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Is celebrity casting killing theatre? | Thoughts on the West End and Broadway stunt casting debate
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Mickey Jo
Now I feel like the conversation around whether or not celebrity casting, star casting, whatever you want to call it, is destroying theatre in the West End or on Broadway is one that I have been circling around for some time now without explicitly creating space for. But within the last week, the Stage newspaper here in the UK has run two entirely opposing think pieces about whether or not this is happening. And in the last couple of hours I've had two glasses of wine, so why the heck not? Let's talk about celebrity casting in theatre. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you are listening to this on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. Today we are going to be talking about one of the favorite topics of conversation for theater fans on the Internet. No, we're not talking about bootlegs. We did that not too long ago. No, we're not talking about ticket prices, although before too long we will again, no. Today we are talking, as we so often do, about stunt casting and not just whether or not it impacts certain shows and audience members, whether it is actually having an industry wide impact, with my question for you to answer in today's comments being do you think the casting of more celebrities on stage is ultimately wounding the theatre industry? And the reason I asked that question today is not just because of the two different opinion pieces recently shared in the Stage newspaper, one of which, the first of which originally asserted that celebrity casting was killing the theater and the second of which took objection to that position and suggested that no, of course it isn't. But it's also because it's quite a timely conversation to have both here in the West End where many new openings are attached to celebrity casting at the helm, not just in commercial theaters, but more and more so it seems, in smaller off West End, more traditionally artistically driven spaces like the Bridge Theater, like the Almeida, and certainly more and more so on Broadway. We've recently had a conversation about what's happening economically with the Broadway climate and how, you know, success is skewing towards star driven tickets and star driven ticket prices with fewer and fewer big new musicals recouping, but the most successful shows becoming short limited run star led plays starring. Whether it's, you know, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter or Jake Gyllenhaal and Denzel Washington, or the various stars of succession or George Clooney, all of those. And much gets said anecdotally about stunt casting, celebrity casting, star casting, whatever you want to call it. But today we're really going to dig into that and consider whether or not we think it is having a wider impact. As always, I will be sharing my thoughts about this, but I would love to know what yours are as well. Please feel free to weigh in in the comments section down below and if you would like to hear what I have to say about other theatrical issues and conversations, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel or follow me on podcast platforms. But for now let's talk about celebrity casting and whether I think it is killing theatre or not. So we are going to frame this around these two pieces that have been published in in the Stage newspaper. These are opinion pieces and the first came out of the annual Spotlight Conference which is all about casting and which I was actually invited to recently. I didn't get the chance to go but I was very intrigued and so I'm glad that this has emerged from that. If Only to give us, I think, a really interesting insight into the kind of conversations that were happening there. So this was published on October 22, 2025 in a piece written by Katie Chambers, but largely quoting Nadine Rennie, who is the co chair of the Casting Directors Guild, who spoke at the Spotlight conference on October 21st and said something to the effect of celebrity casting is killing theater. Now when we say celebrity casting, I think a disclaimer is important here because the meaning of this is getting increasingly warped. And I've seen people, and I said this recently in another video talking about some UK tour casting with Amber Davis in Legally Blonde and Carrie Hope Fletcher in Waitress. I've seen people calling that stunt casting. And to my mind if they are famous for doing things theatre or musical theatre, and that's what they continue to do, then I don't think that's stunt casting. And so when we talk about celebrity casting, I think it has more to do with bringing people onto the stage from outside of the traditional theatrical sphere. Those who do not have experience on stage, those who do not have a background on stage because they are household names that would be recognized throughout the UK or throughout the US and everyone has a different interpretation as to what that means. I argue with friends and I argue a lot with my stagey fiance Erin James about what constitutes a household name. Because if you can recognize their face from TV and you can't remember what their name is, that is not a household name. The name has to actually mean something. Nadine has said that casting household names in shows is killing the industry and mid scale theaters will be the first to go. She compares the proliferation of celebrity names on stage to feeding a child too much sugar and suggesting theatre goers are