Broadway Discovers Socialism, Keeps the Prices
The Tonys were lovely. Now can we talk about why taxpayers are being asked to subsidise a business model that rarely benefits the public?
Oh 👋🏼. I’m about 60 minutes away from landing in Calgary to open the BANFF World Media Festival. Not gonna lie, I sassed up my 45 minutes to a new level and it might be my best public work yet. We’ll see. If you’re around, say hi.
On the back of last week’s Tony Awards (no, I don’t believe you watched it either) we’re updating a piece from last September because New York appears to have discovered public subsidy and somehow missed the bit about the public. Inspiring work.
There is a kind of health that only accountants can love.
Broadway has had, by the usual measures, a very healthy year. The 2025–26 season grossed about $1.91bn, with attendance around 14.6m. The Tony Awards arrived, as they always do, to translate those numbers into feelings and keep Neil Patrick Harris off the streets for three hours. People cried. People thanked the theatre. People thanked their agents in ways normally reserved for organ donors. Everyone spoke beautifully about community inside an industry where the average ticket price increasingly suggests the community has been means-tested.
This is not a complaint about the Tonys. The Tonys are useful. They are the one night each year when Broadway shows us exactly how it would prefer to be understood: not as a business, not as a luxury product, not as a highly negotiated arrangement among landlords, investors, producers, stars and unions, but as a fragile civic miracle that happens to be a giant affiliate marketing campaign for American Express.
Both things can be true. Broadway can be a miracle. It can also be a machine. The problem is that the machine has started eating the miracle and then submitting the bill to the state.
In my earlier piece on Broadway and the West End, I argued that New York and London are not simply two versions of the same theatre market. They are two operating systems. London lowers risk before a show reaches the audience. New York raises the cost of survival after it opens. London buys time and Broadway sells it by the week.
That distinction matters more now because New York has finally discovered subsidy, in the way rich people discover trains: late, loudly, and with several notes on how the experience might be improved for them personally.
Good. It should. Public support for theatre is not embarrassing. The embarrassing part is arriving centuries late to the concept and then structuring it like a loyalty programme for people already sitting in the good seats.
Civilisations have understood for a very long time that theatre requires public support, with only occasional interruptions from men with spreadsheets and the moral imagination of a parking meter. Theatre is not an ornament. It is civic infrastructure, labour infrastructure, tourism infrastructure, education, public memory, shared attention and night-time economy. It is one of the few remaining places where strangers sit together and look at the same thing without the thing quietly rearranging itself to flatter each of them individually.
So the scandal is not subsidy.
The scandal is subsidy that asks nothing structural in return.
New York’s Broadway tax credit began as pandemic-era support and has since become something that perfectly explains the entire problem. The state has put serious money behind keeping productions in New York. The argument is familiar and not wrong. Broadway supports jobs, tourism, restaurants, hotels, taxis, bars, dressers, musicians, carpenters, ushers and the emotional stability of people who say “the room” and “the patrons”. If London is making itself cheaper and safer as a place to launch shows, New York cannot simply stand there in a fitted tuxedo and hope nostalgia wins.
But public money is not fairy dust. A subsidy can do two very different things. It can create the conditions for work the market would not otherwise support. Or it can arrive after the market has already chosen the safest, richest, most legible things available and ask if anyone needs a little cushion for the downside.
One is public R&D and the other is aftercare for incumbents with better seats.
That is what makes New York’s recent moves so uncomfortable. The issue is not that Broadway receives public money. Again: fund the arts. Fund them properly. Fund them without the apologetic little cough that now accompanies every defence of public culture in America. The issue is that credits have flowed to major media companies and billionaire producers.
This does not make every credit indefensible. Nor does it require the satisfying but lazy conclusion that large companies are inherently disqualified from public support. The point is not that rich people should be banned from producing theatre, tempting as that may be.
The point is design.
If public money enters Broadway without changing what Broadway rewards, it does not fix the loop, it simply stabilises it.
