In early November, a few days after Local One of the technical and stagehand union IATSE had gone out on strike against Broadway shows, I was standing at the FOH position in the Hilton Theatre on West 43rd Street, a half block from Times Square. The Hilton is home to the musical version of Mel Brook’s film, Young Frankenstein, and was one of the few shows still running, as the Hilton Theatre’s union contract had been established separately from most of the others.
At the Meyer LCS digital console was Simon Matthews, the show’s front-of-house mixer and a union member (as are all FOH mixers working Broadway shows). We were talking shop a few hours before a Friday evening performance of the show — one of the few bulbs, along with some Disney shows, in the otherwise blacked-out marquee that was Broadway during the strike. I asked him if he felt odd still working when all the other theatres were ringed with picket lines. “It does feel a bit weird,” he conceded, but added that it was just one of the idiosyncrasies that makes mixing on Broadway a unique career.
The Strike
The IATSE strike lasted 19 days — far longer than the four-day musicians strike of 2003 — and its economic impact will be commensurately dev-astating. Box office takes have climbed relentlessly during the last decade, setting new records almost every year, including the 2006–2007 season, when audiences paid $939 million to see an array of shows, including a bumper crop of musicals, that have made FOH mixers some of Broadway’s most crucial technicians. And all this happened at a time when recorded music sales continued to spiral downward. Worse, the strike was timed, purposefully or not, to coincide with the start of Broadway’s busiest season: the period from Thanksgiving week through New Year’s. This time period often sustains shows through the winter doldrums, when tourists avoid New York’s chill and snow.
But it got worse. The IATSE strike began days after the Writers Guild of America’s own walkout. While the WGA’s work action had been mainly read in a Hollywood context, television was that strike’s first casualty. The “perfect storm” of labor unrest was due to begin in mid-November, when newswriters at CBS television voted to strike as well, thereby reducing news anchors to reading wire copy during the nightly news broad-casts.
The Aftermath
At deadline, the theatres were again lit, but the other two work actions continue; however, the implications for live sound, and for the pro audio in-dustry in general, were already apparent. Aside from the lost income to FOH mixers and other audio techs, several executives from pro audio manufacturers let me know — off the record, but in no uncertain terms — that the cumulative effect of these work stoppages would include cut-backs in spending on audio technology. On Broadway specifically, some speculated that a few of the marginal shows would close during the off-season, and that others in developmental or out-of-town tune-up phases would never set foot on Broadway due to investors backing off in the face of labor turmoil and an increasingly precarious general economy.
This all comes at a time when the music industry has turned to live performances as a primary source of revenue. It’s also a time of transition for sound on Broadway, as the theatres move toward digital consoles and more digital processing and control of the multipoint speaker systems. Carin Ford, who is mixing The Color Purple, is running Cadac’s Sound Automation Manager (SAM) on her Cadac J-type console. When she mixed Les Miserables a decade ago, Ford used a Cadac A-type console with no automation.
Given Broadway’s intense mixing characteristics, the 17 microphone channels the show used then stretched her to the limit. With more than double as many channels on The Color Purple, “There’s no way I could mix this show without automation,” she says. The shows’ audio is getting far more complex — Young Frankenstein has more than 200 sound effects, triggered by the FOH mixer, the backstage A2, the lighting console’s automa-tion, the conductor and the drummer. Anything that restrains investment in upgrading Broadway’s audio risks giving up the kind of technical so-phistication that has made this new generation of Broadway musicals rival cinema sound in quality and complexity.
In 1988, the last writers strike lasted five months; in 2003, the musicians strike darkened Broadway for a mere four days. But both devastated their respective industries. The Los Angeles Times reports that the writers strike could cost Los Angeles over $21 million a day, while Crain’s Business estimates that New York lost more than $5 million for each day of the IATSE strike. Now that live content is starting to reach parity with canned content in the entertainment business, there are no more sector barriers — what hurts one hurts all.
