Musical Midas Touch

The world’s greatest public theatre companies are making fortunes out of blockbuster commercial musicals they develop in-house. Peter Gotting looks at how monster hits such as Hamilton, Les Misérables, A Chorus Line and Matilda are bankrolling not-for-profit organisations.

When Muriel’s Wedding the Musical takes to the stage in November, the Sydney Theatre Company will be hoping to repeat the success of another Australian film-cum-musical: Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Although long finished in Australia, Priscilla is still running in Spain, France, South Africa, Hong Kong and on a cruise ship.

It’s tough to create a long-running show. But the STC has one advantage: it receives government funding. Some of the biggest musicals in recent years - both with critics and audiences - have come out of public theatre companies in the US and UK. The best example is Hamilton, the rap musical about the founding fathers of the United States that’s breaking Broadway records. It was created by New York’s Public Theater, also responsible for another unlikely success, Fun Home.

“Fun Home and Hamilton are probably the two most successful musicals we’ve had since A Chorus Line and Bring in da Noise,” the Public’s venerable artistic director Oskar Eustis told the Los Angeles Times. “But they are the product of a bunch of other things — a whole history — we’ve been developing here.”

Ask a publicly funded theatre company how it is able to create a hit and the reason is clear - it can take risks and allow its creative teams to come up with original ideas. That’s certainly the case for Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company, which is behind Matilda the Musical. The company says it’s able to create hits because it works on a number of ideas at once.

“Really it is a case of ensuring that we have enough plays in development and properly supported through the commission process so one can surprise us,” the RSC’s literary manager Pippa Hill told Stage Whispers. Matilda, which is currently in Perth as part of an Australian tour, took the RSC seven years to get to the stage.

“As a publicly funded organisation we don’t develop work with a necessarily commercial eye: so the art comes first,” Hill says. “We spend years developing our shows and we invest in a large number of projects and commissions.”

Matilda is not the Royal Shakespeare Company’s first hit musical. In 1985, the producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh sought out the company’s artistic director Trevor Nunn to adapt a French musical called Les Misérables. Nunn agreed only on the condition that he could bring in a team from the RSC, including a number of actors who took lead roles. Together with his RSC co-director John Cairn and other collaborators, Nunn overhauled the plot and script and came up with an idea that transformed the show: a revolving stage. 

Les Mis is now the longest-running musical in West End history (it’s still on, more than 30 years later). The collaboration between the publicly funded RSC and a private partner (Mackintosh) is seen as key to the show’s success.

The British magazine What’s On Stage has reported that by 2012 the RSC had made £19 million ($29 million) from Les Mis. It only earned rights from the show; Cameron Mackintosh made a lot more. But with Matilda, the RSC takes home a lot more money as the show’s primary producer. Last year alone, it banked £4.1 million ($6.7 million) in its reserves from that success.

All income from Matilda is ploughed back into the company. “It certainly does enable us to keep on resourcing projects at the research and development stage,” Hill says

Also enjoying huge success internationally is another of Britain’s publicly funded companies: the National Theatre. In 2016, the National’s production The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime became the longest-running play in more than a decade on Broadway, seen by 350,000 people. Here in Australia we’ve seen its hit productions of War Horse and The History Boys - and other plays are regularly screened in our cinemas through the NT Live program.

Just like the RSC, the National says it doesn’t produce shows with the specific intention of a commercial life. Only after a show has opened at its South Bank theatres in London is the decision on a possible West End or other transfer considered, says Kash Bennett, managing director of National Theatre Productions. “When we do find a show that we believe could be seen by more people, then we have a team of experienced people in-house who work specifically on transferring our shows outside of the South Bank.”

Last year, revenue from international productions made up about a fifth of the National Theatre’s revenue. But the company says it cannot plan these successes, as hits cannot be predicted.

“None of our shows that have recently gone on to global success were expected to run beyond their original limited schedule at the NT,” Bennett says. “These include War Horse, a play with a horse as its central character, People Places and Things, a story about a woman whose life is spiralling out of control because of her addiction to drink and drugs, and Curious Incident, a story about a boy with behavioural problems – I guess you could call any one of these a risky choice.”

