PI ONLINE:
12-10-04

One of the most revived dramas on Broadway was back again last month: labor negotiations between producers and the various unions. The latest was with the stagehands, who, after working without a new contract since Sept. 1, “reached an agreement early yesterday on a new three-year contract,” as the New York Times duly noted on Nov. 24.

For the record, a contract reached “early yesterday” meant that the agreement was “brokered at 4:45 a.m. after nearly 19 hours of talks.” (If any union contract was ever brokered around midday, after an hour and a half lunch, it wasn’t in the theatre business.) The new contract, reported Crain’s New York Business, covers “between 200 to 250 stagehands at about 20 productions.” The Nederlanders negotiated their own contract, separate but essentially identical, with the union the previous weekend.

This latest contract (which “effectively assure[s] labor peace on Broadway at least through the spring of 2007”) seemed relatively straightforward. It “includes annual three percent pay increases, as well as increases in benefit contributions.” Much more difficult, you may recall, was the musicians contract dispute, which led to a four-day strike over the summer.

Speaking of music and unions, the Wall Street Journal editorial page offered its own rather bitter take on the stagehands on Nov. 17. Barbara Jepson, who writes about classical music for the Journal, took a classically conservative swipe at IATSE Local One, writing about how at “a time when classical music organizations are struggling to balance budgets and attract new audiences” union-related production costs “increase the fund-raising burden and inhibit creativity in concert presentation.”

Jepson details various ways that unions clean up on the classical music scene, focusing on their salary guarantees: “In both New York and Los Angeles, cities with a strong entertainment-industry presence, stagehands’ wages approach record-setting levels for blue-collar workers,” she complains, noting that “Carnegie [Hall] stagehand and properties manager Dennis O’Connell made between $309,000 and $344,000 annually…[t]hat’s more than some principal players in major symphony orchestras.”

This is a tricky business for us artist types. By agreeing that this props manager’s salary is exorbitant (and it sure does sound like a lot) are we denigrating his contribution to Carnegie’s artistic output? Nor should we forget that our own unions and associations—SAG, AFTRA, the Dramatists Guild, etc. etc.—are often on shaky ground, and rely on the support of unions like IATSE Local One.

At the end of the day, it’s probably wiser to be on the side of the guy holding the wrench.

Department of Predictable Headlines

Play title: Doubt, by reliable Off Broadway favorite John Patrick Shanley.

Critical reception: overwhelmingly positive.

Variety in headlines: exceptionally poor.

Examples: “No Doubt, it’s a hit” (New Jersey Star Ledger)… “Topical, Yes, But don’t Doubt Play’s Quality.” (Daily News)… “FIRST-RATE DRAMA, NO DOUBT ABOUT IT” (New York Post)… “No doubt, Father, we have our doubts” (Newsday).

And finally, the exception that proves the rule: “Shanley’s Doubt a Terrific Play” (Associated Press).

Life of George

The New Yorker, as is the New Yorker’s wont, provided a long, insightful profile of George S. Kaufman in their November issue. The occasion was the publication, by the Library of America, of “Kaufman & Co.,” a new volume of nine of the playwright’s greatest works, all written in collaboration with someone or other. (The same book inspired a loving tribute by Woody Allen in a recent edition of the “New York Times Book Review.”)

The profile, by Robert Gottleib, is a wonderful journey through Hollywood and Broadway history. Fans of the Marx Brothers might be disappointed to hear that, for Kaufman (who wrote the scripts for The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers), “Working with the Marxes was hell all the way—at the first reading of the Cocoanuts script, Harpo and Chico fell asleep.” Ouch. “Besides, Kaufman said, ‘How can you write for Harpo? What do you put down on paper? All you can say is ‘Harpo enters,’ and then he’s on his own.” Even funnier is Gottleib’s dry summation of the writer’s relationship with Edna Ferber: “Theirs was a fraught friendship and collaboration. Many people thought she was in love with him, but she was physically unattractive, demanding and aggressive—not qualities that appealed to him in women.”

What’s most interesting in the profile however, is that Gottleib, after pages and pages of summary and praise, ends on rather a sour note, suggesting that ultimately, Kaufman—easily one of the most successful writers in Broadway’s history—wasn’t that great. “Great literature endures, but even first-rate entertainments fade. It doesn’t take away from Kaufman’s genius for success or from the pleasure he provided audiences for so long that today his work reads like a footnote to literature, rather than the thing itself.”

Ouch.

Coleman: Already Back

Cy Coleman, who died on Nov. 18 of 2004, will open a new show in the fall of 2005.

Variety reported that on the 23rd, and they weren’t kiddin’, either. “Transamerica,” a financial conglomerate, “is returning to showbiz with the tuner Like Jazz,” wrote Robert Hofler on Nov. 23. “Creatives on the project are book writer Larry Gelbart, lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman and composer Cy Coleman, who died last week.” In the Variety article, Alan Bergman describes the show as “not a book musical or a revue or a concert, but rather a new idiom.”

Producing a Broadway show, by the way, is a new idiom for Transamerica, although a long time ago they were involved in the movie studio United Artists. But, Hofler notes, “[a]lthough Transamerica will produce the Gelbart/Bergmans/Coleman show from the ground up, the venture does not mark the company’s Broadway debut. That milestone came earlier this season when it rescued the musical Brooklyn, which ran into money problems after the Toronto-based StageVentures II withdrew from the project. Transamerica made a last-minute cash infusion there and took a producer credit.”

And speaking of withdrawing from the project, since the score is already complete, the composer’s death is not being considered a major problem for Like Jazz.

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