Getting Steeper All the Time

One of the many things that appear to cost too much in our entertainment-based culture of immense gratifications remains the theater, the fabulous invalid of the arts that won’t go away but also won’t let us down from the balcony for less than $50. Or so it often seems, especially on trips to New York. And by the way, have you tried to get your tickets for the “The Producers” at the Pantages yet?

The high cost of the ancient art of Shakespeare and O’Neill and Shepard and Sondheim is not good news to those among us who want to believe that theater can remain relevant to society at large and not disappear behind the velvet ropes marking off territory reserved for the rich. This fall brings the first $100 ticket to off-Broadway--for Brecht, yet, even if it is Brecht (“The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”) performed by Al Pacino, Billy Crudup, Steve Buscemi and John Goodman. Without regard to the quality of the show, it’s hard to see how at that price an entertainment does not qualify as elitist.

When “The Producers” opens here at the Pantages in May, with Martin Short and Jason Alexander, it will carry a top ticket price of $90, a new local threshold.

Compared with New York, prices remain, if not cheap, somewhat lower in L.A. A survey of recent ticket prices here would reveal a $45 top at our leading institutional theater, the Mark Taper Forum; at the larger Ahmanson, $75; at the Geffen Playhouse, $46; the Pasadena Playhouse, $60; “The Lion King” at the Pantages, $77; and “The Full Monty” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, $64.50.

At smaller theaters like the Odyssey, the Falcon, Theatre West and A Noise Within, tickets are in the $15-to-$40 range.

That’s still lot of money to spend on entertainment for anyone who has to pay a baby-sitter while stretching to make the rent or mortgage payment. But the first thing the producers at those theaters will tell you--after they tell you it’s not the theater’s fault it costs so much (and that no one is getting rich)--is that you can get in for less if you really try. And they’re right on both counts.

In many a consumer’s mind the theater suffers mainly from comparison to that other more popular form of two-hour storytelling, the movies, where you can usually get in for less than $10. To pay two, three, four or five times that to see a play, you have to value the difference: that film is a mass medium, with individual titles showing on thousands of screens across the country at once, while a play is a live event, being performed by actors in real time in a single place for an audience of from 100 to 2,000 people. A particular movie might be good and a particular play bad, but the relative economics of each remain the same.

It’s mainly in competition with films that the theater looks expensive, because when you check out the continued inflation in the cost of attending other live events like rock and pop concerts, you wonder who’s paying those prices. The cheapest Bruce Springsteen tickets on his current tour are $49.50, with many selling through ticket services for upwards of $500. Top ticket for the Rolling Stones concert at Staples is more than $300; for the Who, $153; Luis Miguel, $140; Cher, $125; Jimmy Buffett, $75; Sheryl Crow, $60. When the new Disney Hall opens next year, the best seats for Los Angeles Philharmonic performances will increase from the current $82 to $120.

Tickets to sporting events are also no bargain. Good seats to see the Kings and the Lakers at Staples are $70 or more (with parking at a price-gouging $15 to $20).

But professional sports and pop music benefit from mass marketing, television and radio exposure and iconography that only occasionally touch the theater. Whatever the price of a ticket to a pop concert, the audience often has a good idea of what to expect and can decide whether it’s worth the money. Likewise, while you can’t be sure the Lakers are going to win, you have a pretty good idea what the experience inside Staples is going to be like.

Going to theater is riskier. You have to be ready for anything. Even if a play is familiar, it is likely to have unfamiliar actors, and new plays are uncharted territory. Theatergoers have to value the unique experience of being in that room with the actors and the other members of the audience while something hand-made and human takes place to allow for the possibility that what’s on stage might not transport them. Hope springs eternal that it will.

Unlike sports and rock ‘n’ roll, the theater does provide ways to bring down the carriage trade prices for students and others who otherwise couldn’t afford it. Any number of theaters have a weekly pay-what-you-can night, like the one at Actors’ Gang, the 99-seat theater in Hollywood where “The Guys” is playing.

Stage actors themselves--or at least the ones without a recurring role on a prime-time sitcom--are sometimes among the first to take advantage of such discounts. Brian Brophy, an actor, director and educator associated with Actors’ Gang, says he often tries to attend pay-what-you-can nights at other theaters. “I usually end up not paying full price,” he says. “I’ll pay $75 to see the Berliner Ensemble at UCLA, but only because I see that as a personal investment.”

