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The Great White Way Goes Dark
On Friday Actors Equity Association and IATSE national boards voted to support The American Federation of Musicians work stoppage against The League of American Theatres and Producers. At issue is the League's desire to eliminate minimum hiring requirements for musicians in Broadway musical productions, with the ultimate goal of automating all music aspects of these shows using a computerized system euphemistically described as a "virtual orchestra".
This is what happens when the people involved in producing Broadway entertainment come from the ranks of the multi-national corporate media conglomerates (Disney, Clear Channel, etc.), who have little interest in preserving the very characteristics that make the Broadway Musical a uniquely American art form. In this age where the axiom of "maximizing shareholder value" (read, "making as much profit as possible"), outweighs all other considerations, it's not surprising that these companies don't understand (or worse, don't care) that it is the interaction between the performer and the audience that makes the experience of going to the theater unique and worthwhile.
In their mind, the product is secondary; it's really about making as much money as possible for the least amount of expenditure. Hey, musicians are expensive; you have to pay them salaries, and health insurance, and worker's comp. Plus, they get sick, they make unreasonable demands, like having a safe place to work, or heat or the ability to see their music. Much better to buy a $2,000 laptop computer and some software to take the place of 20 live musicians, because after all, the audience doesn't REALLY care whether it's "live or Microsoft", so long as they can walk out of the theatre humming the tunes. Oh, and while they're at it, pick up some t-shirts, coffee mugs, souvenier programs, personal hygeine products and CD's in the lobby on their way out the door. So far as they're concerned, audiences are little more than consumerist sheep, who will blindly continue to pay already high ticket prices for the privilege of watching live actors sing along to canned music. And if they could figure out a way to get rid of the actors and still charge $100 a ticket, I don't doubt for a moment they'd jump on that opportunity as well.
That's what they mean when they throw around biz-speak terms like "leveraging the value of the brand" and "synergy", which is jst another way to say, "separate the sucker from the contents of his wallet".
Posted byCOMTE
on 12:06 PM
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