Why Musical Theater People Should Support “Peter Pan: Live"

Last night 9.1 Million people tuned in to see Allison Williams play the boy that never grew up. That is down fifty percent from last years “Sound of Music: Live” event but still a huge audience for a musical written in 1954.

Now I am not writing this piece to convince you to like Allison Williams as Peter, or to change your mind if you thought the show was crap. (Full disclosure I haven’t watched it yet.)

No, I am writing this to implore the theater community to fully support these live events no matter how flawed you believe the casting choices or execution to be.

(WARNING – MATH AHEAD)

Since 1997 Broadway shows, have had an average annual attendance in the 12 million range. That attendance is reached over 1400 - 1500 “Total Playing Weeks.” You get that number by adding all the weeks that all the Broadway shows run in a year.

This gives us an average of around 8600 attendees per week, spread over all Broadway shows. Or in other words, Broadway shows play weekly to 0.0009% the audience that Peter Pan reached last night.

Ok that was a lot of math so if you are still reading this you have gotten though the hard part.

Now why should we support something that obviously is supported already, at least in the corporate sense? I mean Walmart sponsored the show so they weren’t hurting for money like most Broadway shows will this year.

The answer lies in the math above. The audience. In one night and subsequent DVR and online watching, NBC can spread the art of musical theater to more people than Broadway can in a year.

Almost everyone can remember their first musical experience, and last night tons of children were introduced to musical theater.

Not to sound too much like Whitney Houston but, these children are the future. They will be the performers and producers and theater goers that will sustain this art-form well past the time most people will even remember that Christopher Walken may have been “too old to play Hook.”

So the next time you take to social media to tell all of your friends how terrible the NBC musical was, stop and ask yourself, what is worse for musical theater as an art?

Allison Williams as Pan…or you telling people not to watch?

- David Surkin

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David Surkin is Artistic Director of Musical Theater Studio and Cast Aside Productions. David’s focus and passion is based on musical theater performance and audition training. Using a Meisner based technique as well as technique learned from experience in the craft, David helps students uncover and understand their potential in the all forms of art and performance.