Sizing Up the New York Not-For-Profits

The Alliance for the Arts has published a list of the 100 biggest not-for-profit cultural organizations in New York City, measured by budget.  Nine theater producing groups are in the top 100, suggesting the relative importance of theater in the cultural life of NYC.  Some theater-related organizations also made the cut.  In the top 100 the producing theaters are:

Ranking	NFP Theater Organization	Budget
17	Roundabout Theatre Company	$50 million
24	Lincoln Center Theater	$34 million
30	Manhattan Theatre Club	$22 million
33	Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival	$20 million
54	Playwrights Horizon	$9 million
65	Second Stage Theatre	$7 million
74	Atlantic Theater Company	$5.9 million
81	Theatre for a New Audience	$5 million
90	New York Theatre Workshop	$4.7 million

In addition, one of the top 100 produces children's theater that plays in NYC and tours across the country, Theatreworks USA with a budget of $13 million at number 40. Some additional organizations present some theater but are probably best considered to be road houses,  presenters of touring productions, music, and dance.  This description as road houses is not to denigrate these organizations.  Some of what they present is very important to the theater life of New York City and the US.  These include the Brooklyn Academy of Music (21st with $36.8 million), the New York City Center (34th with $18.7 million), the New Victory Theater (45th with $11.8 million), and perhaps the Apollo Theater (52nd with $10 million).

Also on the list, at number 46, is the Theater Development Fund (TDF) with a budget of $11.5 million.  TDF, which was founded in 1967 to promote the performing arts, is a theater oriented service and advocacy organization dedicated to the advancement of for-profit and not-for-profit dramatic, music, and dance productions.  TDF's best-known initiative is the TKTS ticket booths which offer day-of-performance discounted tickets to performances in New York.

The biggest NYC cultural organization is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with a budget in excess of $309 million. And the biggest number of top 100 cultural NFPs are museums, about 35 of 100.  ("About" depends on how one defines a museum.) The next biggest chunk are organizations presenting classical music, dance, and opera; they make up another 19. These totals are offered to give the rankings of theater producing groups some perspective.

Attention Students!

If any students read this blog, they need to know about http://www.studentrush.org/. This new site brings together links to discounted and free tickets for theater, dance, museums, film, etc.  Good source for leads on lower cost admission to cultural events.

Take Two International Stars and a Pound of Press Releases

The formula is being trotted out again.  Two great stars—Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones—will revive Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy for a limited Broadway run scheduled to open at the Golden October 25.   While the “star-studded package” has been applied to straight plays for decades, it has hardly ever been employed more consistently than in the past five years.  As noted in the post before this one, last season four productions used the tried-and-true recipe to earn back their investments in short runs.

Redgrave and Jones are more than international names.  They are theatre artists who have repeatedly won kudos for stage work.  Redgrave was last on Broadway in 2007's one-woman play, A Year of Magical Thinking.  Jones played Big Daddy in the African-American cast revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2008. Both shows recouped their investment in New York and went on to play London. Casting these actors for any play is not a cynical choice driven only by potential for profit.

While the star formula--and its application--may be good for the bottom line, this blueprint sometimes cheats patrons, many from across America.  We wanted to see the prize-winning Reds but its 12-week run without extensions meant that we could not make it to Broadway because of other commitments.  The producers won but some potential audience members lost.

Elsewhere in this blog we've written about the financial impact of stars, demonstrated especially when a star gets sick or takes a vacation.   And if a show whose box office relies primarily on the appearance of stars is to continue to run when the stars' contracts expire, then star replacements are needed.  See, for example, the casting of Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch as replacements for Catherine Zeta Jones and Angela Lansbury in the current revival of A Little Night Music.

Driving Miss Daisy--a three-character play with little staging needs--has never played Broadway before.  It opened in April 1987 at the not-for-profit Playwrights Horizon and transferred to an off-Broadway run at the John Houseman Theater. It became a movie in 1989 that won four Oscars.  On stage, the two lead roles were played by Dana Ivey and Morgan Freeman; in the movie, Jessica Tandy took the part of Miss Daisy.  The play won the Pulitzer Prize, for whatever that honor is worth.  The history of the Pulitzer Prize in Drama is riddled with dubious choices.  Although no one was clambering for a revival of Driving Miss Daisy, this production may attract an audience.  The wonder of Broadway is, one never knows. 