increasingly unwilling to take a chance on unknown work. And before we carry on with some more of her thoughts, it sounds initially like what she's suggesting here in is that it's a balance that has maybe begun to tilt in the wrong direction, that there is now just too much celebrity casting. It's always been a reality in certain corners of the industry. Certain productions, plays like 222 A Ghost Story have often indulged in the world of stunt casting. But I wouldn't disagree with the notion that it is now becoming more and more widespread. And it does seem that almost every show now needs to have some sort of a recognizable pseudo celebrity name. But we'll carry on and hear what else she has to say. She said, I personally think it's killing audiences intellects. Now that's controversial. She said, adding, I hear audience members say all the time, I don't know anybody who's in this, or they're not excited about a new play by an emerging writer. I also don't know, in terms of overhearing audience conversations, whether there's an inherent negative connotation to saying, I don't know anybody who's in this. I don't know that it necessarily suggests a lack of quality. It depends on the backgrounds of those audience members and what their expectations are. If they're people, people who go and see an awful lot of theatre, that it may speak to a cast of largely debuting, emerging earlier career talents or people who are less frequently cast on stage. I have one friend, interestingly enough, who sees so much theatre and sees almost exclusively theatre that when a big star name is in a show, that's often the one person who he does not know on stage and has no idea who they are, when you know the rest of the audience might have come just to see them and. And he couldn't tell you. And in terms of the comment around audiences not getting excited about plays by emerging writers, this I think is just a reality about the way that we identify writers and the way that we think of their work. And there are certain individuals who have become successful enough as writers or as creatives, those people who we don't see on stage, that people get excited about their work. And people, certainly avid theatre fans here in the uk, get excited about new productions directed by Rebecca Frecknell, who of course there is buzz about new productions directed by Jamie Lloyd. There are several other directors who have been working for years and years and decades who also carry a similar sort of buzz and a mark of quality. And for writers, I think people still get excited about new James Graham plays, but it is harder and I think where mainstream audiences are concerned, outside of, I guess, the world of fiction, I don't think there is that much of a connection with writers. If you were to ask about like the most compelling, the best written, BAFTA award winning drama series on TV here in the uk, it's often called, or at least in my experience you would often hear it called, like, oh, the new Sheridan Smith thing, the new Sarah Lancashire thing, the new David Tennant thing. It's not referred to by its writers in that world. I don't think a lot of films are either. Perhaps they were in years past when there was some more iconic and well known film writers when people would talk about like the Nora Ephrons, but I don't know, I don't know, if we have that as much in media and entertainment in general these days, and when it comes to new writing, I think we're really bad at that. Similarly, in the theater, you know, we can talk about the Chekhovs and the Shakespeares and the Ibsens, but I don't think we're good at profiling new writers regardless. And it's also, I think, something that feels quite connected to the spoken word rather than the sung word. This is another tangent we could go on, but we are so much better identifying musical theatre composers and lyricists than we are book writers. And we categorize those shows by their composers and not by the entire collaborative writing team. We call, and I'm guilty of this as well, we call into the Woods a Sondheim show rather than Sondheim and James Lapine. More words here from Nadine, who is a casting director currently working with the Gate Theatre, who expressed great alarm about the impact of the trend on mid scale venues. She said, I worry that it's killing the industry in the middle section. This because due to a lack of stars on stage in those smaller theaters, they were suffering from poor ticket sales, despite being places where household names of the future were cutting their teeth. She added, I know we're all trying to do our best to keep it going and do our best work and keep our integrity and our principles, but it is dying. And that's the extent of the quote that we have from Nadine Rennie here. And it's an equally interesting and troubling proposition because although I think the situation isn't quite as drastic as it is or on Broadway, the way the theatrical climate works in the UK is inherently quite different because our regional venues are because our country is so much smaller, less far flung from London. And so the impact of what's happening in the West End trickles down a lot faster. And it does impact regional venues. If there is almost exclusively celebrity casting throughout the shows in the West End in London and I I think it is entirely likely that a lot of other smaller, mid scale, smaller theaters are going to struggle in the face of that when they can't bring in that kind of celebrity casting either because of celebrity availability or because of budget and resources. And I wonder if some of this