This is How You Win the Future of Theatre

The pandemic brought a premature end to the Golden Age of American Theatre. For the 30 or so years before 2020, Broadway boomed. Regional theatres flourished, and even small theatres proliferated.

But that’s changed. A significant part of the pre-pandemic theatre audience is gone for good. We had gotten used to a healthy theatre scene. And maybe took it for granted. It wasn’t always this way.

In fact, it took heroic efforts in the 60s, 70s and 80s to create it. Check the founding dates of regional theatres and you won't find many before 1960. That generation of people created the infrastructure that enabled theatre to thrive.

But that was then. This is now. Our colleagues in the past did what they had to do. But the future’s at stake again, and the outcome is not a given.

How do we win the future of theatre this time?

Replace the Baby Boomers.

Here’s one overlooked thing that helped that generation of theatre heroes: demographics. It’s no coincidence that the largest generation America had ever seen– the Baby Boomers– did all this. They were healthier, wealthier, more inclusive and better educated than any generation before. And there were lots of them!

The Baby Boomers are great supporters of theatre and will continue to be. But they are not the future of theatre. I don’t mean anything bad by that. It’s just a mathematical and actuarial fact.

To win the future, theatre has to win over one group: millennials. This isn’t the usual generic advice to “reach young people.” I’m talking about a very specific group here. The oldest millennials are about 40 right now. As a generation, they’re about to hit their theatre-supporting stride.

And here’s the good news: there’s tons of them.

The Millennial generation in the United States is larger than the Baby Boom generation by sheer numbers. This is crucial. More people means more patrons, more artists, more donors, and more political and creative support.

The rising generation of middle-aged millennials is a solid rock on which the future can be built.

This requires that we get them onboard.

Commit to Digital.

The fabric of daily life for this audience is the digital world. You know that, of course. In the pre-pandemic world, Boomer priorities and values carried the day. You could ignore the digital reality of Millennial life.

But Boomer World is winding down.

What do I mean by “committing to digital”? Good question. I wrote a book on this subject, but here’s the main idea.

Digital and online give theatre its best opportunity for growth, possibly ever. But it’s a new medium. To get good, you have to start with a commitment to figuring it out and keep going.

It also means figuring out how to make business arrangements that support digital. Union agreements, rights management as well as the shows themselves.

Here’s what “committing to digital” isn’t: using ads or posts on social media to try to sell tickets to strangers. Even ones that are “targeted” by the likes of Instagram and TikTok. That’s just good old-fashioned Boomer-era “interruption marketing” in a sleek modern package.

Think of the commitment it took to build a robust regional theatre system. Or a thriving Broadway ecosystem. A daunting, slow and expensive task, but they stayed at it.

Can we?

Escape the Theatre Echo Chamber

I love my colleagues and friends in the theatre business. I really do. Remember that when I say what I’m about to say next.

We need to see other people more.

The world is full of people, ideas, business models, topics of conversation, creative angles and opinions. Sometimes, a small industry like theatre can get stuck. People end up trading and re-trading the same handful of ideas and practices.

In good times, this might be ok, or at least less harmful. In defining times, like the ones we are now going through, it could be fatal.

New and useful ideas from elsewhere matter. Big innovations come from combining an outside idea with an existing one. So you have to be listening.

Remember: echoes are the ghosts of things that someone already said. We’ve got to listen for those voices a little further off, saying something new. Not all of it will be valuable, but some of it will. Some might be crucial.

Entertain

Before you get mad at me, I'm not saying theatre always has to be light or have a happy ending or be Rock of Ages.

But in 20 years of selling tickets to theatre, I've noticed something. People like being entertained. Brilliant, right? But sometimes show creators lose sight of this for too long.

When building a new audience, entertaining them earns you credibility. You can take them all kinds of places once you've earned their trust. Til then, maybe tilt the balance a little more toward making sure they're having fun.

Insightful, hard-hitting artistic theatre can be fun. If we can deliver that, it's going to be hard to lose.

I don't even want to imagine what it would mean to lose the future. It’s a sobering thought to imagine the American theatre slowly declining in the decades to come. I don’t believe that will happen, but it’s not guaranteed. In the past, people had a vision that they fought for and won.

Many of you share my excitement at the dazzling possibilities for the future of theatre. But there’s no glide path to that. No predetermined assurance of success. Nowhere is it written that we didn’t peak in 2020.

What happens next is solely up to us.