Is there room for shows on Broadway without stars?  Last season's Next Fall (photo on right) earned strong critical reviews when it opened off Broadway.  But the producers ignored the star formula and opened in an appropriately small theatre with the original cast.  No stars, no run, and a 100% loss of investment. Similarly, the revival of the musical Ragtime transferred from the Signature Theatre in Washington, DC, got glowing reviews but it had no stars and closed with a loss of its investment.  Folks who saw these two shows report they lived up to their strong reviews--at least, we report so.

2009-2010 Season Recap and Finishing with 2008-2009

The Broadway season ended May 23.  Income was up a bit; attendance was down a bit. Thirty-nine new shows opened in the 2009-10 season compared with 43 in the 2008-9 season.  The decline in new productions was mostly caused by a reduction in productions from the three not-for-profit Broadway theaters, the so-called "super-NFPs," who opened 10 shows last season, compared to 15 the prior season.

There were 29 commercial openings on Broadway last season.  Variety declared four shows to be "hits," meaning the investors received their investment back.  The shows were Hamlet, Race, A Steady Rain, and A View from the Bridge.  Each of these shows featured at least one performer well-known from television or film.  Half were new scripts and half were revivals.  None were musicals.

Another 14 shows were declared "too soon to tell," meaning they had not paid back their investors by the end of the season but were still running so could recoup in the next season.  The number of "too soon to tell" shows tends to be high because the Tony Awards coming in mid-June motivate some producers to open shows late in the season. Only with the coming months will we know which of the 14 become hits.  "Misses," shows that closed without paying back their investors, totaled eleven. These are productions that Stage Money: The Business of the Professional Theater calls "flops."

Big hits continued in the 2009-2010 season to rake in the bulk of ticket sales.  Of a total of 71 shows running sometime during the season, the top 18 shows accounted for over 70 percent of Broadway revenues.  All of these were musicals except for the play God of Carnage which grossed $28.7 million during the season.

With the Variety recap, we now know what became of almost all the "too soon to tell" shows--called "holdovers"--from the 2008-9 season.  There were 16 holdovers at the end of the season. One show is still running and still hasn't paid back so is still too soon to tell: Rock of Ages.  Of the other holdovers from the 2008-9 season, six are hits.  Of those, four are still running: Billy Elliot, Hair, Next to Normal, and West Side Story.  One other hit, The 39 Steps, transferred from Broadway to a commercial off-Broadway run when its ticket sales went below the "stop clause" in its Broadway theater license.  Nine of the holdovers closed without paying back their investors.

The hit percentage for the 2008-9 season was 27.9 percent.  How does the 2008-9 season compare with the eight seasons tracked in Stage Money?  A little lower than average.  We found that between the 1999-2000 season and the 2006-2007 season, hits averaged nearly one-third of commercial Broadway openings.    This difference is not significant in itself, however, because there was great variety in the season outcomes Stage Money tracked.  For example, the 2003-2004 season had only 20 percent hits.  The 2005-2006 had over 40 percent hits.

The numbers of openings is so small that a single show success or failure can change the look of this statistic.  For example, should Rock of Ages, the remaining show that is too soon to tell from the 2008-2009 season, pay back its investors, the hit percentage for the season would be 30.2, very close to Stage Money's average over six seasons of 32.3 percent.

There Are Many Ways the NFP and Commercial Theaters Can Dance

In a chapter of Stage Money titled "Shall We Dance: The Commercial and Not-for-Profit Relationship," we explore the many ways that the commercial theater--namely, Broadway and touring--and the NFP theater are connected.  A May 16th article in Sign On San Diego, a web presence of the San Diego Union-Tribune, laid out the breadth of the connection as it manifested itself in two shows that played in San Diego NFP theaters and have gone to or are going to Broadway.  The piece by James Hebert is titled "Diversionary Theatre Basks in Broadway Glow."

Hebert compares the Diversionary Theatre's staging of Yank! which is slated to open on Broadway next season with La Jolla Playhouse's developmental staging of Memphis, currently on Broadway.  As Sign On puts it, "If 'Memphis' rode a rocket from San Diego to Broadway, 'Yank!' took Manhattan by Greyhound bus."

First, the rocket.  La Jolla has three stages, ranging in size from 388 to 492 seats, an annual budget of about $15 million, and has developed many shows that wound up with Broadway runs.  In addition to Memphis, La Jolla has developed successful Broadway shows like Jersey Boys, The Who's Tommy, Big River, and I Am My Own Wife, and Broadway flops like Jane Eyre and Dracula, the Musical.