is also a new reality of the industry beyond and after the pandemic, which I think this piece is going to go on to talk about a little bit more with theaters having to find new compelling ways to incentivize audiences to come into the space to get excited about new Productions, you know, there are a great many theaters, there are only so many audience members to go around. And when we talk about celebrity casting more and more, it's not just the more blatant examples that you might be thinking of, but it's also places like the Donmar Warehouse and like the Almeida and like the national and like the rsc. Even a lot of these season launches recently have hung several productions on stars who may have worked on stage but are also very well known for TV and film appearances. Which is sort of one of the best examples of celebrity casting where someone has the chops, but through the wider body of work that they've done has also become a well known household name. TV series like Game of Thrones or the Crown are great for that because they often take stage talent or certainly stage ready talent, and they put them in, in these very theatrical types of TV shows and dramas and they then release them after becoming very popular and famous and then they are free once more to return to projects on stage. And so like Rose Leslie goes back to the stage, Kit Harington goes back to the stage, all of the Crown go back to the stage. But they have with that sort of become stars nonetheless. And it does feel then harder to be a smaller or a mid scale venue, especially when, and this is something else that you notice when you pay attention to British regional theatres. A lot of them do tend to license and produce many of the same plays. Gosh, if we have another regional production of Noel Coward's Private Lives, I swear to goodness it's a funny play, it's a witty play, it's popular with audiences, but it's done everywhere. It's done absolutely everywhere. That's before we start the conversation about doing the same Seven Shakespeares over and over and over. And it's difficult to be the Macbeth or the Private Lives that doesn't have star casting. When the one up the road six months ago did we have other professionals quoted in this piece as well? The next one is the National Theatres director of casting, Alastair Kumar, who labeled star casting the one way that theaters can guarantee a really hot sale upfront after Covid transformed ticket buying habits. Now what he means by this is that audiences are with less frequency booking tickets in advance. And I think this was just a big shift in the way that people manage their entire lives and the way that people plan ongoingly as a result of COVID maybe people are also going out a little bit less. Maybe there's more of a timidity around that. Either a conscious or an unconscious one. But it has been made very clear that people are not booking as far in advance for the theater as they used to. And to my mind, and obviously he has more data on this than I do, I would agree that the thing that gets people to actually engage with a show that is upcoming and book a little further in advance is a revelation of star casting, of celebrity casting. Because that would make me think, oh, this is going to be popular, this is going to sell. And if I want to see this before it sells out entirely, I am going to need to book a ticket. Otherwise, if I think there's going to be tickets available near the time I, I will still plan to go. But there is no impetus for me to book in advance. The only thing that is motivating me to do that is the fear of it selling out. And certainly there were a lot of tickets available for something like Jamie Lloyd Zavita at the London Palladium until the moment that they announced Rachel Zegler. And then the tide started to shift a little bit even more. So once it was opening and she was singing from the balcony and it was getting all of the great buzz and the word of mouth, then the tickets really started to move, then the dynamic pricing started to start soar into the sky like a hot air balloon. But what Mr. Kuma goes on to say here is people do not book in advance in the way that they used to. The national would put a new season on sale and we could rely on a core audience to book in advance for four, maybe five productions. We now know it's one or two. And celebrity casting is the biggest driver now for audiences. It's as simple as that. And in terms of how this is affecting those smaller mid scale venues, he continued by saying, it's putting a very huge pressure on the industry. Now all of us are chasing the same very, very small group of people. I know that Sheridan Smith's telephone must be ringing off the because she remains one of the individuals. You know, the Sheridan Smiths of this world, the Imelda Stauntons of this world, who continue to work prolifically on stage and command a lot of interest in ticket sales. The actual number of stars who can reliably attract an audience before the curtain goes up, Kuma claimed, is smaller than a lot of venues think. Producers quite often think it's a bigger group. You have this weird compromise where the casting isn't really satisfactory in terms of what the show really needs and is also not satisfactory in terms of the box office. And I would be A little more crass to cite a bunch of examples now, but I can think of some productions recently that have had to bring in sort of a couple of mid tier celebrities to try and garner some interest in those shows. And it still hasn't necessarily worked, I often say of this type of casting as well. It has to align