Finishing the Hat

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If in America we lowered our ticket prices on Broadway, audiences could make up their own minds and wouldn’t have to rely on the New York Times as the critic to tell us what we think.

I think we have a big problem on Broadway right now where Wall Street has hijacked Broadway. They’re not in it for the love of the theater. I don’t know anybody that goes to Broadway or goes in to theater period to make money. It isn’t a money-making proposition.

There can only be one ‘Wicked’ a decade really but we have a lot of Wall St. fat cats who are money-laundering on Broadway and when they don’t get the reviews they want, they shut the play down. They’re not showmen so they don’t know how to run it or how to bring an audience in.

You have to have the ingenuity to get beyond the reviews if they’re bad. In the old days they would never let a critic tell them their show was a flop. They would find a way to outwit them.

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“To me the most interesting aspect of the success of ‘Man of La Mancha’ is the fact that it plows squarely upstream against the prevailing current of philosophy in theater. That current is best identified by its catch-labels – Theater of the Absurd, Black Comedy, the Theater of Cruelty – which is to say the theater of alienation, of moral anarchy and despair. To the practitioners of these philosophies ‘Man of La Mancha’ must seem hopelessly naive in its espousal of illusion as a man’s strongest spiritual need, the most meaningful function of his imagination. But I’ve no unhappiness about that. ‘Facts are the enemy of truth,’ says Cervantes-Don Quixote. And that is precisely what I felt and meant.”