The Guardian has a short and clear piece on the London production of The Producers, and more specifically on the cluster of producers that have brought it to the stage. There are as many as 13 individuals and organizations involved in the investor pool (depending on how you count), quite a few steps from the mythical and historic impresario approach:
Huge producer consortiums are now the norm for modern stage musicals. The single, all-powerful producer exerting full artistic and financial control has become exceptionally rare — Cameron Mackintosh being the notable exception. But most big shows, particularly those that transfer internationally, are financed and packaged like films.
To balance the risk and the ever-growing cost of mounting a stage musical (now costing over $10 million per production, just to get it going), producer consortiums bring many players to the table, and buffer their creative input through the terms of the partnership:
Clearly, it would be impossible to do the job if all these show-business moguls were to venture an opinion at once. Instead, the structure breaks down into a number of limited partners (investors who have no artistic input but are indemnified against loss) and general partners (the creative brains behind the project who take the lion’s share of risk).
For cultural productions with large fixed costs to launch, and huge risk of ever making that money back, these kinds of production consortiums may become more common throughout the industry — for-profit and nonprofit. There are even several touring museum exhibits that are organized in the same way.
Does the corporate consortium lead to safer and flashier product, over the good old brazen impresario model? Hard to say, but interesting to consider.
