After a Week, Broadway Talks to Resume Tomorrow

Photo by James Estrin/The New York Times

The stagehands’ union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, picketing Thursday on West 44th Street.

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON New York Times

Published: November 16, 2007

Tomorrow, the stagehands’ strike will have reached the one-week mark, and those who make a living on Broadway and in its shadow are still teetering back and forth between fatigue and anxiety.

A list of some of the shows currently running that are recommended by Times theater critics.

But tomorrow is a big day. Local 1, the stagehands’ union, and the League of American Theaters and Producers are to sit down for talks at 10 a.m. It will be first round of negotiations since Nov. 8, and the pressure is rising.

Along with the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving week is one of the busiest and most lucrative of the year. In 2006, Broadway did $23.3 million in business that week.

The general sense around Broadway, as producers have been reporting their losses to the league, is that the past week was rough but not disastrous. The loss of another week of shows — and the Thanksgiving week at that — and the loss of another week of paychecks for the people working in the shows are another matter altogether.

For a few shows — like “Wicked,” “Jersey Boys” and “The Lion King” — a dark Thanksgiving week would mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost profits. But those shows have huge advance sales that help ease the blow.

Producers of shows, like “The Drowsy Chaperone,” that have less money in the bank would have to take a serious look at the numbers before deciding to reopen if the strike continues for two weeks or more.

Then there are shows that are strictly limited engagements, like “Cyrano de Bergerac,” which operate on budgets carefully calibrated to the length of the show’s run. Every no-show of “Cyrano” is probably an unrecoverable loss.

With all this at stake, two big hitters are flying in from the West Coast for tomorrow’s meeting. Robert W. Johnson, a top labor relations executive from Disney, which helped arrange this round of negotiations and is respected by officials on both sides, will be sitting with management, though Disney’s theatrical division is not a member of the league.

Thomas C. Short, the president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the parent of Local 1, will be sitting on the labor side of the table.

Most Broadway insiders refused to talk about the situation publicly, either because they were directed to do so by the league or one of the unions, or simply because they didn’t want to jinx the talks.

Meanwhile, the rank and file of Broadway is feeling the crunch. More than 800 actors, from the chorus girl to the Hollywood starlet, saw their salaries this week drop to $405, the strike payment given out by the Actors’ Equity Association. About 350 musicians are receiving loss-of-work pay from their union. Local 1 would not comment on what the 350 or so stagehands on the picket line were being paid, but it is not what they make while working.

There is another, scarier prospect if there is a long strike: the possibility that theatergoers may lose interest in Broadway. The week after the musicians’ strike on Broadway in 2003, which cost the industry an estimated $5 million, grosses on Broadway actually surpassed what they were in the week before the strike. That was a four-day work stoppage, though, and it was in March.

“Everybody in the industry was acutely aware that getting people back into theaters after the musicians’ strike was a key priority,” said Jed Bernstein, the executive director of the league at that time and now a producer. “The habit of Broadway theatergoing for New Yorkers and tourists is not something we wanted anybody to break.”