Recently, a new discount program, Play7, was introduced by 15 sub-100-seat theaters (including Met Theatre, Circle X and the Evidence Room) offering a one-year subscription for $77 that would entitle the subscriber to seven unrestricted admissions to any of the member theaters, reducing the individual ticket cost to $11.

At larger theaters, including the Taper and the Ahmanson, a limited number of “public rush” tickets are offered (as many as 250 at the Ahmanson and 55 at the Taper, on occasion) two hours before curtain for each performance during the first weeks of a run at a cost of $10 to $15.

Most larger theaters offer other forms of discounts, beginning with preview performances that are marked down from a few dollars to 50% of full-ticket price. In addition to a couple of pay-what-you-can performances for each show, the Taper also provides a number of $6 tickets distributed through city social-service agencies.

The last of these would seem to be essential for the people who make up the subject of the Taper’s current offering “Nickel and Dimed”--that is, the working poor--to ever see the show.

“We have a responsibility to make theater accessible,” says Jim Royce, the director of marketing and communications for Center Theatre Group, which includes the Taper and the Ahmanson. “And there are ways for people to get into the theater if they’re willing to explore a little bit.”

Theatre LA, which represents more than 150 local theaters (the great majority of which have fewer than 100 seats) makes half-price tickets available (with a $2-to-$6 service charge) on its Web site for many shows on the day of performance, following the model of New York’s TKTS booth at Times Square. Instead of paying $50 to see Reprise!’s “Anything Goes” at UCLA, you could have bought a ticket on the Theatre LA Web site for $27.50. You can still see Harold Gould in “Fellow Traveler” at the Malibu Stage Company for $10 rather than pay the regular $20.

“I think ticket prices are very scalable,” says Lee Wochner, president of Theatre LA, itself a nonprofit organization whose half-price WebTix service has grown in two years, he says, from 1,000 registered users to 12,000. “You can make a point of going to see ‘The Lion King’ on a Saturday night and pay $127 [for special VIP tickets], or you can find a way to go on another night for half that or less.”

In fact, “The Lion King” offers senior and student discount tickets for $25 (when available) and offers the last two rows of the mezzanine for $12 in advance, as well as discounts through group sales.

It remains an irony that theater, which is far cheaper and more accessible to produce than movies, costs far more to attend--simply because it can only recoup its expenses a few hundred seats at a time. And nonprofit theater, like dance, opera and symphony orchestras, still requires private and public subsidy to meet its budget. Although the need for funding beyond the box office is a long-established fact for such cultural institutions, it’s not a need most Americans necessarily yet understand. It was only seven years ago that our elected representatives in Congress nearly extinguished the National Endowment for the Arts.

I still remember hearing a well-known food critic remark around the time of the debate over arts funding that he didn’t see why a theater deserved a subsidy any more than a restaurant. The market should rule and quality would survive. That’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t explain McDonald’s, not to mention acknowledge the completely different economics of scale and production involved.

“The decrease in subsidies has continued year after year, and now you have theaters operating in arrears and escalating ticket prices,” says Wochner, even as he points to the discounts available through his organization.

Only increased subsidies, comparable to what European governments spend, could bring the cost of theater tickets down in the U.S., and that seems highly unlikely in the privatizing spirit of our age.

We will probably never be like London, where, because of tradition, the number of subsidized theaters, competition and lower labor and advertising costs, theater prices for some of the world’s finest productions are still cheaper than in Los Angeles and New York. In fact, theater is one of the few things that is cheaper. Top ticket to a West End musical is about $62.

Here, theater companies have to continue to battle the image of elitism that sadly marginalizes the popular art they often put on their stages. “You have to fight for the relevance of theater,” says Brophy, who has worked in big-budget feature films but also staged plays with homeless actors downtown.

“We live under the misapprehension that this is not a theater town,” says Wochner, who makes the claim that at whatever price, more people attend the theater in Los Angeles County than all professional sports events combined.

Can this possibly be true? Imagine, then, what would happen if more people weren’t scared off by the prices they see at the box office.

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Sean Mitchell is a regular contributor to Calendar.