The First Review

Our first review is in Southern Theatre, the journal of the Southeastern Theatre Conference (SETC).  The reviewer is--full disclosure--a long-time friend of Jim Patterson but also a theater professional: Phillip Hill, professor emeritus of drama at Furman University in Greenville, SC. Any one who knows Phil knows he is a plain-speaking, upright individual.

The take-away from the review is "Stage Money has something important to offer to everyone with a serious interest in the American theatre."

Complete review follows:

Full disclosure: I first read this book in manuscript and offered suggestions, some of which its authors apparently have adopted. On reading the published version, I still find it intensely interesting and very valuable.

Its authors describe Stage Money: The Business of Professional Theater as a “cynical book,” focusing on how play productions are financed in the U.S. in the early 21st Century. It is “not a how-to book on theater producing,” but a book on “how theater is paid for.” To that end, the authors marshal a compelling array of statistics and production details with extraordinary completeness, at least in respect to the Broadway theatre. Also included are statistics from the nation’s not-for-profit theatres, as well as some other commercial theatre activities. Although “Broadway” theatre can be definitively identified, there is no generally agreed upon definition of “professional” theatre outside of Broadway; the authors admit this limitation and use sampling techniques to document the rest of their universe as fully as they can.

One of the co-authors, Donahue, holds an MBA, and his expertise in legal structures, financial statistics and economic theory shapes the book. Donahue’s co-author is an emeritus theatre professor, a director and a writer on theatre, and the fact that the art is the reason for the money is never overlooked. Many theatre people eschew mathematics, money and legalisms as somehow foreign to their art, but this book demonstrates how central to theatre art these seemingly dreary matters are, and it does so in eminently readable, even entertaining, form. In short, the eschewers are the very people who most need to read the book.

I had thought for decades that I understood as much about Broadway producing as anyone without the actualexperience, but I learned much that I didn’t know before. I have been aware for decades of the increasing importance of the not-for-profit professional theatre (NFP), but this book explores the symbiotic relationshipsamong NFPs and Broadway and the Road in truly enlightening ways. I thought I understood why ticket prices have inflated horrendously during my lifetime, while actors struggled to survive, but I didn’t know the half of it. In short, I think Stage Money has something important to offer to everyone with a serious interest in the American theatre.

One warning: The facts and figures come, for the most part, from the first decade of this century, and are supplemented right up to the publication date. But the data will date quickly, as the authors demonstrate by discussing the effects of the current recession and speculating about what recovery from that recession may entail. They offer their website (www.stagemoney.net) as a source of more up-to-date statistics, but the book will almost certainly suffer as new facts cause the old ones to appear dated.

Read it now.

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