The Best Place to Spot Women in NYC? Broadway
"Beautiful: The Carole King Musical" is a perfect girl-power story. It covers the famous singer-songwriter’s early days: she starts writing songs as a teenager at the Brill Building, falls in love, has kids, dumps her cheater husband, goes happily solo.
It’s a Broadway hit. “Beautiful” is grossing about $1.3 million a week and it was the first play from the 2013-2014 season to recoup costs.
The musical goes to the heart of two out of three people who go to Broadway: women. According to the Broadway League, 68% of the Broadway audience is female. And that percentage is growing -- it used to be 58% in 1980. The trend has proven difficult to reverse, and is a deciding factor on what succeeds or not on Broadway.
Why More Women?
Most men who do go to Broadway are often accompanied by women. Mike Leccese, a sanitation supervisor from Long Island, was watching "Beautiful " recently with his wife and he said he had no idea why there were more women than men in the theater. “Why more women? Maybe they are more cultured than men,” he said, laughing. “Maybe, I don't know.”
“Beautiful” was actually written by a man. Douglas McGrath has also written and directed several movies, and he said he’s not surprised women make up most of the Broadway audience, compared to 52% for movies.
“The theater explores, in all kinds of ways, human relationships. Women are very interested in human relationships. Sometimes men want to get away from human relationships, so they go to the movies,” he said.
Courting More Women
If women are indeed more inclined to like the theater, why would the gender gap keep growing? That’s because producers are investing in more plays that appeal to women, and advertising dollars are spent mostly on the female audience as well.
“Changing behavior is a very difficult thing to do,” said Nancy Coyne, CEO of Serino Coyne, the largest theatrical advertising agency in the country. She says theater advertising budgets are small, so she has to spend it wisely. “We can't afford in the theater to court people who don't want to be courted, that is the long and the short of it.”
There have been some recent efforts to bring more men to Broadway with plays about sports like “Rocky,” or “Lombardi.” They didn't do well. Angelina Fiordellisi, who owns the Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village and is also a Broadway producer, said she would not have invested her own money in those productions.
“I guess I feel I am representative of the audience, of the largest percentage of the audience, ticket buyers,” Fiordellisi said. “If I am moved by something, I feel I represent those women.”
Healthy, Girly Broadway
Women are making it for a healthy Broadway, at least for now. Grosses are up 11% for the last season, to $1.27 billion.
But one theater critic fears a downside. Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post worries that an art form that attracts a mostly female audience can be stigmatized.
“Something that has often a majority female audience is often not taken seriously. That is really annoying,” she said.
For Coyne, Broadway’s growth strategy is with the youth. “The best thing that happened to Broadway is Disney,” she said.
For now, women still have to convince their husbands to go to shows. One of them is Einat Sarouf, a singer from Israel who wanted to see “Beautiful” recently, but still needed her husband to agree to it. “If he doesn't want to come with me, I will go with a friend. A woman,” she said.
Not unlike what happens in the musical Beautiful, as we watch Carole King embark on a solo career. Her boss says he knows she will succeed because she is a girl, and she sings girl songs.
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