Written by Harrison Lorenzen
During the 2019 SxSW music festival, four major production forces on Broadway came together to discuss the past, present, and future of Film and Music Collaborating on Broadway. Leading the panel was Natasha Davidson, an associate professor of theater at the University of Texas at Austin as well as a producer of The Prom. By her side were Nell Benjamin, lyricist of Mean Girls and Legally Blonde, and Larry O’Keefe, composer of Legally Blonde and Heathers. Rounding out the group was Melisa Sechrest, the Live Stage Representative at Paramount Pictures. The discussion ranged from the current state of Broadway and attracting new audiences, to works already on stage and some future projects.
Presently, Broadway catered to approximately 14.4 million viewers in 2018, more than the New York and New Jersey professional sports teams combined. They had $1.8 billion in revenue. However, with this increasing viewership, the ability for shows to profit is declining due to a steep rise in production costs and weekly operating expenses. With this closing profit gap, producers are finding new ways to ensure full houses and maximum income. The average Broadway attendee is 40 years old, two thirds of attendees are female, seventy-five percent are white, and they have an average household income of two hundred thousand dollars. To draw in new viewers, shows are appealing to crowds not formerly interested in Broadway through bands taking up residence on Broadway such as Bruce Springsteen and movie-musicals drawing in already established fans of such movies. For example, Mean Girls, already a mega-blockbuster movie, drew in large crowds on Broadway in part to its past success and the role that Tina Fey played on its creative team. Similarly, Waitress used the star power of Sara Bareilles to draw its audience from her fan base.
Because the production processes of Broadway and Hollywood differ vastly, there are much different sources of profit and artistic licenses between the two. In writing plays and musicals, the artists maintain their full artistic license of the work, so they make royalties on every production of the work for the duration of its life, while in Hollywood, the production company owns all work that is written or produced in regards to the movie, taking away much of the artists liberties in seeing their content through its final production. Broadway artists also receive a portion of profits from non-performance-based revenue such as albums and merchandise. Because of this ongoing royalty system, producers and artists want to create shows that will last both on Broadway and in amateur, regional, or foreign theaters as well.
Recently, Broadway has seen a large increase of film being reproduced for stage. From Heathers to Waitress to Mean Girls, movies in a variety of genres are making hit musicals. One of the recent hit off-Broadway musicals was Heathers, the dark indie film, with music and lyrics by co-writers Larry O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy. When choosing to write this musical, the duo could not find a producer willing to take on the show, so they paid the film company directly and produced it on their own. While it never made it to Broadway, primarily due to its subject matter, it was very successful in its run off-Broadway and is now popular among regional theaters. Moving on from his success with Heathers, O’Keefe and his wife Nell Benjamin were asked by MGM pictures to write the music for Legally Blonde, also making its Hollywood to Broadway transition. The writing duo remarked on the trouble they had when working on the opening number, “Oh Mi God”. The stereotypical sorority girl is generally looked down upon by the public, and they kept writing their opening track with some of this degrading attitude towards the characters. Once they realized that the mistake they were making was not representing the characters as they actually are, but rather as the outside might see them, they had more luck with the song. They realized that they would not want to degrade the characters that the audience was about to spend two hours with. They realized they had to make the audience cheer on Elle Woods throughout the show and had to make her, along with the rest of the sorority girls, likable from the start. Their opening number was what made them attractive to the MGM producers, since most other writers were casting a poor light on the sorority girls.
Similarly to O’Keefe and Benjamin’s selection for Legally Blonde, the Waitress producers picked Sara Bareilles because they liked her song “She Used To Be Mine”. Sara was not immediately sold on writing a musical, but once the producers convinced her of how much they liked that track, she was quickly pulled into the show. Waitress became the first Broadway show with a fully-female creative team. Throughout the writing and rehearsal process, songs were added and removed very frequently, but some stuck instantly, such as “She Used To Be Mine”. By the time the show opened, Sara Bareilles was the main driver for ticket sales, much more-so than the movie or the storyline. Her fan base fueled the popularity of the show for much of its run, along with some of the other pop stars, such as Jason Mraz, that were brought on with subsequent castings to play lead roles.
Tina Fey brought a similar star power to Mean Girls as Sara did to Waitress; however, the movie itself provided the main audience draw. As the writer of both the movie and musical forms of Mean Girls, Tina Fey had much of the artistic control over the production, and as opposed to many Hollywood writers who try to bring their work to Broadway, she was very eager to make changes and adapt it for stage. Fey thought that the show would not do well on stage if it was simply a recreation of the movie because people could rent the movie instead of seeing it on stage, so she opted to change scenes and jokes to better adapt the show to the current day and make it more stage friendly. One scene that Fey dropped from the movie was the three-way calling scene since teenagers do not call each other nowadays. Working together with lyricist Nell Benjamin, Fey was adding and cutting jokes and songs all throughout previews and up until opening night. She changed the closing number to its current song “Stars” on opening night.
While bringing these movies to Broadway, the producers and artists have started to see trends in what is successful and what is not during these transitions. Surprisingly, the movies that fare the best in theater are not always blockbuster hits in theaters. While there have been attempts to recreate larger hit movies like Spiderman, Rocky, and The Godfather, movies that bring in less than one hundred million in profits are five times more likely to recoup their production costs on Broadway. In addition, morals and messages to the audience can land better on stage than on screen, so Broadway shows can emphasize ideas from movies without boring audiences through humor and music. In order for the shows to fully capture the audience, they must contain moral or ethical dilemmas, captivating kids and adults alike until solutions are uncovered. Lastly, one of the best lessons learned from Legally Blonde is that people should never stop working on their best self, even if that means realizing that what someone thinks is their best asset may be what is working against them.
If you have never seen a Broadway musical live, I strongly encourage you to do so. Lose yourself in the magic that is created onstage, whether it is from a crashing chandelier, a dancing genie, or a singing cat. While listening to soundtracks is no substitute for seeing the full show, tune into specialty show Showstoppers at KTRU, either on air or online at ktru.org for Broadways greatest hits and hidden gems.