with an individual's brand. And there are certain people who, you know, audiences might prefer to see in a musical than to see in a play. And so they sell better when they're doing musical theatre than when they're doing comedic or a dramatic play. Likewise, the tone of the play matters for certain people as well. James Corden doing a dramatic role at the Old Vic, which I thought he was entirely decent in, wasn't necessarily the hottest ticket in the world. But if he was to come back in a more one man, two governors adjacent comedy, I dare say that would sell a lot better in London because it aligns with his personal brand. The shows that Sheridan Smith sells out in versus the ones that she doesn't. Same for Damon. Melda Staunton. Also interesting to take a look at there carrying on. Indu Rubasingham's first season at the helm of the National Theatre boasts major figures including Paul Mescal and Nicola Coughlan. But Kuma also pointed to less starry productions such as the current ensemble led Bacchae. And he said, I'm not making this up. At the National Theatre, our conversations start about the work, what the play needs, what the demands of the space are, what the director has in mind and what the writer has envisaged. On which point he went on to say that although celebrity casting enabled theatres to funnel cash towards supporting new work, which is an important reality of the balance in the industry, that there are more commercial ventures and more artistically driven ones. And it's an important balance of those two ideas. And sometimes, you know, the cash cow pays for the. The artistic integrity horse, I guess. He said there was a danger that the industry could become less adventurous with writing and casting in the future. But unlike Rennie, he added, I don't think we're there yet. What I do have concerns about is that new writing is going to become more neglected altogether in favor of revivals and to jump the Atlantic for a brief moment and go and talk about Broadway. We are seeing comparatively fewer new plays featuring starry performers. And I am not counting that adaptation of the Picture of Dorian Gray by Kip Williams starring Sarah Snook as a new play. She was basically reading the book on stage that was A revival, to my mind, certainly all of the Shakespearean stuff, revivals. Glengarry Glen Ross was a revival. A lot of the plays coming in this season, you're waiting for Godos. A lot of the other stuff that has recently been announced or that is scheduled to be opening over the next few months, a lot of revival productions. That tends to be where you find the celebrity casting. George Clooney was an outlier example, co adapting a film that he had been attached to previously as a piece of new writing for the stage. But for the most part, that we're seeing celebrities in revivals of older plays. And so that, I think, does put a lot of pressure on new writing to try and sell nearly as well, which it's not going to be able to do, which is why I celebrate the actors who do throw their weight behind new writing and new playwrights. I think that's a really important use of anyone's celebrity and platform and something they can absolutely choose to do. Now, there is one final quote here, and that is from another casting director, Annalee Powell, who took aim at what she claimed was a widespread assumption that big name casting comes at the expense of theatrical talent. She said, I think that a lot of people think a star is somebody that will put bums on seats, but doesn't necessarily have the chops or the experience to be on the stage. And I so wish throughout this article, because I don't even know who we're really talking about here, whether we're talking about the kind of names I've already suggested, or whether we're talking about slightly less theatrically experienced performers, maybe those who started in theatre and then stepped away for a long time to go and do more screen work and then return less frequently. I don't know. I think it's very difficult to have these kinds of conversations if we're going to be so deliberately vague about the types of actors and celebrities that we are invoking here. She went on to say, it's quite hard to go to a regional theater and find a star casting where they haven't had some sort of legitimate stage experience. Of course, that does happen in certain things, but that becomes a conversation. It does the job of. Of starting the conversation. The flip side of it is the pressure that is on us and producers and regional houses to get Bryan Cranston to come to Birmingham for four weeks on £650 per week. And once you start to then bring a conversation about finances and salaries into it, then you start to see some of the challenges faced by those smaller regional producing houses. And I remember Imelda Staunton actually said at the press launch for hello Dolly that those were the theaters she was the most concerned about, that London had done a great job of, you know, coming back since the closures in 2020 and that more support needed to be given to regional theaters. And just like I was saying, more celebrities should be throwing their weight behind new plays on Broadway. Perhaps it's up to stars and celebrity names to do more regional theatre here in the uk. But I absolutely understand and agree with a lot of the points made in that piece and I think it does reflect a lot of very real challenges being experienced in the industry. However, do you know who doesn't necessarily agree is Lynn Gardner, who shared an opinion piece shortly afterwards, five days later in fact, in the same newspaper.
