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If we had to pinpoint the exact moment Broadway’s home in Times Square became a neon nightmare, we’d put our finger on the opening of a certain feline-focused extravaganza. According to Linda Winer, Chicago Tribune theater critic from 1969 to 1980 who now covers Broadway at Newsday, the frenzy surrounding Cats proves that mass-marketed theatrical products can overrun a metropolis’ identity.
“Before Cats came in [to New York in 1982], for literally months, the side of the buses said Cats, there were Cats tchotchkes everywhere,” Winer says. “Unless you were watching carefully, the casual observer would think that Cats had already opened and was a hit. They were able, through very shrewd marketing, to create the critic-proof show and to brand these things as hits,” she says of the Times Square megamusicals.
The New York Times’ op-ed columnist and former chief drama critic Frank Rich sees such products as an inevitability in the marketplace, but one that’s grown considerably in recent decades in New York. “Those big spectacles are for tourists, but maybe they always were,” he says. “I mean, was The Pajama Game [in 1954] something that sophisticated New Yorkers were running to see after the first six months?”
Rich also notes that the boom in New York tourist theater is a relatively recent phenomenon. “In the 1950s, tourism was something for wealthier people, but now it’s a mass calling,” he says. “I would say the ambition [of producers now] is no different from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ambition as producers [in the 1950s and ’60s]. It’s just the scale is different now.
“The big problem is they stay for so long and tie up theaters,” Rich adds. That’s certainly an issue in Chicago, too: There’s no end of Wicked in sight, and Jersey Boys is committed to the LaSalle Bank Theatre for 40 weeks, leaving only the Cadillac Palace and the too-large-for-plays Auditorium Theatre for Broadway in Chicago tours.
But while real estate is a concern, it’s the unflagging longevity on the marquee that matters most. Winer maintains that when show and city become synonymous, one can’t survive without the other. “That’s why A Chorus Line is back, why Les Miz is back,” she says of the recent Broadway revivals of shows that had barely been closed before they were propped back up again. “[Producers] have to feed the monster that they created that says, ‘What is New York? Well, New York is the Statue of Liberty, New York is A Chorus Line, New York is Phantom of the Opera.’”
Substitute Chicago into that equation, and you might get something like, “Chicago is Buckingham Fountain, Chicago is the Green Mill, Chicago is Wicked.”
The difference, of course, is that you can’t find the fountain or the Mill in any other city in the world.
