Media Theatres: or, Why Mean Girls the Musical Is a Movie

Audiences are changing and it’s going to be a continued challenge for live performing arts, including theatre, dance, music and more. But there are some encouraging signs and things that artists and companies can do.

In 2012, I wrote an academic article titled, “Theatre Is Media.” (You can read a copy here or in the Essays section of this site.) There, I observed that theatrical performances circulate outside theatre buildings themselves. That is, we encounter theatrical performances in all kinds of ways before we actually sit in a darkened auditorium. These encounters include online advertisements, digital recordings (both those officially published and bootleg copies), and sometimes through the social media feeds of theatrical creators themselves. (Isn’t TikTok just big theatre kid energy?) The international musical theatre hit, Hamilton, demonstrated how effective a deliberate online strategy could be when it launched an informal series of performances outside its Broadway theatre under the hashtag #Ham4Ham.  

During the COVID-19 pandemic, this attention to the digital transmissions of live entertainment exploded as digital performances became the only way to view theatre for months on end. Established theatres aired their archived recordings, often for free, and intrepid performers created new works specifically for digital platforms, including podcasts, streaming shows, and new work such as Joshua William Gelb’s delightful shows for Theatre in Quarantine. Even as the worst conditions of the pandemic faded, some predicted that we would encounter a new theatrical environment in which both live and digital performances co-existed and re-enforced each other in the theatrical landscape. I was one of them, but now I’m not so sure.

As theatres reopened, audiences flocked and there were many expressions of “how great it is to be together again.” And it was, until it wasn’t. Since the days of heady emergence, live audiences receded, though unevenly. After experiencing a brief dip, Broadway theatres have started to recover though attendance is lower than its historic peaks. But many other theatres suffered. American Theatre magazine declared a “theatre in crisis,” largely among non-profit theatres. The Public in New York suspended its Under the Radar Festival, though it has returned under different producers.

In Toronto, live performances have seen a significant dip in audiences, including theatre and dance, as well as live music venues. Some touring performances have done well. The latest collaboration from Crystal Pite and Jonathan Young’s Assembly Hall (which I loved!) sold out Canadian Stage, even though the acclaimed dance company Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal’s Rites of Spring with an *amazing* pan-African company performed for only one show in Meridian Hall. Some smaller theatres have had to cancel shows. There have been a lot of discounted tickets floating around, including for iconic performances such as Paul Gross’s King Lear at Stratford earlier this year.

What happened?

I’ll be writing a series of reflections here and elsewhere on the current circumstances, most especially in Toronto, where I live and see the most theatre, as well as in the United States and Europe (places where I have lived formerly and also like to see theatre).

The biggest thing I see is that live performance has not kept pace with the changing media landscape and is not well positioned to attend to the needs and demands of contemporary audiences who increasingly work, live and entertain themselves online. As Brian Herrera has written in his excellent Theatre Clique newsletter (subscribe!), theatregoing has become a challenging ordeal, particularly amid conditions that have changed since the pandemic. Seeing live performance costs: time, energy and money. (This is especially true if you’re trying to go east-west in downtown Toronto, where a significant number of the City’s theatres are located.)  

I’ll add one small addition to Brian’s litany of the difficulties for theatre: the contemporary conditioning for audiences. If you think about it, streaming and other online digital content has taught audiences the following entertainment model:

Digital entertainment is high volume, low cost, and the more you watch the more you see things you like.

This is true for subscription streaming services, such as Netflix, as well as for social media video platforms, such as Instagram Reels and TikTok. Programmed to adjust and suggest new content based on past viewing and expressed preferences (both explicit ratings and the amount of time a viewer spends watching content), over time, a viewer will be presented with options for entertainment viewing that are well aligned with their personal preferences. And there is an almost infinite amount of material to choose from, all at a relatively low cost in terms of money, effort expended, attention, and time.

The model for theatre is the opposite:

Live entertainment is low volume, high cost, and the more you see, the less likely you are to see things you like.

Seeing a lot of live shows involves seeing a lot of different kinds of performances, different styles, techniques, performers, and of course, quality. One of the joys of attending live performances is that you don’t know what you’re going to see and therefore you also don’t know if you’re going to like it. Of course, one sees a lot of duds in that approach, but the joyful encounters with seeing something truly new is delightful.

Unfortunately, that’s not how new audiences are being taught to find and enjoy new performances. Through the prevalence of algorithms, we mostly see things we already like, which accounts for why we see so many “new” shows is using familiar material, such as the film-musical-movie musical, Mean Girls. This will prove a challenge for all kinds of live performance until the sector can figure out how to engage with data, algorithms, and new digital audiences. More on that in future writing to come.