NBC Exec Robert Greenblatt Not Ruling Out Live Audience for HAIRSPRAY: LIVE!

In a new interview with Adweek, NBC Entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt shares his thoughts on the live programming presented thus far on the network, as well as plans to present HAIRSPRAY as the next live musical.

The exec says that he was highly impressed by what FOX was able to pull off in their first live musical attempt, GREASE: LIVE. "I thought Grease was fantastic, and the live audience was great in a lot of ways," he says, but quickly qualifies, "but it's not just as simple as having a live audience or not. We've done shows in the past where it would have been ludicrous to have extras in scenes laughing and applauding, like in Nazi-occupied Austria, Neverland or even in Oz. Should we have had munchkins or flying monkeys in the background going crazy after musical numbers? And if the audience isn't visibly worked into the scenes, then they're sitting in a big room somewhere and you just hear disembodied laughing and applause, which is when viewers at home would think we just added a fake laugh track."

However he doesn't rule out the possibility of adding a live audience to the network's next live musical HAIRSPRAY, explaining "If we can work an audience easily into a show, as I think we can in a lot of places in Hairspray, we will."

Choosing HAIRSPRAY as the next live musical project was a hard decision, according to Greenblatt. "It's hard to find titles that are really broad and popular in the musical world, that are available," he explains, "I'd love to do Wicked, which is a show that this company owns, but it's a huge asset, it's still in its infancy and it's going to be a movie, so that's not available. When you look at the ones that you can get your hands on, many of them are old-fashioned, and they're shows that I might know really well and like personally, but I don't know that the rest of the world does."

He goes on to explain that the success of THE WIZ ratings-wise "emboldened" the network to move forward with their fourth live musical production. "If we'd gone south [in the ratings], we would be questioning it because they are enormously expensive," he says. "Everyone thinks every media company just rolls around in their cash, but that [musical] is so expensive to do, and it generates a lot of advertising revenue, but it doesn't generate a lot of profit. So we can't just do these for the fun of them."

He continued, "What The Wiz did tell us is, let's speak to the diverse audience, in as potent a way as we can. Peter Pan was very white. Sound of Music was very white. And I think Hairspray is one of the few shows where thematically, it's about inclusion and literally integrating that music show with black people. It's a very uplifting, positive message, and there aren't a lot of shows where that's inherent. So that rose to the top immediately. Now, the challenge to cast it is a big one, because The Wiz did set that bar. I think these musicals do significantly better if you have big names. Not in every role, because it was so fun to discover [newcomer-turned-Wiz-star] Shanice Williams, but you've got to have some real marquee value, and that's what we're going to look for now."

Read the interview in full here

Photo by: Virginia Sherwood/NBC