WAR PAINT Producer David Stone Honored with 2017 Green Broadway Award

The Broadway Green Alliance (BGA) has announced that David Stone is the recipient of the 2017 Green Broadway Award. The Green Broadway Award honors an individual, show or organization for outstanding achievement in making Broadway more environmentally friendly. The first Green Broadway Award was given to Jujamcyn Theaters in 2015.

David received the Award at the Broadway League's Biennial Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on January 30, 2017. It recognizes his consistent leadership: identifying an important challenge and tackling it, enlisting his staff to make theatre more environmentally friendly, sharing his results, and inspiring others in the community to take action.

David Stone is a leading producer whose credits include War Paint, If/Then, Next To Normal, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Wicked, Three Days of Rain, Man of La Mancha and The Vagina Monologues. In 2008, as the producer of Wicked, Mr. Stone organized a town hall at the Gershwin Theatre attended by over 250 theatre owners, producers, and professionals. It was following this town hall that the BGA was formed.

Since then, Wicked has continued to innovate: using rechargeable batteries has cut annual battery use from 15,000 to only 96; using water bottles and filtration systems has kept tens of thousands of plastic bottles out of the waste stream; and on-demand printing of Playbill stuffers has cut paper usage and saved over $25,000 a year. These practices and many, many others have been widely shared and adopted at theatres around the world.

Mr. Stone stated "The size of the carbon footprint of Broadway and touring Broadway is, of course, relatively small, but our impact is large -- or it could be. When the NRDC first started advising the Broadway Green Alliance, there was a two-fold mission. One, to reduce our carbon footprint substantially, which we've done. And two, to use our enormous influence with our fans to communicate how vitally important, and how easy, it is to join us in reducing their carbon footprint. So I implore all of you to work with the BGA to rededicate ourselves, to reach out to the wider world, to our audiences, and to ask them to join us. Before it is too late."

In the eight years since the BGA was formed, the theatre community has taken great steps to become greener, bringing together all of the theatres and virtually all of the shows on Broadway. Some BGA highlights include: all marquee lights have been changed to energy-efficient bulbs, saving money and energy. Many shows are now using rechargeable batteries, and there is a green captain at every show on Broadway. The BGA also holds four drives a year in Times Square: two for collecting textiles, and two for collecting e-waste. Finally, the BGA now has an active Chicago Chapter, and an Off-Broadway Chapter that gives yearly grants to Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and Independent Theatres to seed green improvements in their communities.

The Broadway Green Alliance (BGA) educates, motivates, and inspires the entire theatre community and its patrons to implement environmentally friendlier practices. The BGA (formerly Broadway Goes Green) was launched in 2008 as an ad hoc committee of The Broadway League and has become a fiscal program of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. The BGA brings together all segments of the theatre community, including producers, Broadway and Off-Broadway theatres in New York and around the country, college drama programs, theatrical unions and their members, and related businesses. Working closely with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the BGA identifies and disseminates better practices for theatre professionals and reaches out to theatre fans throughout the country, and through alliances, internationally. For more, visit www.broadwaygreen.com, or follow on Facebook: facebook.com/BroadwayGreenAlliance and Twitter: @broadwaygreen.

Photo Credit: Brian Estrada