giant scale. And yet what was striking about it was how effectively Taymor had brought Disney’s epic pretensions into human scale. “The grasslands” was indicated not by a great, billowing field of green but by two columns of stately figures rising from beneath the stage with square headdresses of green turf. A single tree with a great, spreading projection of lacy, irresolvable patterns stood for the bounty of nature. These allusive gestures, which Taymor described as “ideographic,” summoned larger associations by virtue of being so sketchy and economical. And then of course there were the masks, also contrived as minimalist objects. A big bird was an actor carrying a rack of wings, a flock of little birds an actor wiggling a mobile hung with birdlike shapes. A leopard was an actor piloting a leopard figure like a wheelbarrow. Man and animal merge and mingle in an enchanted vision of unfallen nature—the Circle of Life, perhaps, without the movie’s Mother Earth pieties. Apart from all the Disney-certified hokum about “Hakuna Matata”—which is to say, apart from much of the actual dialogue—it was an impressive production.

The Lion King
won six Tonys, including one for best musical. Six years later, it was still playing to packed houses. On 42nd Street, and in ten other locations around the world, it had earned Disney over a billion dollars. What was perhaps even more important, it blotted out the image created by the schlocky
Beauty and the Beast
and materially altered Disney’s status in the larger culture.

IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR an example of an evil media conglomerate you couldn’t do much better than Clear Channel Communications, an $8 billion company that enjoys a powerful, and in some cases near monopolistic, status in radio station ownership and program distribution; rock concert production; monster truck and motocross competitions; outdoor advertising; the management of sports stars; and, last and perhaps least, the nationwide distribution of theatrical productions. Clear Channel could have been described as one of the most powerful companies in the country that scarcely anyone had heard of until 2002, when suddenly it became the chief symbol of the evils of media concentration. Clear Channel owns 1,250 radio stations, making it by far the largest station owner in the country; and in the run-up to the war in Iraq, it was widely criticized for promoting pro-war rallies, pushing singers deemed patriotic and punishing those, like the Dixie Chicks, with the mettle to criticize the war effort. The company was said to engage in the illegal practice of “play for pay,” forcing performers to ante up for airtime (a charge they have consistently denied). And Clear Channel’s practice of using the exact same programming on many of its stations made it the single greatest cause of the numbing uniformity along the radio dial. Press reports described the company as “radio’s big bully” and “the evil empire.” And when the Federal Communications Commission deregulated media ownership in 2003, radio was conspicuously excluded from the fiesta—because of Clear Channel’s naked abuses of its power, according to subsequent reports.

Clear Channel’s role in the world of theater was practically an afterthought, and may be traced back to a company called Pace Theatrical. Pace had begun in the 1970s by booking tractor pulls and monster truck shows into arenas. In the early eighties, the company began to buy up theaters around the United States and in Great Britain; in many cities, it purchased the subscription series—in effect, the audience—rather than the theater itself. Pace then began to invest in Broadway shows, with a view to securing the right to distribute them in its network of theaters. Ever since the decline of the “road” back in the 1920s, theatergoers outside New York had largely had to content themselves with retread productions, of hardy perennials like
My Fair Lady
and
The Sound of Music.
In the late seventies and early eighties, the British producer Cameron Mackintosh began to mint Broadway-quality road companies for splashy shows like
The Phantom of the Opera, Cats,
and
Miss Saigon.
Mackintosh proved that you could charge more money for a better class of show and still turn a profit. Soon Pace was investing in practically every musical on Broadway and sending the most successful ones on the road in productions of its own. The company now owned the product, the audience, and the venue; it enjoyed the kind of monopoly over the road that Klaw and Erlanger, or Keith and Albee, had exercised ninety years earlier, though at that time the road was a good deal bigger, and more valuable, than it is now.

