Stage Money: The Business of the Professional Theater by Tim Donahue and Jim Patterson (review)

The project of Donahue and Patterson's book is to study the structures of and approaches to producing professional theatre in the United States. The book's organization is slightly unusual, consisting of seven numbered chapters separated by "intermissions" that explore topics related to the overview chapters in greater depth. The volume begins with a study of Broadway, off-Broadway, and Broadway tours; the final two chapters examine nonprofit theatres and their relationship to commercial theatre. The authors struggle openly with defining "professional theater," which is problematic given the book's subtitle. Perhaps a better subtitle would have been "The Business of the Commercial Theater," which is the focus of all but one chapter.

The greatest strength of the book is its richness in relevant data. Each chapter contains hundreds of relevant facts and figures, as well as definitions of terms such as "options" and "subsidiary rights," explaining them simply and lucidly. The authors also perform risk analysis on for-profit theatre, concluding that it is no more or less risky than other types of investment in relationship to potential returns, and supporting their conclusion comparing data from recent Broadway seasons with data from other types of non-theatrical financial investments. This sort of comparison is innovative and creative, a real strength of the authors' perspective on theatre as a business. The chapter on ticket pricing is succinct, with a number of useful figures for visual reference, and explains the vagaries of variable pricing models and how and why they generate extra revenues. While the season-specific information the book provides will eventually grow dated, it is still immensely helpful to have a thorough portrait of a single Broadway season in terms of hits, flops, revenue, and origination of the work.

One small quibble is that the authors define "Commercial Theater" only in terms of Broadway, off-Broadway, "the road," and Las Vegas, which leaves out a number of for-profit theatres across the country. Dinner theatres, for example, are only mentioned briefly in the first chapter. Their modest size and variety of geographical locations would make their business models and financial data potentially relevant to theatre practitioners, since for-profit theatrical production might be subsidized by similar business partnerships such as bookstores, coffeehouses, or bars.

The intermissions provide useful case studies of specific approaches to theatrical production, such as Disney on Broadway and the "chitlin' circuit." The intermission section speculating on the "actor glut" is somewhat out of place in the volume, however. The authors' goal seems to be to apply general economic theories on labor to the acting profession, and they apply such theories with success and insight elsewhere in the volume. In this section, however, their avoidance of deeper discussion of the acting spectrum from "amateur" to "professional" is problematic. Their consideration of why actors choose to perform as "discounted labor" fails to take into account many reasons beyond the range of economic theory, and they do not incorporate current theories about creative economies and artistic capital that would be relevant to the questions they raise but leave unanswered.

By including a chapter on nonprofit theatres, the authors make the effort to touch on an area of research that certainly merits further scholarly attention. Their nonprofit theatre chapter focuses primarily on large regional nonprofit 501(c)3 theatres. By working with the data available to them through organizations such as TCG and LORT, the authors must ignore nonprofit theatre companies with budgets below TCG's $50,000 membership floor. This section gives a number of brief descriptions of nonprofit companies but not much in the way of a general picture of the nonprofit sector. Challenges such as board management and balancing earned and unearned revenue receive a few paragraphs at best. There is no tracking of "the life of a production" similar to that in the for-profit chapters, so there is no mention of the tangled web of...