Good Morning,
The most useful stories today aren’t about who’s failing to draw a crowd. They’re about where crowds actually come from now — and it’s almost never through the front door.
A fictional English football club made Americans care about the real sport, and the writers say the trick was smuggling the game inside a comedy (Los Angeles Times). Poetry is having its biggest moment in decades, built by performance poets on TikTok and Instagram rather than by publishers (The Guardian). And Broadway is studying movie theaters after the Hadestown pro-shot hit, on the theory that a camera close enough to read an actor’s eyes offers something the eighth row can’t (NPR).
Set that against today’s harder math. Jellicle Ball filled every seat it had and still had to close, because a Broadway show is a start-up carrying fixed rent (The New York Times). And developmental programs — where new work figures out who it’s for — are disappearing from American theatre at an alarming rate (American Theatre). Demand isn’t the constraint. The path from demand to a sustainable institution is.
Meanwhile, Britain’s Ministry of Justice has spent £50,000 scrubbing a Banksy off a heritage listed wall (BBC).
All of our stories below.