The Public in New York also produces a lot of plays, from Shakespeare and the classics, to contemporary and experimental works. But musicals have proven to be particularly successful, at least in terms of making money.

“I don't consider that selling out,” the artistic director Oskar Eustis told the LA Times. “Musicals are the only form that actually holds up the possibility of artists making a living in the theatre. It is directly related to the fact that you can reach many more people with a musical than you can with a play.”

He says that even Hamilton, which received rave reviews and has become the hottest (and most expensive) ticket on Broadway, will not make as much money for the company as A Chorus Line. The Public was responsible for the original production of that American classic in 1975. According to the book Broadway: The American Musical, the Public’s Shakespeare Festival made $50 million from A Chorus Line. Not bad for a $500,000 investment.

“No one will ever make as much money from a Broadway transfer again,” Eustis says. But he suggests this may be a good thing because it’s a “lousy business model” to have just one commercial hit funding an entire theatre company. 

“The Public will receive income from both Fun Home and Hamilton that will help us, but there's never going to be a disproportionate amount of money,” he said in the LA Times interview in 2015. But since then, Hamilton’s financial fortunes have risen exponentially. Last year, it set a new record for the amount of money a Broadway show makes in a single week: $3.3 million (compared to around $1 million for many shows that do well - not to mention those that do not).

The National Theatre’s artistic director Rufus Norris has talked about the challenges when hit shows come to an end. War Horse and some other shows contributed massively to the company’s resources for a number of years, allowing his predecessor to redevelop the National’s theatres at South Bank.

But when Norris took over in 2015, War Horse was coming to the end of its West End run. That was a problem, he told the Observer, because “we had pretty low reserves and a model that was to some degree dependent on commercial income.”

These theatre companies are among the best - if not the best - in the world, pumping out a disproportionate number of hits. But they all say that while the big shows provide a huge boost and can even transform a company, they cannot rely on them. After all, hits cannot be manufactured. Instead, they need development - and all three companies say public money plays a vital role.

“It’s crucial,” says Pippa Hill from the RSC. “It allows us to take the time to properly develop shows through research, workshopping and testing out ideas until we are sure we have a project that should be taken into production.”

Kash Bennett from the National Theatre believes strong government support is key to the success of British theatre around the globe. “Public funding is at the heart of both the National Theatre and the RSC,” she says. “It runs through the veins of British Theatre and allows creativity to flourish.”

And both British companies say they never lose sight of their public responsibility. Organisations that receive government funds have other duties beyond creating commercial successes

“A hit show always boosts the company but we all understand that our main focus is not to make hits,” Hill says. “It is to create work with integrity that either challenges or reflects the world we live in.”

Les Misérables famously received bad reviews when the RSC production opened and there was controversy at the time over public money being used for such a commercial initiative. But Matilda was different - highly praised by critics.  The RSC has also had critical and commercial success in core business - playmaking. In recent years Wolf Hall and Bringing up the Bodies have played to rave reviews in Stratford, London and New York. Traditional Shakespeare such as Henry IV and Richard II have also crossed the Atlantic.

The Sydney Theatre Company has also made a mark in New York, thanks in part to its star and former artistic director Cate Blanchett. Now, the company’s workshopping Muriel’s Wedding the musical and is hoping it will be one of the company’s biggest hits this season. Like Les Mis, this is a co-production between a publicly supported theatre company and a private producer, Global Creatures. By teaming up with the STC, Global Creatures gains extra resources for development, as well as access to the company’s subscriber base. The risks are diminished.

But previous Global Creatures musicals Strictly Ballroom and particularly King Kong have failed to become bigger hits. A reminder that even with strong source material, it’s difficult to get the adaptation right. The best hope of creating the next big show is to get the creative team right. And with the film’s director PJ Hogan on board, alongside Kate Miller-Heidke and the songs of ABBA, they just might do it.

Images: Les Misérables 2014 Australian cast (photographer: Matt Murphy); Lin-Manuel Miranda with the Broadway cast of Hamilton (Photographer: Joan Marcus); Matilda - Australian cast (photographer: James Morgan); Fun Home - Broadway (photographer: Joan Marcus); Maggie McKenna in Muriel's Wedding The Musical (photographer: James Green).

Originally published in the May / June 2017 edition of Stage Whispers.