Interview: Andrew Lowy Imagines What the Theatre Industry Will Look Like in the Year 2050

While the future of the theatre industry may look a little unclear as we forge a path forward through the ongoing health crisis, one thing is certain: Theatre will be back. The question is 'how?'. There has never been a more necessary time to examine what the future of theatre will look like, and there has never been more time to discuss it. As theatre-makers and theatre-viewers alike adapt to new ways in which theatre is being created and talked about, one theatre professional is using this time to examine and explore ways in which the theatre industry could, and maybe should, be changed.

Andrew Lowy, current Director of North American Ticketing for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, who has worked on 50+ Broadway, Off Broadway, National Tour and West End productions, is the founder of the project Theatre 2050- imagining what could look like in the year 2050. Through Theatre 2050, Lowy is using this time in which the future of theatre remains uncertain to write extensive think-pieces exploring ways in which the industry could be altered and improved.

Lowy has dissected everything from why he feels that the theatre industry should rethink publicly releasing Broadway grosses, to why the United States should have a National Theatre, and the future of global digital streaming for Broadway shows.

Read our interview with Andrew Lowy, discussing these ideas and more, below!

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How did the idea for Theatre 2050 come about?

Really what it came down to is, there are two inciting incidents. It was something that I thought about in 2014 when I was living in London. I was getting my maters over there, and when you're in that grad school mindset you're always thinking about the future, and I thought, "What if I do a bunch of writing about the future of the theatre?" It definitely started there, and when I moved back to the states I just kind of decided to put it aside for a while.

The second inciting incident was this pandemic and seeing, overnight, the industry go away in its existing form. I just looked at myself again and said, "What better time to be talking about the things I wanted to talk about than in a moment when we are literally not running, when we can decide, and potentially craft, the work we are going to be doing, and craft how we come back in the future. That's really what it came down to. I just looked at myself and talked to a couple of people and they all encouraged me to say, "I think this is the right time to do this kind of thing." So, I put the website together and started writing. It's what I've been doing the last couple of months.

Tell me about some of the topics you've been writing about recently. What do you feel most strongly about?

One of the things I feel really strongly about is the idea of digital distribution. I know it's something we talk about a lot, but to me, I believe it needs to be fundamental to how we move forward, and I think that it needs to be brought into [the process] as a part of the creation of a piece. I really believe that as we keep moving forward we need to create a model where from the very beginning, when we're producing a show, we need to immediately start thinking about the digital distribution of a show. So, if you're doing a Broadway show, that's a part of your initial capitalization, is how you're going to digitally distribute it.

And I would argue that we should start immediately distributing shows internationally. Domestically we could have another conversation about, but internationally is where I think there is such a huge market for Broadway as a brand, that if we can cultivate an audience digitally from an international standpoint, we're kind of priming an audience to understand that when you're coming to New York, you have to come see a Broadway show...It feels like we need to be using this kind of technology to our advantage, and see it as an advantage, instead of something that would take away from ticket sales, which I think we've proven at this point, it doesn't really do that.

How many of your ideas are being born from this current moment in time, and how many were ideas you had prior to the pandemic?

If I'm being honest with you, I would say that most of them were not [born] of this time, they were of when I was initially starting to think about these kind of things. I think they are being highlighted by the pandemic in this moment, but really, we should have been doing this twenty years ago when you think about it. In some ways we wouldn't have had the capability to do some of this twenty years ago, but ten years ago, a lot of this we could have been doing in limited ways. If we were just doing it in movie theaters in the way that Fathom Events has been doing for the last ten, twenty years. We could have been doing that with Broadway shows being shown from Jakarta to Tokyo this whole time. But the model is not set up to do that right now. And I think that in this moment, when we've seen the extreme, it's time to figure that out, how you actually can do that. And by the way, that is not an easy task, there are a lot of brilliant people who are going to have to get together to figure out, if we wanted to do this, how to do that. But this moment is showing us that it's worth having that conversation.

Which of your ideas do you think will be the first to be put into action once live theatre comes back? Is it digital streaming? Is it the idea of the industry not publicly releasing Broadway grosses?

I do think it is the digital part of it, because when we do get back into our theaters, we can take that moment to make it a priority to capture them so that if God forbid this happens again in the future, we start having that library of stuff that we can be marketing. But, to me, the last piece I did write, about Broadway grosses, it is very inside baseball and Broadway specific, but I do think [not releasing them publicly] would create an environment for shows to come back in a successful way.

