BWW Blog: Peter Wayner - Channeling Indiana Jones on Broadway

One of the pleasures of reporting about Broadway is the deep history -- if you know where to look. And if you find the right place to dig, the material can be like a portal from a science fiction movie.

When I started investigating just how prices of the theater had gotten so expensive, I called up Tino Balio, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who has written extensively on the economics of theater and film. In 2012, the new production of Death of the Salesman was setting records with tickets for the hit costing $200, $300, $500 or more, and yet I heard that in 1949 anyone could have seen the play for $1.50. What changed?

So I started to call around to experts like Balio see if there was enough for an article. He cited the standard reasons why live theater is so expensive (the NYC wages, the real estate, the stars, etc.) and then said, in an offhand way, that if I was really curious, I could just go dig around in the archives at the University of Wisconsin where they had the papers from Kermit Bloomgarden. Papers? Sure, he said. The man who had produced the first version of the play in 1949 had donated what must have been a truckload of documents to the archives. The answers to why the theater cost so much might be buried in there.

To paraphrase Indiana Jones, 70 percent of history is done in the library. I called up Mary Huelsbeck, the librarian responsible for those papers, and asked what could be found.

And soon I found there were 70 cartons (6 of them oversized) and reels of microfilm. The smartest thing I did was hire her to help dig through the archives for the crucial financial records for Death of a Salesman from 1949.

There were plenty of the colorful memorabilia that can stand alone in a display case like playbills and programs. Publicity material from over the years is still eye catching. But there are also cartons and cartons of financial records and correspondence. There are contracts, tally sheets, and the nightly box office counts from the first play. The play sold out regularly then, and each night the treasurer recorded 550 orchestra seats, 338 in the balconies and 36 in the box seats. The orchestra seats were $4 and the last rows of the balconies was only $1.50.

How could they charge so little? The answer was in the budget sheets that Huelsbeck found. One page was titled simply, "Production Cost - New Arthur Miller Play." The numbers on this sheet added up to $75000. When I spoke with one of the producers of the 2012 play, he half-joked that the entire cost of the 1949 production was less than he paid for one newspaper ad and he was right.

It's a bit odd to think about a play by looking at these dry numbers, but each number has a story behind it. When the weekly budget from 1949 said that the musicians were paid $562.50, there were four musicians and one director who split that money each week. To understand what it was like to live in New York on those wages in 1949, I dug up restaurant menus and apartment listings.

Documents like these are just waiting for us in the libraries to give us a glimpse of what life was like. The archives aren't real time machines but until someone creates one they're the closest thing to it.

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