And the loop is now quite plain. High weekly costs force high ticket prices. High ticket prices make audiences more cautious. When disappointment costs hundreds of dollars, people reach for what they already know: the star, the film title, the revival, the jukebox, the celebrity, the brand with enough name recognition to survive group sales. Producers then programme more familiarity because familiarity is what makes the economics look survivable. The slate narrows. Prices rise. Theatre becomes less of a habit and more of a planned exception. Then, when the system becomes too expensive to sustain the risk that made Broadway matter, it asks the public to help preserve the system.
This is not quite a bailout but something far more intimate. It is Broadway asking to be rescued from the consequences of being Broadway.
The Tonys sit in the middle of this because the Tonys are Broadway’s annual Saved by the Bell caffeine-pill episode: immaculate hair, rehearsed optimism, and the unmistakable sense that everyone is trying to turn panic into a production number. A show makes it through the machine, and then the machine holds a ceremony to celebrate the fact that it did not kill it. Everyone applauds. Someone thanks their high school drama teacher. Nobody thanks the weekly nut.
This is not an argument against the artists.
The artists are the reason any of this still matters. The performers, writers, designers, musicians, stage managers, dressers, carpenters, crew and front-of-house staff are not the problem. They are the people holding the cultural value in place while the economics destroy it at the same time.
A record-grossing Broadway can still be a narrowing Broadway. In fact, the two may now be connected. The more expensive the room becomes, the more it rewards work that arrives pre-approved. The more it rewards pre-approved work, the harder it becomes for new work to enter without celebrities or established IP attached. The harder new work is to produce, the more Broadway points to the familiar things that survive and The Broadway League gets to publish that ridiculously shallow annual report. Data without a point of view or teeth helps no one, and in fact becomes complicit in the industry’s continual creative decline. A record gross tells us money moved but not whether the form widened, whether access improved, whether original work had more runway, whether audiences became more adventurous, or whether Broadway has simply become more efficient at charging more people more money for things they already recognise.
This is how a culture market can look full while becoming less available to surprise.
London is not a fantasy of artistic purity.
It has premium pricing, landlord power, celebrity casting, commercial nervousness and, presumably, at least one man saying “audiences know the film” at any given moment. But the point of London’s support system is that it changes the starting conditions. Theatre Tax Relief works more like production R&D. It lowers risk before a show has completely proved itself. It creates runway. It gives producers more room to develop, open, adjust, discover and transfer.
New York’s danger is that it copies the vocabulary of subsidy without copying the logic of public purpose. The test should be simple: did the money create theatre that would not otherwise exist, and did it make that theatre easier for ordinary people to discover?
If not, what exactly did the public buy?
A serious Broadway support regime should be judged by three things.
Did it extend the discovery window, giving new or unfamiliar work more time to find an audience before the weekly economics made the decision?
Did it increase the comfort-price share, protecting a visible supply of seats that normal people can buy without first holding a household budget meeting?
Did it increase repertoire entropy, making the slate broader, stranger, riskier and less dependent on the same revolving categories of revival, celebrity, adaptation and brand?
If the answer is no, then the policy is not correcting Broadway’s very broken system.
A tax credit that supports smaller producers, original work, Off-Broadway pathways, regional circulation, longer runways, protected cheap seats and recycled upside when a hit recoups is cultural infrastructure.
A tax credit that helps expensive shows remain expensive, familiar shows remain familiar and powerful players remain insulated is something else. It may support jobs, and it may help keep the district busy, and it may even be politically defensible in parts, but it should not be mistaken for artistic renewal.
That distinction matters because Broadway’s real threat is not death. Death would be dramatic, which is one thing Broadway still knows how to sell. The more plausible future is stranger: Broadway continues to glitter, gross, nominate, revive, extend and congratulate itself while continually pushing all new American work to London.
A culture can sell out and still hollow out.
So yes, fund theatre. Fund it seriously. Fund it proudly. Fund it as if stages are engines, not ornaments. But do not ask the public to underwrite Broadway’s nostalgia for itself.
Ask the public to underwrite what Broadway does not yet know how to recognise. The next strange thing. The first risky thing. The show without a film title, a celebrity or a brand deck. The work that needs time before it becomes obvious.
That is what subsidy is for — not to keep the expensive machine expensive but to make room for the thing the machine would otherwise kill.