the case for pro-shots
Next to Normal is a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning musical that ran on Broadway from 2009 to 2011. The show uses a contemporary rock/pop score to tell the story of a family as they navigate grief, trauma, and mental illness. I’ve been able to see this show more than once – and the first time I saw it, it wasn’t live. I was a sophomore in undergrad when a friend showed me a bootleg recording of the show. As we watched, I was so enraptured by the score and the sets and the performances and everything else, that I didn’t realize how it had affected me until it was over, and found myself undone and in tears by the show’s powerful ending. I saw Next to Normal again a couple of years later, this time at a regional theatre in Austin, Texas. It was staged in their smaller performance space, making for a more intimate experience. I was once again undone by what the show has to say about grief and mental illness, just as I had when I first saw that bootleg those years before.
Many theatre goers and industry professionals alike like to say that theatre is meant to be experienced live. Some also like to say that because of this, watching a recording of a show doesn’t provide the same experience as seeing that same show live, and so it doesn’t hold the same value. All of this is used as fuel for the argument that professionally shot theatre performances (or “pro-shots”, as they’re referred to colloquially) have no place in the theatre industry. I tell the story of my experience with Next to Normal to make the point that while seeing a recording of a show is obviously a different experience from seeing it live, a viewer can absolutely get similar value from both. Going further, we as an industry should be doing more to make theatre more widely available to the masses. Releasing pro-shots of shows, especially those no longer on Broadway, is one possible solution to the accessibility problem our industry faces.
To make the case that professionally shot theatre is as viable a form of entertainment as seeing live theatre, we can use the overwhelming success of the release of Hamilton on Disney+ as a case study.
The wildly popular, award-winning musical that tells the story of America’s first Treasury Secretary was filmed with an audience over three performances in July of 2016 (arguably the height of the show’s success), along with a few shots recorded without an audience to allow for more advanced setups – two weeks shy of when the bulk of the original principal cast would depart the show.
In February 2020, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s creator who originated the title role, announced that Disney had bought the distribution rights to the filmed production for an unheard of $75 million. It would first be released in movie theaters in October 2021, then make its way to Disney+ some time after that. However, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Disney decided to move up the release and make it a Disney+ exclusive that released this summer on July 3. According to IndieWire, subscriptions to Disney+ increased a staggering 72% the weekend of the show’s release compared to the four weekends previous. With this data, it should be no surprise that 37% of streaming service viewers watched Hamilton in the first month of its release compared to releases on other platforms during that time.
Meanwhile, during the same time the show was filmed, SeatGeek reports that the median listing price for a ticket to Hamilton averaged about $915 in June 2016; the listing price almost doubled to $1,634 the afternoon that Miranda announced he would be departing the show the following month. Even though prices did decline after Miranda’s last show, the median listing still averaged over $700 up to a week after he left. Even today, SeatGeek says it costs about $300 for a ticket to Hamilton according to the national average.
Hamilton obviously isn’t the only show out there, but even a comparably popular show like Hadestown is just as inaccessible to the masses. The Tony-Award winning musical that uses contemporary/indie-folk music to modernize the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice and Hades and Persephone has an average ticket price of over $200 according to SeatGeek. Prices like these are simply untenable to the average theatre-goer.
I lived in New York for four years and I never saw Hamilton live. Between ticket prices being so exorbitant and having left NYC, the pro-shot on Disney+ is likely the only way I will get to see it. I know countless others who are in a similar situation to mine. I even had a pretty decent paying job while I lived so close to Broadway, and I couldn’t even afford the average $120 ticket to see a show, even the ones less popular than Hamilton that are easier to get a ticket to. Truthfully, I was only so lucky to see as many shows as I did because I not only worked in the industry, which gave me certain access to free tickets, I also have friends who work in the industry which gave them access to free tickets, and they were usually nice enough to make me their plus-one. I also learned how general rush and ticket lottery systems work, which vary for each show out there, if a show even decides to have such a policy.
No matter whether they work in the industry or not, a person should not have to work that hard to get to see a show that has the power to change their life or their worldview.
There is a general belief held by plenty of people that theatre is a dying industry. These people sometimes claim that this is because nobody goes to the theatre anymore. While this may be true, I have to ask those people this: why do you think that is? The answer is both simple and complex at the same time. It is becoming harder and harder to see theatre. This is mainly because of high ticket prices, but there are other factors that contribute to high prices which I don’t have time to get into here. The average person rightfully balks at these high prices and ultimately decides that theatre is not an art form for them. We in the industry then wonder why people aren’t seeing theatre anymore.
I’m not trying to claim that I have the perfect solution to solving this problem, or that there even is a solution for it. I’m only trying to make the point that maybe, if the theatre industry got out of its own way and tried to work at addressing the larger issue of availability and accessibility, we might find that there are people out there we may have never considered until we break down the walls we built around ourselves over the decades.