In 1999, a concert presenter called SFX purchased both Pace and Livent, the production company established by the Canadian entrepreneur Garth Drabinsky, which owned the Ford Center, across the street from the New Amsterdam, as well as several valuable properties, including
Ragtime
and
Fosse.
And then Clear Channel bought SFX, like the giant fish that swallows the big fish that swallowed the little fish. To give an idea of how very small that little fish was, the Theatrical and Family Division, the company’s production wing, accounted for 12 percent of the revenues of Clear Channel Entertainment, which also included concerts, motor sports, and real estate (meaning the actual theaters)—and this entire branch of the company, in turn, accounted for only a quarter of its revenues. Nevertheless, that modest slice of the entertainment pie still made Clear Channel a giant force on Broadway—almost as significant a player in the world of musical theater as it was in, say, monster truck shows and billboards. In 2002, Clear Channel Entertainment moved into the Candler Building, a narrow, elegant limestone skyscraper built in 1913 on the southern side of 42nd Street. Clear Channel had now joined Disney, Viacom, and Toys “R” Us in the global entertainment axis of Times Square.

The offices of Clear Channel do not much resemble the raucous headquarters of Keith and Albee’s United Booking Office on the second floor of the old Palace Theatre, though the function is not so very different. Lauren Reid, whose job is to supply a package of shows to Clear Channel’s eighteen theaters, and its fifty-six subscription series, sits in a gray-carpeted office with a nice view east, toward the Condé Nast Building. Reid says that in most cities her big competition isn’t the ballet or the opera, but sports teams. The average theater she’s working with seats 2,800 people—immense, by Broadway standards—and this means that she has to find a crowd-pleasing product. “When we put together a package,” she says, “we always try to round it out, so you have maybe one megashow, like
Lion King,
one new hot revival, like
42nd Street,
then you have a play slot and a slot for something different, like
Riverdance.
” She says that she would love to aim a little higher, but there are, she says, “a limited number of cities where you have an audience for a straight play.” She would love to put together a circuit of smaller theaters for more modest and ambitious shows, but it hasn’t happened yet. And so the folks out in Minneapolis or Portland get
David Copperfield
and
Seussical,
though also
Hairspray
and
The Producers—
not August Wilson or Suzan-Lori Parks, perhaps, but also not Top 40 radio.

Scott Zeiger, the president of Clear Channel Entertainment, compares the theatrical operation to a television network that has owned and operated stations—the theaters and subscription series—as well as affiliated stations, which in this case means the “strategic partnerships” Clear Channel forms with other presenters. The central imperative is to keep the network supplied with popular product. Clear Channel takes the role of “associate producer,” “strategic partner,” or “strategic limited partner” on various Broadway productions, but the ultimate goal is to field shows that will play well on the road. In the mid-nineties, the company also began producing kiddie shows in collaboration with Nickelodeon and others. Clear Channel may claim credit for such dramatic fare as
Rug-rats—A Live Adventure, Scooby Doo Stagefright,
and
Blue’s Clues Live
. Liz Mc-Donald, who runs children’s programming, says that some of these shows can sell out Radio City Musical Hall many times over. I attended one rehearsal of an upcoming show called
Dora the Explorer,
based on a popular cartoon of the same name. Dora is a feisty little girl with a pet monkey who engages in educational and prosocial activities in the course of solving knotty mysteries. At one point the director, a Broadway veteran accustomed to somewhat more ambitious productions, instructed the villain, Swiper, to “come downstage and take a feather from Red Chicken.” Pausing to savor the sheer inanity of it all, he said, “I
know
: It’s derivative of
Richard III.
I know that, but
the kids
don’t know that.”

In 2000, the principal officials of Clear Channel Entertainment decided that the time had come to commission adult works as well. Unlike Disney, which has an archive of beloved material as well as a production line churning out mythopoetic cartoons on an annual basis, Clear Channel had to start from scratch. The company hired Beth Williams, a pianist who had conducted the pit orchestra in
Les Miz
and then worked as a line producer for shows Pace sent out on the road; she, in turn, hired six young producers to scour Broadway for talent and material. Clear Channel’s culture would appear to be allergic to anything as unpredictable as actual creativity, but theater is too marginal an enterprise to be subjected to the same stultifying discipline as radio. Beth Williams describes herself as “a Mom-and-Pop producer,” which is true in Clear Channel terms, if not in Broadway terms. Virtually everything has to be a musical, but Williams insists that it doesn’t have to be an inane musical—Dora for grown-ups. She is very hopeful about
The Gospel According to Fishman,
a musical she has commissioned, set in 1963, in which a Jewish composer hooks up with a gospel group (a setting that sounds dangerously heart-warming).