As noted in Stage Money, La Jolla usually enters into enhancement deals with Dodger Productions, a Broadway producer.  In an enhancement deal, the producer makes a donation, enhancement money, to support a production in a NFP theater which the producer wants to bring into New York.  Enhancement money can be substantial.  Jersey Boys, for example, received $900,000 in enhancement money.  When the deal is right, both sides benefit.  The commercial producer gets to see the material before an audience for a lot less money than a Broadway opening or even a commercial out-of-town tryout.  The NFP gets a bigger budget than normal, the excitement of premiering a new script, and the potential to receive a small share of the gross of the commercial run.   For Jersey Boys, La Jolla received one percent of gross receipts up to recoupment and one-and-one-quarter percent after. As of the week ending May 16, 2010, Jersey Boys has grossed $260.5 million on Broadway alone.

The website for Memphis describes the story in breathless style:

He's a young, white radio DJ named Huey Calhoun (Chad Kimball), whose love of music transcends race lines and airwaves. She's a black singer named Felicia Farrell (Montego Glover), whose career is on the rise, but who can't break out of segregated clubs. When the two collaborate, her soulful music reaches radio audiences everywhere, and the Golden Era of early rock 'n' roll takes flight. But as things start to heat up, whether the world is really ready for their music - or their love - is put to the test.

StageGrade, a site that scores and averages reviews for New York shows on and off-Broadway, gave Memphis an average grade of B.  The musical has been nominated for eight Tony Awards.  As of the week ending May 16, having run for 34 weeks, Memphis has grossed more than $19 million.

The Diversionary Theatre which staged Yank! in 2008 is in a different league than La Jolla.  Diversionary bills itself as the third oldest gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender focused theater company in the US.  It runs one theater, seating 106, on a $600,000 annual budget.

The Yank! website describes the show thus:

YANK! is a love song to Hollywood's "it takes one of every kind" platoon flicks and to 1940s Broadway. Suffused with songs (swing, big band, boogie-woogie) it explores what stories get told in wartime, and how WWII became the great catalyst in bringing gay men and women together.

One San Diego reviewer raved, "Diversionary’s fun Yank! is as good a show as it is an idea… Yank! wins on virtually all counts, putting a fun and human face on gender identity at a time this culture couldn’t begin to fathom its import."

Before San Diego, the musical was staged by the Brooklyn NFP Gallery Players in 2007 and at the NY Musical Theatre Festival in 2005 where it won the audience award for best musical.


In March 2010, with some enhancement money, Yank! opened off-Broadway at the NFP York Theatre Company at a cost of about $450,000.  Writing in Variety, Steven Suskind raved, "'Yank!' is the most intriguing new American musical to reach New York in several seasons.…'Yank!' is a bright, original and moving winner of a musical that earns its exclamation point."  StageGrade's average of 15 reviews for Yank! was a B+.  It was nominated for a number of Drama Desk Awards but received none.

Now Yank! is slated to go to Broadway with the hot Chicago director David Cromer set to direct.  The star role is played by Bobby Steggert, who has been nominated for a Tony for his performance in the revival this season of Ragtime.  The budget is low by Broadway musical standards, about $5 million.

On Broadway today, that probably passes for bus fare.

The Book Is in Print

Stage Money is available now from USC Press and should be available from Amazon in a short while.  Hooray!

The cover includes a quote from Steven Adler, author of On Broadway: Art and Commerce on the Great White Way and Provost of Earl Warren College at UC San Diego:

"Stage Money offers a concise yet deftly drawn introduction to producing professional theater in America. The authors wisely situate the world of producing in the larger landscape of doing business in America, and the result is an eminently readable and intelligently written addition to the literature."

It's about the Budgets, Stupid

"Budgets" is not a misprint in the title of this post, for a commercial theatrical production has two budgets, the start-up budget that covers everything up to opening night and the operating budget, the weekly "nut" that the box office must bring in to let the show break even for that week.  Some producers maintain that the start-up costs are less important than the running costs.  With low enough running costs and sufficient demand for tickets, one can pay off even large investments.  What if both budgets are record-settingly high?

Michael Riedel of the New York Post wrote again last week about the travails of the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.  If you've been following the story, the Julie Taymor-directed, Bono and the Edge of U2 fame-composed comic book musical was making structural changes in the Hilton Theatre for the show to go into rehearsal but in January 2010, the producer discovered there wasn't enough money from investors and the construction stopped.   According to Riedel in his piece "Spider-Man's sticky figures," the show is on again, still with an estimated start-up budget of $50 million, by far the largest investment of any Broadway show in history.  Bono brought in a Canadian concert promoter, Michael Cohl, to take over the producer's reins.

