[NEohioPAL] From the New York Times; straight shows down, musical theatre up

[Christopher Fortunato]

December 15, 2008

Audience for Straight Plays Is Declining, N.E.A. Finds 
By PATRICK HEALY

The scattered empty seats these days at some of Broadway’s best-reviewed plays — including “August: Osage County,” “Boeing-Boeing” and “Equus” — are part of an overall nationwide decline in audiences for nonmusical theater, a new study says.
High ticket prices do not appear to be the primary factor, according to the report by the National Endowment for the Arts that is being released on Monday. Instead the Cassandras who have been fretting over the future of Americans’ dramatic appetites seem to have a point; there are more straight plays than demand for them, endowment officials said.
Since 1992 the number of people attending such plays in the United States has fallen to 21 million in 2008 from 25 million. 
The audience for musical theater in the United States, meanwhile, has grown to 37 million people this year from 32 million in 1992, the research shows.
Ticket prices do not appear to be a factor in the attendance trends for musicals either, the report’s authors said. Using statistical models that factored in price increases in theater subscription packages and single-ticket sales, the authors found that even a 20 percent price increase would reduce total attendance by only 2 percent.
Nor does it appear that a lack of theatrical companies is a significant problem. On the contrary, the number of nonprofit theaters nationally, for instance, more than doubled over the 15-year period that the endowment studied: there were 1,982 nonprofit theaters in 2005 with annual budgets of at least $75,000, up from 991 such theaters in 1990, according to the report.
And new theaters appear to be opening everywhere. From 1990 to 2005 the most significant growth rates of nonprofit theaters, in order, have been in Nevada, Arkansas, Utah, Colorado, Idaho and Mississippi, states with relatively small populations that have historically had modest numbers of theaters.
Over all, endowment officials said, the demand for nonmusical theater simply is not what it used to be.
“In a sense, the dilemma of nonprofit theater can be simply summarized — supply has outstripped current demand,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the national endowment, wrote in a preface to the report. “The remarkable growth and professional management of theatrical organizations across the nation has not yet been matched by equally robust growth in audiences.” 

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 
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