“She Loves Me”: A Broadway Show Made for Digital Aesthetics
The theater scene is going through another crisis of relevancy. For a slightly antiquated musical, online aesthetics can make it new again.
Once again, theater work is at a crossroads existentially. Many theaters are steadily losing money, and plenty of them have already gone under. Meanwhile, normal people are getting priced out of Broadway. People are sympathetic to these problems, and they have kept the worst issues from boiling over. Theoretically, there is a large enough network of theater people who knows a guy who knows a guy that can form any kind of audience.
Unfortunately, the limits of patronage have been exposed by the type of shows that are produced. Despite what they tell you, most patrons want to sink into nostalgia and escapism. Especially for community theaters, which are theoretically intended for the locals but are in practice attended by older folks more consistently. Younger and more tech-savvy audiences can pull out their phone and watch something like Hilda on Netflix. Not to mention that partly due to the 2016 election, the local community as a concept is viewed with more skepticism.
On the surface level, there’s nothing wrong with that. People will pay for the shows they want…
