Theater pact tackles thorny issue of tours

The commercial theater industry issued a collective sigh of relief Tuesday over the tentative agreement on a new four-year contract for actors who are employed on Broadway and in Broadway-derived tours. Broadway and its touring productions might have closed for an expensive strike if the agreement had not been reached.

“I’m thrilled,” said Actors’ Equity council member Vernon Willett. “The union wanted a contract, not a strike.”

“It’s a win-win situation,” said Martin Wiviott, the L.A. general manager of the Broadway power Nederlander Theatricals.

Details continued to be hashed out Tuesday, but the general shape of the agreement became known from sources close to both sides, who would not speak for attribution.

The most contentious issue had been the contract terms for touring productions. In recent years, Broadway producers have licensed touring rights for an increasing number of their shows to other producers who don’t use Equity contracts. The union’s single production contract -- which was used on tours as well as on Broadway -- was too costly, the producers contended.

The new agreement would set up seven tiers of wage scales within the production contract, allowing potentially less successful productions to use the lower tiers while blockbusters still use the full contract.

Probably the most decisive factor that will determine a production’s placement on the tiers will be the size of the return that local presenters -- such as the Nederlander company’s Broadway/LA or Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles -- guarantee to the producers. That figure (usually between $200,000 and $350,000 a week in a major market) is hammered out in the negotiations between producers and presenters, based on a tour’s perceived commercial appeal.

Ken Gentry, whose NETworks company produces the non-Equity tour of “Oklahoma!” that recently played the Orange County Performing Arts Center and is scheduled to play the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood next January, said Tuesday that the tour would have been on an Equity contract if a tier system had been available.

The “Oklahoma!” tour probably won’t switch to an Equity contract for the duration of its run, he said, because “we have a full cast of [non-Equity] people we’re pleased with.”

Still, he said that nonunion tours might eventually vanish from the 70 major markets where tours usually play at least a week. In the 230 smaller markets where tours play only half-weeks or even one-night stands, non-Equity casts will probably continue performing, Gentry said. And foreign markets are another potential source of audiences for non-Equity tours.

Most professional theaters in the Southland are nonprofit institutions that already operate on lower-paying Equity contracts. But if agreement had not been reached and Equity had launched a strike, it probably would have darkened such currently local tours as “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Hairspray” as well as most of Broadway.

The formal ratification process could take at least four weeks. The agreement will be submitted to the Equity board and the executive board of the League of American Theatres and Producers later this week. Assuming the Equity board approves it, it will then go to a vote, conducted by mail, of 6,000 members of Equity who have worked under the production contract during the last eight years.