Riedel also reports that the operating budget for the show will be $850,000 a week before royalties, making the weekly nut more than $1 million including royalties.  In the week ending May 9, 2010, only seven of the 35 shows running on Broadway grossed more than $1 million.  The musical beloved of tween girls, Wicked, had the highest grosses, just more than $1.5 million in its sixth year. Wicked's start-up costs were about $13 million and it recouped in 14 months.  Should Spider-Man make $1.5 million weekly grosses consistently, it could pay back its investors in two years or so.

But Riedel reports that the Broadway Spider-Man is not interested in payback in New York City alone but is really intended to establish the brand name so the show will then tour.  But the show is not planing to tour in the usual musical touring venues with 2,000 to 3,000 seats, but in coliseums with 10,000 seats and more.  In addition to the huge number of seats in those venues, the show is described as a sort of Cirque du Soleil extravaganza, the sort of show that could not tour in legit houses.  The scenery and special effects wouldn't fit.

Maybe the show will work in coliseums.  Bono's band U2 is one of the most successful touring acts in the world.  The latest tour, lasting in three segments from June 2009, through October 2010, is on track to gross $750 million.

Riedel quotes a producer not connected with the Broadway Spider-Man, "'They're trying to sell it as a rock concert. ...But you're not going to sell out a 10,000-seat basketball stadium unless Bono and The Edge are playing the songs. Basically, it's gotta be a U2 concert. Nobody's going to sit in nosebleed seats to see a Broadway musical.'"

As they used to say on the evening news, time alone will tell.

The Value of Stars on Broadway

We've noted previously here about star salaries on Broadway and the impact of stars on Broadway box office.  We noted that when David Hyde Pierce went on vacation from the Kander and Ebb so-so musical Curtains box office grosses for that show dropped by $240,000 a week. Today's New York Times reiterates the subject, demonstrating again that stars are potent marketing tools for the commercial theater.  In an article called "The Cost of Stardom" the Times notes that when Catherine Zeta-Jones went on vacation from the currently running revival of the Sondheim and Wheeler musical A Little Night Music, box office grosses dropped from $917,526 to $485,701, a drop of more than $430,000. That's a plunge of nearly 47  percent!

Note that the percentage of available seats sold declined only a little bit, from 94 percent of house to 91 percent.  But average ticket price dropped from more than $143 to just less than $72.  The list prices for A Little Night Music range from $52 to $137.  When Ms. Zeta-Jones was appearing on stage, the theater sold some premium tickets, whose prices range from $237 to $367.  But when she was on vacation, the theater discounted a lot of tickets, probably on the TKTS booth. 

Discount tickets for the show were not available on the TKTS lines last week, according to the Theatre Development Fund website. For the week ending May 9, 2010, A Little Night Music filled more than 93 percent of seats with an average ticket price of a little more than $115.

A Fantasticks Return

In our book Stage Money, we note repeatedly that the little off-Broadway show The Fantasticks has been an outlier--a very unusual example--in the financial history of commercial theater in America.  An article in today's New York Times confirms the rarity of the Jones and Schmidt musical once again.  Here on the "Stage Money" blog, we will extend the gray lady's analysis.

The piece by Patrick Healy, entitled "'Fantasticks' Pays Back for 50 Years," focuses on one couple who invested in the original production in 1960.  (On the web, you'll miss the great subtitle in the print edition: "For a Small Investment in 1960, the Checks Follow, Follow, Follow.") Marjorie and the late Malcolm Gray have received checks from their original $330 investment for fifty years and will be entitled to a share in subsidiary rights for another ten years.  In all, over fifty years they received about $80,000 total, an average of $1,600 per year. Mrs. Grey notes, "We would've been happy to earn our $330 back and get free tickets to a couple of performances, but the 'Fantasticks' money helped put our three children through college and paid for trips to Guatemala, Costa Rica, Israel.  It's certainly been handy to have around for 50 years."

What do we have to add?  First that the Grays had the right idea to begin with: investing in the commercial theater is highly risky and one should be prepared to lose one's entire investment.  Payback is a small victory in itself and then there are the intangible benefits, such as attending a show you helped finance.