- [22:54]
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- [23:58]
Mickey Jo
So bear in mind the title of that first piece was Celebrity Casting is Killing Theater. Lynn Gardner's piece was titled Celebrity Casting Isn't Going to Kill Theater. Give audiences more credit Lynn Gardner, the prolific theatre critic, queen of the Edinburgh Fringe. Lynn said, another week and another trend that is apparently killing theatre and sending us all to hell in a handcart. Last week it was Daniel Day Lewis, who hasn't appeared on stage for 40 years, deriding theatre as being an elitist art form. Almost every other week it has complaints about rising ticket prices, mostly a West End issue. And the West End is but one part of theatre or audiences behaving badly. That's the other one that I didn't mention back at the start is theatre etiquette, which based on the fact that we haven't spoken about it in a couple of months, probably means that a new conversation about that is right around the corner. Looking forward to that flashpoint anyway. Lin Muses I thought it was a might rum to hear this coming from the mouth of a casting director because surely if there is an issue, as she suggests, casting directors are complicit and you know, like it would be unfair to criticize everyone for existing within capitalism. I don't think casting directors have have quite enough power to be able to shift casting trends, which sounds ridiculous because, you know, they are the casting directors, but they only respond to what is working in the industry, what is viable in the industry and what audiences are responding to. And I think the power on that front when it comes to theatrical trends remains with audiences and ticket buyers carrying on. Lynn said in difficult times we all want to find someone or something to blame for why things are tough, particularly when, as the National Theatre's director of casting, Alistair Coomley correctly observed, transformed ticket buying habits. As I suggested in my piece last week on independence, including the Wolverhampton grant, Terrific Theatre Covid has not dampened ticket sales everywhere across the uk. And we might want to think hard about why some theatres have been so badly affected and others largely immune, which is a really interesting notion. Circling back to the Daniel Day Lewis comment, she does point out that it's undoubtedly the case that successive government's failure to invest in the arts and our children's futures by prioritizing cultural education is inevitably narrowing who goes to the theatre and who makes a career in it. We don't as an industry help ourselves when we have closed hiring processes, which is a sort of an interesting and necessary sideswipe at another industry problem that was recently noted. There was some sort of a statistic that was released about the number of backstage roles that go to individuals already working with different people, and how that as much as anything else else, was a section of the industry where it wasn't what you knew, it was who you knew and it was harder to really break into. Lyn, who had nothing but time today, it seems, is next taking on ticket prices. She said some producers are indeed greedy souls and are taking the pit with pricing. But in many cases higher prices reflect higher costs and inflation. And you have to acknowledge when it's an industry wide problem, when it's happening in the West End and on Broadway, that there has to be some truth to the realization that it is because everything is getting simultaneously more expensive for a handful of reasons. She says those decrying rising Western ticket prices might reflect on how a carton of orange juice in the UK has increased in price by 134% in the past five years, far more than theater tickets. Then there is the endless focus on audience behavior. Lynn is Lin is having a rant today in the stage newspaper and listen, I've been there. This was me on TikTok over the weekend. She concludes this paragraph by saying, even the tiniest audience indiscretion is liable to end up plastered across social media as evidence of the end of civilization. I don't know what you mean, Lynn Gardner I'm not guilty of that at all. So let's turn to celebrity casting. The car's back on the road, an issue that has been vexing people for years, certainly since Nicole Kidman caused a stir by starring in the Blue Room at the Donmar. I wonder what some of the earliest examples of celebrity in casting would be. And I'm not just talking about people who became stars for their work on the stage. Your Gielguds, your Oliviers, even the actors in Elizabethan times. Certainly it would have to be mid 20th century onward by the time that, you know, we're experiencing a golden age of Hollywood and cinema. I wonder who some of the first egregious movie stars to make their way onto the stage were. Some people, I dare say, who have fantastic memories will be able to provide some examples in the comments section of this video as well. What do you imagine might have been the earliest version of of stunt casting? But in answer to the question of whether or not this type of casting was killing