We need to start judging our shows in a different way and we need to let shows have a chance to catch on before sales become a part of the conversation. We want plays to have their time to find their audience, which is a tough thing to do on Broadway in the best of situations. But if you were able to take the grosses out of that and let shows shout when they want to shout about their sales, I truly believe that's a better way for us to be coming back in this moment. Let the shows organically find their audience. We don't need to find out that Hamilton had a 4 million-dollar week to know that the show did a really great job. In my opinion that actually hurts Broadway in some way, because it sets a standard that no one else can live up to.

What do you think about where theatre was before the pandemic, and what do you think about where theatre is at now? How much of your vision for the future of theatre changed due to this current moment?

It's a tough question to answer because when you look from a financial standpoint, we were on track for another record breaking year, and obviously that has a lot to do with the record-breaking average ticket price and tickets being sold as high as they have ever been. But I think it's a tough thing to gauge considering where we are now and the fact that we just can't come back in any way. I truly feel that after all of this, people are going to want to have that live experience and come together. It's going to feel like a really unique experience, and I think the theatre is going to provide that in a way that other avenues in entertainment won't. But, I think it's one of these moments where there's going to be a shift in how we price our shows and expect what we can make from our shows for a little bit, given the way the economy is going to be whenever we do come back. So, there's going to have to be a temporary adjustment to what we can expect.

I think that goes for every industry, especially a live industry, and I think that's going to shape how we come back for a while. Which is also one of the reasons why I think that, from a gross perspective, we might want to not have that [releasing grosses]. Because we are really focusing on getting people back to being comfortable in large group situations again. And I think it actually might do good in that way, it might help bring in certain communities that felt that the theatre wasn't for them, that maybe felt that theatre was something untouchable because of price.

What ideas are you looking to dig more deeply into that you haven't yet written about?

I'm trying to write a bunch of general different pieces, but I have two different series I'm doing. I'm doing one about a National Theatre for the United States, and the second one is going to be all about theatre spaces, and really talking about what is the future of the live theater space? You always hear flexible theaters around the world or site-specific, but I truly believe after this moment we are going to be seeing a lot more of that. When we're building new theaters, I think there is going to be an insistence not to build theaters that are specifically proscenium. I think you're going to see some still, but I think you're going to start seeing theaters more where proscenium is one of the choices for that kind of association, versus that being the norm. I think that how we address some of those spaces is going to be critical as we come back, and people are going to expect a bit more from their spaces. So, that's definitely the next area I'm going to be going into, is talking about the new world of theatrical spaces.

Why do you think a National Theatre for the US is something we should have? Why do you think we don't have one already?

I was fascinated by that question, so I went through and thought out which G7 and which NATO countries have National Theatres, and I found out that every single one of them does, of some sort. Some of them have touring companies, some of them have centralized ones, like in Great Britain which is based out of London. So, that was the first question of how the heck does the US not have that? But for me, it's really about the idea of the theatre being at the center of a national conversation. I truly feel there needs to be a reshaping in communication in general, and I feel that theatre is the best apparatus to do that.

If you read my first two pieces about it, I talk about it as being a place for digital distribution so that we can show the rest of the country and the world different stories from different parts of our country, but also potentially having an in person National Theatre that would be decentralized, where potentially every year one state would get The National Theatre, and it would be focused on telling the stories from that state and those artists. As well as a third one which would be all about education. I really believe that education would be an enormous part of a National Theatre, basically trying to enlist an army of young theatre artists to go throughout their state to perform theatre for kids and other audiences. It seems like a National Theatre could be a gateway, and it also could be a really great jobs plan to help emerging theatre artists gain their footing in this world.

How much hope do you have that these ideas will be put into action?

If you would have talked to me before March 12th, I would have had a bit more of a pessimistic view on it. Just because when you're in that mode and the industry is chugging along, there isn't a lot of reflection to be done. Because you're seeing it in the sales, you're seeing it with audiences, especially international audiences growing on Broadway, you don't really see the need for [change]. I think after this we need to evaluate everything. And that's why this project is my way of having my megaphone to scream out what I think we should be focusing on. I think that if there is going to be a time for this conversation to happen, it's now or never. I really believe that. And I need to do the best job I can to keep screaming out to people and see if we can get people to listen about it, at least explore some of these ideas. That's all I would ever ask.

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To read Andrew Lowy's pieces, visit: https://theatre2050.com//