To understand the Gray's returns, we really need to look at the effect of time.  Their original 1960 investment of $330 would be the equivalent of $2,330 in 2010, using the CPI as a measure of inflation.  More important is the average compounded rate of return the investors received.  This is to say, if the Grays opened a bank account of $330 in 1960 and took out neither capital nor interest and today the account held $80,000, this is the interest rate the bank would have had to offer.  But no bank has ever offered anything near this interest rate.  The average compounded rate of return for investing in The Fantasticks for fifty years has been 111.6 percent per year.  This is a rate of return that few investments ever match.

This example supports the contention of Stage Money: the risk of investing in the commercial theater is high but the returns on successful investments appear to be commensurate with the level of risk.  

Broadway Theater Owners and Their Influence

The New York Times has an interesting article today about the problems producers have now in licensing a  Broadway theater for a show, because so many are dominated by long-running hits.  But the piece leaves out an important detail that Stage Money reveals.   The oligopoly of theater owners restricts the competitiveness and thus the future of commercial Broadway theater. And our claim about the constraint resulting from Broadway theater ownership patterns was echoed by a venerable producer in a recent interview.

Start with the basic numbers.  There are now 40 Broadway theaters, ranging in size from the Helen Hayes with  597 seats to the Gershwin with 1,933 seats.  Five of the Broadway theaters are owned or operated by not-for-profit organizations.  The Shubert Organization owns and operates 17; the Jujamcyn organization owns five; and the Nederlander organization owns nine. One is leased by the city to the Disney Corporation, one is owned by Key Brands Entertainment and the remaining two are independent.  Of the 35 commercial Broadway houses, only 11.4 percent are independently owned.  The remaining 88.6 percent are held by just three entities.  This is the "elephant in the room" that the Times article ignores.

The Times piece by Patrick Healy, "In Broadway Lights: No Vacancy," starts by noting that the late Horton Foote's trilogy, The Orphans' Home Cycle, had the investors lined up for a Broadway transfer but couldn't find an appropriate theater. Fifteen of the 40 Broadway theaters, Healy writes, are occupied with long-running shows like The Phantom of the Opera, Billy Elliot: The Musical, Mamma Mia!, Jersey Boys, The Lion King, In the Heights, Chicago, and would-be long-running shows such as Come Fly Away and Hair.  Meanwhile two delayed shows have tied up two more theaters, Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark for the Hilton Theater and Love Never Dies, the Phantom of the Opera sequel, for the Neil Simon Theater.

For producers, it's not just finding a theater, but finding the right theater, meaning one that is large enough for the budget, small enough for the play in some cases, and attractive to directors and stars.

Philip J. Smith, chairman of the Shubert Organization, told the Times, "I've never seen it more competitive, or the supply-and-demand imbalance more stark."

As Stage Money points out, Smith should know about supply-and-demand.  Between the Shubert Organization, Jujamcyn, and Nederlander, their exists an oligopoly on Broadway theaters.  An oligopoly exists when a small number of suppliers control the bulk of supply of a good.  Not as potent as a monopoly, an oligopoly can still control prices, even without direct collusion.

In the January-February 2010 issue of The Dramatist, the journal of the Dramatists Guild, Emanuel "Manny" Azenberg is interviewed about being a commercial producer.  Azenberg produced many successful Broadway shows and is best known for being Neil Simon's producer.  "There was a real balance, I think, probably from the 1920's through somewhere in the 1970's.  There was an equilibrium between all the economic forces: the unions, the guilds, the theatre owners, the producers," Azenberg told playwright David Ives.  "The theatre owners took themselves out of the equation, ... Now there are three theatre owners and it's a tripartite oligarchy....[I]n the long run it's that imbalance that screws everything up."

Azenberg traces this change to the miserable period in the early 1980s when Broadway theater was in deep financial difficulties and many producers found they couldn't compete.  The theatre owners stepped in, investing money in productions that sometimes they suspected wouldn't make money for the investors but would make money in license fees--i. e. "rent"--for the theatre owners.  The owners saved the Broadway theater you might say, but they also made money for themselves and realized their bargaining power.   After that period, Azenberg maintains, "[Y]ou didn't negotiate a contract, they [the theater owners] dictated their contract. It's the same today.  It used to be competitive.  It's not anymore."

Studying economics is frustrating for many students but economic principles underlie business, even show business.

What Is a Broadway Theater Worth?

That is, what is a Broadway theater building worth?

In Stage Money, we use some public figures to estimate the value of a Broadway theatre--read the book to find out what sources--and estimate the value of a Broadway house as being between $6 million and $20 million.  A recent article by Michael Riedel in the New York Post, "The Broadway Gem You Will Never See - Unless You Pray," suggests our estimate may be low.

