Broadway Is Unaffordable—But Actors Barely Get Paid. The Answer? Stream Broadway

Theater is a beautiful, living thing. At it’s best, theater holds a mirror up to the audience and provides catharsis as Aristotle put it, reminding us what it means to be alive. It’s something I’ve experienced both as an actor and as an avid theatergoer myself.

So it’s something of a tragedy that very few living Americans can afford to go to the theater.

The average ticket price for a Broadway show is around $130. That’s right: It would take a person working a minimum wage job in New York City an entire day’s work to afford a ticket.

Tickets to “Hamilton” next Friday night go from $120 at its cheapest to $372 at its most expensive. “Wicked,” another mainstay show, starts at $98 and goes to $340. Now look at “Merrily We Roll Along,” by far, one of the most in demand shows at the moment: The seats for immediate purchase at box office for a Friday night are $198, that’s rear balcony. Though there’s a $250 difference between the cheapest seats and the most expensive, even the cheapest seats are rarely less than $100.

Here’s the thing: It’s not like there’s a whole lot of excess profit happening. No one is getting rich off these shows. The actors aren’t paid anything exorbitant, and the profit margin is slim. It just costs a lot to put up a Broadway show.

And the tickets wouldn’t be at these prices if people weren’t willing to pay them. Even with those astronomical prices, “Merrily” still struggles to keep an open seat in the house. The same could be said for “Hamilton” in the height of its craze, when tickets were going for over a thousand dollars.

But that’s the point: People are willing to pay the cost of a ticket—people who can afford it. According to the Broadway League, the average income of Broadway show attendees last season was four times that of the average American household. Meanwhile, 5 percent of Broadway theater goers accounted for a whopping 30 percent of all ticket sales, meaning those same rich folks were seeing a large portion of the shows.

In short, the demand is coming from a very small, very wealthy group of individuals.

What can be done? How can we democratize Broadway and ensure that more Americans can enjoy these shows?

In a word, streaming. It would make theater much more available to exponentially more Americans.

It would have helped me, that’s for sure. Growing up in a small town, most of my theater exposure was two cassettes my father had, “Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miserables.” Even that was an exception in the South; most kids and adults a distaste for theater from a lack of exposure.

But streaming Broadway productions would help millions of Americans access the theater. Even college students studying theater are often too broke to actually see any live theater, and on the off chance they manage to save to go, they always ended up in the cheap seats with the kind of view constantly reminding them they’re in the cheap seats.

When I was studying theater, my friends and I often settled for gathering around a dorm and watching “Slime Tutorials,” poorly and illegally shot footage from some shaky, muffled camera smuggled into the audience. As unethical as it may be, it was the only source we had to see many of the shows whose albums we repeated at nauseam, and I’m thankful for them.

Of course, it’s better to see theater live. But it’s better to see it on screen than not at all. And it wouldn’t hurt ticket sales; shows that have released cuts to streaming have reported higher ticket sales in their productions as a result. A point often cited against streaming are the contracts of performers and writers, but with the recent strikes of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, it’s proven that changes can be made for the changing times we’re in.

My wife and I splurged and got tickets the night “Hadestown” re-opened post- pandemic. There was an eight-minute standing ovation at the top of show. You could feel how much this had been missed. I want those without the luxury of witnessing such things in person to know that feeling, despite their location or socioeconomic status.

Love, loss, dreams fulfilled and crushed, hate, second chances, revolution and oppression— these are the themes brought to life in beautiful ways on the stage. It reminds us we’re not alone.

Everyone should have access to great theater.

Chris Senn II hails from Enterprise AL. He’s an actor, writer, husband, and cat father. He studied at Lagrange College in Georgia.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.