\n
In the following excerpt, Derek and John Johnson break down the revival of off-Broadway shows and the growing interest in having celebrities on Broadway.\u00a0<\/b><\/em><\/p>\nDerek Thompson: <\/b>You\u2019ve got this shift from the center of the heat map being 60-plus female ticket buyers from the suburbs to 35-to-55-year-olds who tend to live in the city or just outside the city. I get that. Can you explain to me how that demographic shift might have contributed to a content shift? Those demographics have different priorities. They have different tastes. They want very different things. How has the demographic shift become a shift in content and substance?<\/span><\/p>\nJohn Johnson:<\/b> A lot of it has been driven by the nature of where you see something. Before, 2000s, especially 2010s, off Broadway was struggling and\/or couldn\u2019t really break through because it was \u201cIf it\u2019s not on Broadway, it\u2019s not A-level. It\u2019s not top-notch.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nWe\u2019ve had a bit of an off-Broadway renaissance for shows that we\u2019ve done, as well as many others, where shows that are starting out in 200-seat theaters down in the West Village are actually more attractive to that new core audience because they\u2019re going, \u201cI don\u2019t have to go to Times Square; it\u2019s closer to where I live, whether it\u2019s downtown or in Brooklyn; and oh, look, Aubrey Plaza is doing <\/span>Danny and the Deep Blue Sea<\/span><\/i> in a 200-seat theater? I\u2019d love to see Aubrey Plaza that up close. Adam Driver\u2019s doing a play in the same thing? I\u2019d love to see that up close.\u201d That\u2019s been a big part of that shift. So the idea of someone spending $150, $200 on a Broadway musical when they can see a celebrity like that\u2014we also had Andrew Scott this past spring in the Lortel as well\u2014they\u2019re sitting there going, \u201cOh, well, the restaurants are better in the West Village, it\u2019s closer to my house, and I get to be in a more intimate setting. Sign me up.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nThompson:<\/b> You mentioned a lot of celebrities there: Aubrey Plaza, Andrew Scott, Adam Driver. When I was in New York launching <\/span>Abundance<\/span><\/i>, I believe <\/span>Othello<\/span><\/i> had just had its opening night; that was Denzel and Jake Gyllenhaal. I mean, it seems to me, as an outsider, Broadway has been celebrity-ified. What is that about? What is driving that demand for, and even supply of, celebrities in Broadway? Because it seems different than I remember from 20 years ago.<\/span><\/p>\nJohnson: <\/b>There has always been the nature of a star play every year, of big actors coming and being\u2014Julia Roberts in the mid-2000s came and did <\/span>Three Days of Rain<\/span><\/i>. So there\u2019s always been that. It has definitely been more juiced up in a way. And I think there are a number of factors of it.<\/span><\/p>\nI think it\u2019s driven by the nature of the change of how Hollywood does things. In the mid-2000s and early 2010s, you would\u2019ve killed to have any of the folks on <\/span>Friends<\/span><\/i> to be in your Broadway show, but they were on a contract basically for the entire life of that show. And also everything within that Hollywood system was driven on: You had to get on a sitcom so you could have 10 years of paychecks and then whoever knows how many years of residuals after that. You had to get into a <\/span>Star Wars<\/span><\/i> movie or a Marvel movie or anything in that way, and then you were also going to be jammed up in all of those things. Now, with the streaming revolution, the nature of that, even the biggest hit Netflix show doesn\u2019t do 10 seasons. They do three. It allows for more time.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd so I think you have those theater creatures, like the Denzels, like the Adam Drivers, who are like, \u201cGet me back onstage. It scratches an itch that I need to scratch.\u201d And then you also end up\u2014and obviously we had an amazing time working and partnering with George Clooney on Broadway in <\/span>Good Night, and Good Luck<\/span><\/i>. And then you have the George Clooneys and kind of go, \u201cYou know what? Let\u2019s do it. Bucket list. I want to take it all in.\u201d He came, and we did an incredible show up at the Winter Garden, but he also did the stage door, and he played on the Broadway softball team. He was all about the entire experience of it. He was sitting front row at the Tonys. Every aspect of it he wanted to take in.<\/span><\/p>\nI think that\u2019s also a big driver of it because people, I think you\u2019re seeing a lot of folks know that this is how they can\u2014in a world where every celebrity has a podcast and in a world where every celebrity does advertising in the way that they [didn\u2019t] do, I think Broadway is now a part of that. It\u2019s streaming, it\u2019s movies, it\u2019s Broadway, it\u2019s podcasts, it\u2019s doing promotions, and it\u2019s all part of the celebrity culture now.<\/span><\/p>\nThis interview has been edited and condensed.<\/em><\/p>\nHost: Derek Thompson
Guest: John Johnson
Producers: Devon Baroldi and Kaya McMullen<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.theringer.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the second episode of our two-part miniseries on the future of entertainment, Derek goes from Hollywood to NYC to understand why Broadway musicals are in trouble. \u201cWith the cost of staging song-and-dance spectacles skyrocketing and audiences drawn to older hits, none of the musicals that opened last season have made a profit,\u201d The New […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2090170,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2090169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/The-Future-of-Entertainment-Part-2-Whats-the-Matter-With.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2090169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2090169"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2090169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2090171,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2090169\/revisions\/2090171"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2090170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2090169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2090169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2090169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}