More on Non-Union Tours (MUSIC MAN in Boston)

Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2003 15:08:43 -0400 (EDT)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.theatre.musicals
Size: 5,244 bytes

Maureen Dezell, Globe: the show is a 36-actor, 21-musician rendering of
Meredith Willson's beloved tale. The show's national tour, which has
been on the road since October 2001, is the springtime headliner in a
2002-03 Broadway in Boston season lineup that includes ''Medea,''
''Mamma Mia!,'' and ''The Producers.'' "The Music Man'' is a non-Equity
production. Its actors are not members of the union; the players in the
orchestra don't belong to the American Federation of Musicians. Protests
haven't dissuaded many ticket buyers from seeing the show. In Boston,
the union won't raise a public fuss. According to the show's presenters
ticket prices are lower than usual because the show isn't an Equity
production. ''This is a reproduction by a terrific organization of a
successful New York production that's gotten terrific notices,'' says
Tony McLean, president of Broadway in Boston. Tours of Broadway shows
across North America account for more than half the industry's total
ticket receipts, according to the League of American Theatres and
Producers.
And battles over the cost of union labor reached Broadway this season,
when a strike by musicians and supported by other theater workers
briefly shut down New York's major stage musicals. Producers and union
representatives disagreed over the minimum number of players required in
a Broadway orchestra pit. In fact, non-Equity shows have made stops at
downtown Boston theaters for a long time, points out Wang Center for the
Performing Arts president Josiah Spaulding, citing recent runs of
''Cats'' and the 2000 ''Annie.'' ''I've gotten good reviews for
non-Equity shows and bad reviews for Equity shows,'' he says.
But in the past, a road show would come first in a union tour and return
in a non-Equity version. For example, ''Miss Saigon,'' scheduled for
next season at the Wang, is coming in a nonunion version, but it played
Boston earlier in a union tour. Produced by a company called Big League
Theatricals, ''The Music Man'' is the first successful national
non-Equity tour of a recent Broadway hit to play multiple nights in
top-tier theater towns such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and now
Boston. The minimum weekly salary for actors in the show is between $400
and $450 a week, according to union figures and information provided by
Big League executive director Dan Sher.
If housing, travel, a percentage of health-insurance coverage, and
bonuses are added in, the ''carrying costs'' of a nonunion actor are
approximately $1,000 per week, says Sher. To Broadway in Boston
president Tony McLean, pragmatism is the guiding principle. It's become
prohibitively expensive to replicate a large-scale Broadway musical that
was not a blockbuster, he says, in large part because labor costs have
escalated so dramatically since the early 1990s. ''There are a whole lot
of people in River City,'' says McLean, referring to the ''Music Man''
cast. According to McLean, presenting a nonunion ''Music Man'' helps
keep ticket costs down. To see ''The Music Man'' will cost less than to
see another Broadway in Boston show -- the Equity ''Mamma Mia!,'' which
closed yesterday at the Colonial. The old rules of the road held that a
city like Boston hosted a national tour that was a near-replica of the
Broadway production and usually featured a star. A second-city tour of
towns such as Providence, Cincinnati, or Buffalo might boast a smaller
cast and scaled-down set, but it was still typically an Equity show.
Non-Equity producers like Big League got their start doing ''bus and
truck tours'' of one-night stops in small towns such as Edmond,
Oklahoma, and Tyler, Texas, says Sher. ''Gradually, the shows got better
and more sophisticated, and eventually a lot of presenters felt that
what we did was good enough to play in big cities.'' Equity executive
director Alan Eisenberg told his membership last year that nearly half
of the road bookings across the country were nonunion productions.
Having failed to persuade audiences to stay away when the show played in
Cleveland, Chicago, and Seattle, Equity abandoned its demonstrations and
attempted to organize the cast instead, according to Stamatiades. But
the cast voted, 28-8, against Equity last fall. It wasn't that that the
cast members are antiunion, says Pam Feicht, who plays Mrs. Paroo,
Marian the Librarian's mother, in ''The Music Man.'' ''Nonunion touring
is a stepping stone for actors, a way to cut their teeth.'' At the start
of the tour, ''the union's tactic was to denigrate the actors to try to
build support for [an Equity] boycott,'' Feicht says. ''They called us
part-time actors and nonprofessionals and said this [show] was not of
Broadway quality because none of us had ever been on Broadway. Well,
there are a lot of Equity actors who've never been on Broadway.'' When
the union began to try to organize the cast, ''suddenly they saw us as
talented enough to be in their union. I felt manipulated." Broadway in
Boston's McLean says he decides whether to present a show not on the
details of its employment agreement, but on its overall quality. He's
less concerned about Equity's union seal of approval, he says, than the
endorsement of theatergoers.
''If it's good, the public will buy it,'' he says.