The reasons the value of a Broadway house is important is detailed in a section of Stage Money titled "Broadway and the Shubert Interests." We report there that the NFP Shubert Foundation in its IRS filing in 2005 puts the fair market value of its wholly-owned for-profit business, the Shubert Organization, at a little over $49 million.  The Shubert Organization owns 17 Broadway theaters, plus the Telecharge ticketing service and interests in varied proportions in three theaters elsewhere in the US. The Broadway theaters that the Shubert Organization owns are worth then on average less than $2.9 million each ($49 million divided by 17 theaters). There are many co-op apartments in NYC that are priced higher than that!  Because the unusual relationship between the NFP Shubert Foundation and the commercial Shubert Organization may be an example of what economists call a "moral hazard," the issues of values and profits and their distribution is a matter of concern. The discussion is too long to repeat here; read the book.


Riedel writes in the Post about the former Mark Hellinger Theatre which since 1989 has been the interdenominational Times Square Church.  First leasing the theatre, the church bought it in 1991 for $17 million.  Using the CPI as a measure of inflation, that purchase price is about $27.5 million in 2010 money.  The church has refused offers to buy the building.  Producers estimate its value as about $40 million today.  Broadway theaters are worth more in today's cleaned-up theater district than they were in the dismal 1980s-1990s.

Of course, the only true way to know the value of real estate is to witness an arm's length sale.  Every piece of real estate has a unique value and since the sale of the Hellinger, almost no Broadway theaters have sold individually.  Moreover, the Hellinger is considered a gem of a theater.  This is the theater that hosted the original production of My Fair Lady. Philip J. Smith, chairman of the Shubert Organization, told Riedel, "It [the Mark Hellinger] is the theater to have.  We chased it twice, but the church wouldn't sell.  If they ever do, you can put us at the head of the list." It seats 1,600 and has a 45-foot deep stage.  Today, the largest capacity Broadway theater is the Gershwin, owned by the Nederlander Organization, which seats 1,933.  Only nine of the 40 Broadway houses seat more than 1,600.  Three of those are owned by the Shubert Organization.

As we've noted before, Michael Riedel's column is a great place to find information about the business of the New York theater.  We recommend it.

Defining Professional NFP Theatre

In Chapter 6 of Stage Money, we layout the problem of defining professional not-for-profit theater.  The NFP part is easy, since NFPs must have a 501(c)3 certification from the IRS.  The word "professional" is trouble.  In the NFP theater world, there are troupes that are clearly amateur, where no one--or almost no one--is paid.  Then there are theatres, such as the members of the League of Resident Theatres or LORT, where at its highest standing, LORT-A, everyone is a member of a professional union. Such LORT theatres are clearly professional.  Between these extremes is a continuum of different mixes of volunteer and professional.

We've just read a 1995 article by Joan Jeffri, "Nature's Journeymen: The Education and Training of the American Artist," available at Columbia University's Research Center for Arts and Culture site, that offers a structure for considering the definition of professional. Jeffri identifies three different definitions of professional which she says are "constantly being meshed, confused, or used interchangeably."  They are

• Occupational measures, such as, hours worked and money earned,
• Credentialing, holding a license to practice a profession, such as, a lawyer passing a state bar exam, and/or
• Quality of work performed.

In Stage Money, we identified membership in the Theatre Communications Group or TCG as the closest clear and distinct identifier of professional NFP theater status.  This mark of professionalism is not the same as credentialing but resembles it in some ways.  Using TCG as a proxy for professional NFP theater is far from perfect, as the book discusses.  For just one example, 18 of the 77 LORT theaters have not chosen to be members of TCG.

When friends reviewed early drafts of Stage Money, the use of this proxy was controversial for some.  We now realize the problem was that our friends had an unspoken definition of professional as reflecting the "quality of work performed."  One actually said, "I've seen the work of --------- theatre.  It may belong to TCG, but it's not professional."  If we had Jeffri's parsing of the definition of professional, we might have engaged our friends in a more meaningful discussion of professionalism in the NFP theater.

As to the quality of the art created by America's NFP theaters, we are not qualified to judge.  What night was the company unprofessional in quality?  What production?  What play?  All the time?  Never?   We don't think anyone is qualified to attest to the quality or lack of quality of even a few NFP theaters let alone all.  And if anyone did, he or she would surely get a battle from others who had the opposite opinion.