It would not be the least bit surprising if Clear Channel’s baby production unit unleashed on Broadway a cataract of gooey fudge, such as a Ben Vereen vanity piece now being developed. But you never know. Williams’s executive producer, Jennifer Costello, spent her twenties running an “ensemble-based collective,” Monsterless Actors, with her husband, who also now works for the company. She and Aaron Beall “flowed in the same circles,” she says. Aaron flowed one way, and she flowed another, to
Rugrats—A Live Adventure.
But her aspirations lie elsewhere. Costello says, “I like theater that makes you feel uncomfortable,” and she enjoys working with theater people who feel likewise. She has been trying to encourage a performance artist she admires to think Clear Channel thoughts. So far, she says, his ideas have been too avant-garde, but he’s moving in the right direction. She’s looking into a project about the drug-addled trumpeter Chet Baker. She would plainly love to produce something she doesn’t find embarrassing. Of course, that may turn out to mean that she will be delighted with the untold story of Ben Vereen.

TOM SCHUMACHER PERMITTED me to see fifteen minutes’ worth of a read-through for a musical of
Tarzan,
still in the very early stages. Tarzan said things like, “Did you know there were others like me, Mother?” Jane said things like, “My interest in Tarzan is purely scientific,” though also, “His eyes were intense and focused; I’ve never seen such eyes.” Here was another romance in uncorrupted nature, like
Pocahontas
and
The Little Mermaid.
There may also have been elements of the mono myth in Tarzan’s awakening. Afterward, Schumacher and I stood by the door, and he asked if I recognized any of the figures in the production. I drew a blank. “That’s Phil Collins,” he said, pointing to a balding figure sitting at a table. “He’s written eight new songs. That’s David Henry Hwang; he’s writing the script. And the actor over there is Roger Rees, from
Nicholas Nickleby.
” The director was Bob Crowley, perhaps the best-known lighting director on Broadway. All this for
Tarzan.

Why do all these gifted people choose to work on a musical cartoon? The answer appears to be Tom Schumacher. Whatever horrors the word “Disney” may conjure up on Broadway, it is not Disney, but Tom Schumacher, who is buying lunch on 44th Street and choosing writers and directors. Schumacher says, “There’s no Disney point of view, because Disney is not an idea. There’s no gleaming granite board which says, ‘We do this. We don’t do that.’” Schumacher says that he always wants to be doing something new. That’s why he has gone to Suzan-Lori Parks to write a script for
Hoopz,
a musical about the Harlem Globetrotters. It’s why he asked Bob Crowley, who has never directed a play, to do
Tarzan.

Rick Elice, a longtime Broadway publicist who now works as a consultant for Disney, argues that Schumacher should be understood as the David Belasco, or the David Merrick, of our day. Disney’s wealth gives Schumacher the power, almost unheard of on Broadway, to make a project happen if he wants to do it; but he is not really free to exercise his own taste as a producer of old was, or even as many producers today are. Schumacher has put some of his own money into the kind of shows that Jennifer Costello might like, but he can no more make those shows for Disney than she can for Clear Channel. “Personally,” Schumacher says, “as a guy who supports the arts, works in the arts, spent my life doing it, for me personally to produce a play is very interesting, but when I think of what I need to do for the company, it makes sense to do things with a great return.” One can imagine Marc Barbanell saying much the same thing to Aaron Beall, though perhaps in slightly different words.

Disney may have a better record of creativity than Clear Channel, but the two companies operate under the same economic constraints. A big musical costs as much as $12 million to produce, and perhaps $400,000 to $500,000 a week to run. If the show is a flop, it’s a catastrophe. But if it’s a hit, it may gross $800,000 a week, which means that it will begin breaking a profit within a year and a half. A straight play would be much cheaper to produce, but the profit potential is far too modest for a company of Disney or Clear Channel’s size. More important, success on Broadway means that the show is ready for the road; and it is the road that makes theater a business worth pursuing for Disney, as for Clear Channel. As Chris Boneau, a theatrical publicist, puts it, “Broadway is now a form of international branding.” A hit musical is a global product.