audience intellects and killing the industry in the middle section, Lyn said, I'm not entirely convinced that a potential audience member thinking of going to Leeds Playhouse for the Transform Festival or Frantic Assembly's Lost Atoms, written by Anna Jordan, currently touring the uk Name dropped there is suddenly going to say, hell no, I'll go and see Shadowlands instead, because it's got that nice man from Downton Abbey. Or I've always thought that Chris Pine was a shoe in for Ivanov and wasted in Star Trek theater's strength, that it has many courses for many different horses. Yet another horse metaphor here. And the Chris Pine example is an interesting one. The Bridge being one of those theaters that I mentioned earlier that does seem to have tilted a little bit towards the world of starry and celebrity casting. And it's hard to begrudge the casting of someone like Jonathan Bailey in Richard ii, because he really got his start on stage. I saw some of his earliest work before he became the celebrated film franchise heartthrob that he is now that we've all fallen in love with yet again. But even the current player, Lucia Vikander Being not the only star name attached to the lady from the Sea. And you know, with Chris Pine set to come to the venue in the new year, that's some very interesting casting. I don't know that it feels as though into the woods has anything that you would call celebrity casting. It's certainly like pedigree pristine, high quality musical theater actor casting, but it doesn't feel like it's celebrity driven. I also think there's room for Nadine and Lin to both be entirely correct in what they are suggesting here and talking about completely different corners of the industry and completely different types of shows because all of the ones invoked here by Lin are going to be drawing an audience who aren't traditionally motivated by celebrity casting, because that's more of, of a theatre going audience to begin with, to be visiting those theatres to be seeing that type of work. I don't know if Nadine was talking about more examples that tended towards the more commercial, that being the frontier where we tend to really experience more examples of celebrity casting, but it's also a little unhelpful because I don't know what we're talking about when we talk about celebrity casting. Are we talking about someone who has been on Hollyoaks for a little bit? Are we talking about someone who has been in films? Are we talking about influencers who have never been on stage before? For what are we actually saying here? Lyn goes on to say, I've certainly seen my fair share of cynical celebrity casting over the years. What I would call egregious. Madonna in up for grabs, YouTuber Tanya Burr in Judy Upton's Confidence are two of the examples that she gives. I would add to that Lindsay Lohan in Speed the Plough and probably more that I have blocked from my memory. But the reality is, and this is interesting and pertinent, that you really don't know who will cut it and who won't until you see them. Nicole Scherzinger was a revelation in Sunset Boulevard. Sigourney Weaver a disaster in the Tempest. Same director, entirely different outcomes. Very interesting. And Sigourney Weaver of course, being the far more experienced actress, admittedly in a more exposed acting role, doing Shakespeare rather than largely sung through musical theatre. She also points out some of the benefits of celebrity casting when she says more high profile performers can ensue, that great plays get a wider audience. Paul Mescal's stint in A Streetcar Named Desire brought Tennessee Williams to a whole new audience. And it would be churlish to complain about celebrity guest performers in an Oak Tree, White Rabbit, Red Rabbit or Duncan macmillan's Every Brilliant Thing if those guests are up to the job and if their presence broadens the potential audience for that work, or maybe even gives audiences a taste for something different. Now those first two examples are, I believe, both shows where celebrity guests who are a surprise perform in the show each night and aren't previously familiar with the script. Whereas Every Brilliant Thing has a rotating cast of five different celebrity performers who were performing the play in rep because the play itself is this one person very malleable script, but they would have rehearsed it before going on stage. So it's a slightly different example. Lynn Gardner finishes by saying, I'd give audiences more credit. They may be fans of certain actors, whether it's Alicia Vikander or Chris Pine, but they are not not suckers. They know when a Hollywood A Lister is falling short, and as the Weaver debacle proves, they will vote with their feet when they think they've been sold a pup. The problem is, they won't know that until they've already bought tickets, or at least until enough people have bought tickets to then propagate the word of mouth and people start to hear about whether or not it's good. 25 years ago, back in the year 2000, there was much wailing about the dominance of celebrity casting in the West End. The moment passed. It didn't kill theatre then, and it won't.
