striking up a soap box

For my entire adult life I have worked in a theater in one capacity or another. As an artist, administrator, scholar, and observer of live performance I am naturally interested about the current stagehands strike that is affecting Broadway. If you don't know much about it please go to www.playbill.com or www.nytimes.com (the theater section of course) to catch up.

Through one of my favorite websites, gothamist, I found this blog : http://onenycstagehand.blogspot.com/. I'll give you a minute to peruse it.

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Your back? Okay. Now, today's opinion brought to you by the letter "S". "S" stands for "Suck it money grubbers!"

I have personally known several members of IATSE Local 1 (the stagehands in NYC) and frequently see other members of the local in action, in the theater district, loading in or out shows and doing various tasks. I have never known a stagehand to be interested in the art of "theatre." Who is this stagehand blogger? He's not of the norm I've associated with.

I put stagehands into two categories: Broadway and everyone else. If you ever go to Madison Square Garden and take a tour you often see those stagehands working their butts off. It takes a ton of pros to switch between basketball games, hockey games, and concerts in less than a 24 hour period. I've even seen the guys at the Metropolitan Opera work and those guys are animals. That's a backstage that never sleeps and they are constantly putting in a new opera every night. But it kills me to walk around the theater district and see 1 guy fixing an electrical grid while 3 others are smoking and looking on supervising the guy. That's a constant senario.

I don't support the theater owners and producers either. They are greedy. Plain and simple. I know that Broadway is a commercial business venture rather than an art and that people who financially invest money into a business venture aim for a return on that investment. But I don't agree with the discrepancy between what it financially takes to make theatre and what the owners and producers are charging their audiences for admission. Theatre is expensive. Commercial theatre is uber-expensive. There's not much state funding for art of any size, therefore there is a need for private, corporate, and foundation money to help pay for the art. Famously, a Broadway show is paid for by little old ladies and infamously by corporations like Universal Pictures, Disney, Clear Channel, Fox, and Oprah (she's got so much cha-ching that I consider her a one-woman corporation). I know that having movie, t.v. and concert money invested in a production is not the norm (go to a show, pick up a program and read the bios of the 30 producers it takes to fund a show these days). But the people no one is talking about, the artists and all of the creative personnel, rarely make any sort of living, and they are truly the hardest working people on the Great White Way… in my opinion at least.

Least we not forget the audiences who support these shows. It breaks my heart to see any one miss out on experiencing live theatre.

I've been trying to do some research on this topic and it's been interesting and predictable. The League of American Theaters and Producers (the organization negotiating on behalf of the Broadway theater owners) has press releases on their website but they are of course one sided and attack the union. It's been near impossible to find official information from the stagehands union, which makes them less endearing to me. Sorry guys. Boo-hoo on both sides.

I don’t want to see anyone lose a job out of all of this either. I understand negotiations are hard, but both sides need to communicate in good faith for everyone sake.

Okay, now I'm done.