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'Music Man' tour boycott urged
Monday, August 20, 2001
By JOE ADCOCK
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER THEATER CRITIC
Actors Equity, the union that represents Broadway performers, is calling for a boycott of a "Best of Broadway" production that is scheduled to play the Paramount Theatre in June of next year.
The show is a touring production of "The Music Man."
"We're not saying that the 'Music Man' tour actors are not talented," Equity spokesman David Lotz said in a phone interview from New York last week. "But none of them has any Broadway experience. To market the show as 'The Best of Broadway' is misleading."
A revival of "The Music Man" is in fact running on Broadway. Its cast members are represented by Actors Equity.
"For the public," Lotz said, "the significance is this: they are paying Broadway tour prices for a certain level of quality that you get with a cast of actors who have Broadway experience. But the public is not getting that."
But Drew Murphy, general manager of the Seattle office of Clear Channel Entertainment, the company that supplies productions for the Paramount, said ticket prices for the "Music Man" would be lower than for other productions in the coming year, "something like $50 top compared with $54 or $55 top."
Murphy said that presenters around the country were eager to offer a touring version of "Music Man" but the New York producers found that an Equity cast version would be "cost prohibitive."
"But we are sure that this will be a high-quality production," Murphy said. "The direction and choreography are by Susan Stroman, the same as the Broadway show."
The "Music Man" tour starts in Des Moines, Iowa, in October and plays 21 cities before closing in San Antonio next August. The tour cities, with the exception of Philadelphia, Chicago and Seattle, are not the sorts of theatrical magnets that would normally attract a Broadway Equity tour.
The "boycott" entails informational leafleting and calls for other AFL-CIO union members to not patronize the production, Lotz said.
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