Why don’t we see more commercially released high quality recordings of Broadway shows? Here’s why…

A very good season on Broadway for new musicals means that 3 recoup their initial investment. In any given year you tend to have roughly 10 new musicals and 3 - 6 new musical revival productions. Of those ~15 productions only 1 or 2 ever make any profit.

This is why Broadway has generally speaking become artistically dead, with musical adaptations of films, endless jukebox musicals and pop star bio shows, and Disney. Producers want a slam dunk audience hit.

So you got crap like Jersey Boys, the Carole King musical, and Mrs. Doubtfire: The Musical. Chasing white Boomers’ dollars and increasingly Gen X’s money too (Jagged Little Pill, Beetlejuice).

No doubt, some of these film adaptations and jukebox musicals turn out okay, even great. Hairspray immediately comes to mind. But most don’t turn a profit and original musicals even less so.

So over the last decade Hamilton, The Book of Mormon, Dear Evan Hansen, and Come From Away are the rarest of Broadway musicals: Original musicals that turned a profit.

So this means that your pool of musicals that would ever even consider investing in a high quality filming over the course of a decade is fewer than 15.

The profit margin of a week of performances on Broadway is very slim until you repay that initial capitalization. It’s only then that you’d embark in broader investments into the property.

And of course, that’s a very risky investment. You’ve just spent two or three years (minimum) as a sold out hit in order to recoup that investment. Now you’re going to front the same amount of money for a filming and *hope* that recoups too?

When you get a show like The Phantom of the Opera that can kick off cash for decades, you don’t want to play with that. Because you will likely pay the losses on the film out of the stage production’s profit. Your film has to be incredibly marketable. A surefire hit.

That is why over the last decade Shrek and Newsies are the 2 Broadway shows to have a commercially filmed performance. They appeal to families and are very sellable. The final performance of Rent was filmed in the 2000s and it lost a ton of money.

PBS will step in under either Live from Lincoln Center or Great Performances and we have some nicely shot performances. They aren’t quite on the level of the commercial productions though.

And PBS is nonprofit so they can be a little bit more adventurous. We have the wonderful Kelli O’Hara production of The King & I recently and everyone should check that out.

You’ll also see many concert productions get released, such as Neil Patrick Harris in Company or Emma Thompson in Sweeney Todd. These are much cheaper to produce because they are not on Broadway; they are at a non-Broadway Lincoln Center house.

Broadway theaters are defined by the union contracts that they use. Those union contracts are vastly more expensive than the other theaters in New York. Not that theater artists make a ton of money even on Broadway, but often it’s 4x+ what is made off Broadway.

So to try to invest the millions into a commercial recording of a Broadway show is a risk most producers will not take, because there hasn’t been a profitable model in the past.

That makes what the producers of Hamilton did even more remarkable. They were taking a gamble with this recording, and Disney took a smaller gamble by distributing it to theaters, but look how that blew up in their face thanks to COVID.

We don’t know yet if the release on Disney+ has actually translated into profit, but sustaining more than 12 hours of wall-to-wall national trending words is impressive. You have to think it will make Disney, at least, think about a high quality filming of Aladdin and TLK.

Now yes, every show gets filmed for the archive at Lincoln Center. This is usually a camera on each side of the stage and the audience won’t even know the show is being filmed. Those recordings are basically a high quality bootleg. You wouldn’t release those commercially.

The Lincoln Center archives exist for research, basically. Most shows will also film footage for press reels. These are usually included in the initial contracts for the artists though, so they do not cost nearly as much money as a commercial filming.

Also, press footage, even if it’s high-quality, is made for a TV commercial or local news review b-roll footage. There’s usually no audience, and they don’t film a whole show.

So sadly, most shows live on only through their cast albums, and unless this Hamilton recording is a monster money-maker, that’s unlikely to change. Unless you have $15 million+ to invest to get a recording.