It’s Past Time to Make Theatre More Accessible

These thoughts were written by Gabe, one of our 2020 summer interns. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue.

Another one of our interns wrote an interesting piece about Hamilton as well. Click here to read it!

Hamilton was added to Disney+’s growing arsenal of content on July 3^rd. Filmed over the course of three performances, Hamilton was shot on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York City in 2016.

The Mouse won the bid for the film rights to the show in February of this year, and speculation on when the recording would hit cinemas cycled through every possible option. The announced date was October 15, 2021, a full six and a half years after the show first opened to an Off-Broadway theater with 300 seats. 

And then the world sneezed, for lack of a better term.

It’s not exactly clear how much of a hand Lin-Manuel Miranda had in getting his musical put onto Disney+. The way he’s talked about it in interviews suggests he was the one who pulled the trigger. “We’re at a time when we can’t gather,” he said in an introduction to the show, “Because we can’t perform Hamilton live right now, the fact that we are able to provide this extraordinary film in its stead, it’s a real privilege.”

They only sat on a recording of the show for four years before doing anything with it. Now, I must concede, that is not entirely the fault of Miranda and the House of Mouse. Every single Broadway or Off-Broadway performance since 1970 has been recorded for archival purposes and are technically available to the public. The New York Public Library has every video catalogued for research purposes. The TV and Film Archive section of the Library of Congress in DC has every show available to watch for a fee as well. So, great, if you live in New York City or DC, you can see all the shows you want, almost whenever you want.

What about the other 300,000,000 people in the US? Well, if they want to see a Broadway show, they need to check off a laundry list of requirements:

1. Live near (or a reasonable distance from) a live theatre.
2. Wait for a Broadway show to go on a national tour.
3. Wait for a Broadway show to stop at the theatre they can commute to.
4. Be available to go to said performance
5. Buy wickedly expensive tickets for said performance
6. Watch the show.

Broadway already suffers this gross veneer of elitism. Rebecca Nicholson wrote “Anyone who goes to the theatre can see by a quick look around that it is still overwhelmingly posh and white and old, and the idea that there’s a strict code of etiquette perpetuates the notion that this is how it should be; that you can’t suck a Werther’s Original too loudly in case you interrupt that crucial bit of any Shakespeare play where everyone dies.” 

Hamilton may have disrupted the stage, but it certainly didn’t disrupt the crowds.

Cries that theatre belongs to everybody fall on deaf ears and will continue to fall on deaf ears until proven otherwise. This is not to say that proving Broadway’s elitism wrong is easy; in fact, it would be the most difficult thing Broadway has ever done in its entire history. 

What that looks like exactly, I can’t begin to imagine, but there must be a better way to see a show than shelling out several hundred dollars, digging through iPhone footage on YouTube, or waiting for a media empire to buy the rights and finally release a recording half a decade later.