Recombinant Broadway

Abstract

There have been important changes in the way adaptations have been produced on Broadway over the last 30 years. Earlier Broadway-to-Hollywood transfers like West Side Story were produced in the economic contexts of mid-twentieth-century Fordism. Today, the transfer often works the other way, with Broadway adaptations of Hollywood blockbusters like The Lion King created and maintained from within a set of post-Fordist logics that live or die by the buzzwords of synergy and convergence. Not surprisingly, media capital has a larger role to play here than previously. This piece examines the changing conditions of production on Broadway that are the result of media capital's arrival on to the field of live-theatrical production since 1980. These changes, which have occurred in other established and emerging theatrical economies, feature levels of standardization, routinization and workforce alienation that are new to the theatre. Against any impulse towards formalism, this paper suggests that Broadway purists are often unfairly intolerant of adaptations. Under the theatre's new conditions of global-industrialization, a hit show's generic origins – literature, the movies, television – do not matter nearly as much as the newly mediatized methods of its global reproduction.

Notes

1. Dates indicate the year of the original stage production's premiere.

2. ‘The road’ is Broadway terminology for the circuit of North American cities that regularly host touring productions of Broadway fare.

3. In addition to Burston (2000) and Russell (2007), see also Philip Auslander (1999), whose discussion of how, inside our ‘mediatized’ social conditions, ‘aura, authenticity and cult value have been definitively routed, even in live performance’ (51), provides an important counterpart to these discussions.