- [32:57]
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- [33:56]
Mickey Jo
Now, which brings us to something of a conclusion and perhaps disappointingly, I agree with both sides of this argument. And I think a lot of what they're saying doesn't even directly interface with each other because it feels as though we are talking about different celebrity examples and different corners of the industry and different types of types of productions. I do agree with that final idea there from Lynn Gardner that it doesn't feel as though we are experiencing an epidemic of dreadful or egregious or disappointing celebrity casting. This being a topic that comes up occasionally, this being something that people like to ask me about. It's a little while now since we've seen a handful of very frequent examples of actors shoehorned into roles that they are not necessarily capable of performing as well as more experienced counterparts. That's the most diplomatic way I can possibly say that. In other words, we haven't seen really dodgy celebrity casting in quite a little while. And so, at least in the uk, I tend to think that the sky is not falling. I also think that it is a great thing whenever you have something like a Game of Thrones or a Downton Abbey or the Crown that generates a whole new flock of stage ready name recognition talent. It would of course be even better if that talent could be spread throughout all tiers of the industry. In the smaller theaters and the mid scale theatres, regionally as well, and not just in commercial ventures or at the National Theatre or at the Young Vic or at the Old Vic. If it could, you know, help to uplift theatre nationwide and industry wide, that would be the most productive and the most successful thing. Where I think we are seeing bigger problems is over on Broadway. And I don't mean throughout the U.S. i mean specifically in New York, specifically on and off Broadway as well. Because this is actually starting to trickle down into more and more Off Broadway shows which historically, and there's, you know, been examples of starry and celebrity casting in the past. Even like Shakespeare in the park, which you can queue up through the night for free tickets for, is no stranger to wildly exciting stars on stage. But you would associate previously Off Broadway theatre with being about quality writing and underground, less mainstream, less known productions. And the fact that you now have wildly inflated tickets because Tom Hanks is doing an Off Broadway play, because John Krasinski is doing Off Broadway theatre. Like you want the stuff off Broadway to be selling out because the spaces are smaller and people say it's fantastic and it's getting really exciting buzz and the writing is good and there's this thrilling intimacy and immediacy to the production and not because it hasn't started performances yet, but Hugh Jackman's gonna be in it. Like that sort of upsets the balance of the whole thing. And certainly on Broadway as well. Definitely in the last season we really saw the financial impact for every show really of George Clooney arriving into town and Denzel and Jake and the various succession alumni because it destabilizes the industry. Because when you have something that is recouping that quickly and selling out with average ticket prices of around $700 and something dollars, then I'm sorry, that is going to impact the extent to which those theater goers go and see a show again the next night. They think that was great. Once in a lifetime. We saw Denzel Washington on stage. Maybe tomorrow night we stay in. Maybe tomorrow night we get a cheap, we get a $1 slice of pizza. Maybe we don't go and see another Broadway show because we just spent spent over a thousand dollars for two people on average. And the reality for producers and investors is that they're all paying attention to this as well. It's why this season it's harder for people to get enough backers to support very expensive new musicals with great but non celebrity musical theater casts. In comparison to the plays that are getting funded really quickly that investors are allegedly falling over each other to try and get behind and invest in. Because as a celebrity led play is now the surest bet on Broadway. Those are the shows that are actually recouping, that are making money and that are worth your time and worth your investment. So in that sense though, that isn't what either of these pieces in the stage were actually talking about. I do think that we are seeing some real damage as a result of celebrity casting, particularly where plays are concerned. But it's affecting the musicals as well. And as long as Broadway's finances continue to follow that trend and continue to be what they are are. I don't know what resolves that situation because for a lot of producers that is going to continue to be the golden goose that they are going to try and covet when that is the only way in town to guarantee that you're going to make money without finding a surprise, unpredictable, lightning in a bottle Hamilton kind of a show, then they're going to keep doing that because that's the thing that works. And it's also difficult to criticize them when for a lot of producers that's the thing that they do so that they can guarantee they are going to make money so they can finally finance the other thing that's going to lose money. Anyway, all of this to say yes, celebrity casting is something we are seeing more and more of. I think it's having a more tangible industry impact in New York right now than it is in London. I think it is one of various challenges being faced by the UK theater industry, another of which is name recognition when it comes to the shows themselves and not just the cast members who are appearing in them. And if it is true, as I've long suspected, that it's not necessarily about seeing a particular actor on stage because that's been their lifelong dream, but more about that being, for a lot of people, a mark of quality. I often overhear conversations where people are saying, oh, should we go see this? When it comes to the theater near us next month, oh, who's in it? If only to try and discern whether or not it's a thing worth seeing, Maybe theaters and producers need to find a new way of reassuring audiences and communicating to them that regardless of who is in it, this is a piece of theatre worth seeing. How we do that I do not know, but I would like to try and help. In the meantime, while we work on that idea, those have been my thoughts about celebrity casting and whether or not it is killing the theatre industry. As always, I would love to know what you have to say. Let me know in the comments section down below. And in the meantime, I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a Stagey Day. For 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.
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