Piece Published in Three Parts; Theatre District Notes Uptick in Ticket Sales
New York Man Writes 4,000-Word Op-Ed Explaining Why He Does Not Care About Broadway
Read more satire at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
NEW YORK — A 38-year-old content strategist named Marcus Webb has published a 4,000-word essay in a newsletter he describes as “mid-sized but respected” explaining in considerable detail why he does not care about Broadway, a position he has maintained for eleven years and which, he argues, is underrepresented in the cultural conversation despite being held by the majority of New Yorkers who do not attend Broadway shows.
The piece, titled “The Show Must Not Go On: Why I Refuse to Care About Times Square Theatre,” was published Monday and has since been shared 14,000 times, discussed on three podcasts, and cited in a Broadway industry newsletter as evidence that “the discourse has never been more culturally engaged,” an irony Webb has noted publicly and at length.
The Argument
Webb’s essay makes several points across its four thousand words. The first is that Broadway tickets cost between $120 and $450 per seat, making the art form “structurally inaccessible to the New Yorkers who theoretically give it its cultural authenticity.” The second is that the shows most likely to run for years are adaptations of movies, which he finds “circular.” The third is that the enthusiasm with which New Yorkers who do attend Broadway discuss Broadway with New Yorkers who do not is “a mild form of cultural coercion.”
The fourth point, occupying approximately 800 words, is that he did see Hamilton in 2016 and that it was fine. He devotes a separate section to what “fine” means in this context.
Response from the Theatre Community
The response from the theatre community was swift and, several observers noted, did not help Webb’s central argument. Theatre critic Nadia Okonkwo wrote a 2,200-word rebuttal in The New York Times Arts section, arguing that Webb’s essay was “the most sustained attention a non-theatre-goer has paid to theatre in recent memory.” Three Broadway stars posted about it on Instagram. The official Broadway account retweeted the original essay with the caption “Thank you for thinking about us.”
Ticket sales in the week following the essay’s publication were up 3.2% versus the prior week. Webb says this is a coincidence. The Broadway League has not confirmed or denied tracking his newsletter.
Webb’s Position
Webb says he is not anti-Broadway. He simply does not go. He says this is a legitimate cultural position that deserves the same thoughtful articulation as going to Broadway, and that the 4,000-word essay was the appropriate vehicle for this articulation. He is working on a follow-up piece about not going to the opera, which he expects will be “shorter, around 3,200 words.”
The Broadway League annual report notes that Broadway serves approximately 14.7 million theatregoers per season. The city of New York has approximately 8.3 million residents, suggesting that Broadway’s audience is substantially tourists, a fact Webb’s essay mentions in footnote 7.
All the essays about things people do not do: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Webb’s full essay indexed satirically at https://prat.uk/.
The Essay Industrial Complex
Webb’s essay exists within a well-established genre of New York cultural commentary that might be called the “principled abstention piece” — the long-form argument for not doing something that other people do enthusiastically, presented as a considered cultural position rather than a personal preference or a budgetary constraint. The form has antecedents in the “I don’t own a television” essay of the 1990s, the “I’ve never seen The Wire” piece of the 2000s, and the “I don’t use Instagram” essay that was briefly very popular before most of its authors joined Instagram. Webb’s version is distinguished by its length, its inclusion of the Hamilton exception, and by the section on what “fine” means, which several readers said was “the most honest part.”
The deeper question Webb’s essay raises — and does not answer, at 4,000 words — is whether a cultural position needs to be actively maintained and publicly argued to be valid. Most of the New Yorkers who do not go to Broadway have not written essays about it. They simply do not go. They are not making a statement. They are watching television. Webb’s decision to articulate his non-attendance at length transforms what might have been an ordinary absence into a cultural act, which is either exactly what he intended or a demonstration that in New York, even inaction can be performed. The theatre community has made a note of this. They will use it in the next marketing campaign.
Further Observations
It is worth pausing to consider what this situation reveals about the broader landscape of public life in this part of the world. The gap between announcement and action, between framework and outcome, between what officials say at press conferences and what happens in the streets, is not a gap that emerges from malice or incompetence alone — though both play a role — but from a structural mismatch between the speed at which problems develop, the speed at which political credit is sought, and the speed at which institutional solutions can be implemented. Announcements are fast. Press conferences are fast. Reforms are slow, unglamorous, and require sustained attention across electoral cycles, which is precisely the kind of attention that political incentives do not reliably produce. The result is a particular kind of civic theatre in which the performance of action substitutes for action often enough that the distinction becomes blurred, and in which citizens develop a sophisticated dual consciousness: they know what is happening, they say what is appropriate to say, and they adapt their actual lives to the reality rather than the announcement. This is not cynicism. It is a form of intelligence developed under conditions where the alternative — taking every press conference at face value — would be functionally disabling.
What changes this, when it changes, is rarely the quality of the plan. It is the quality of the follow-through, which depends on political will, institutional capacity, funding continuity, and the kind of incremental, unsexy progress that does not generate press conferences but does, eventually, generate outcomes. The countries and cities that have transformed themselves — that have moved from announced frameworks to actual functioning systems — have done so through this mechanism: not better plans, but better execution of ordinary plans over long enough timelines that the compounding effect of sustained effort becomes visible. The framework is not the problem. What you do with it the morning after the press conference is the problem. Manila, like many cities, is still working this out.
Also: London Mastodon community — https://mastodon.london/ap/users/116495249171626617/statuses/116756198642615566
SOURCE: Santa Claus