![\"200px-DeathOfASalesman\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/200px-DeathOfASalesman.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhile today, Broadway tickets often cost hundreds of dollars, and even nonprofit theaters are jacking up prices, in part because the rough economy and meager public funds, and a decline in season subscribers mean that many theaters see little choice.<\/p>\n
A New York Times story<\/a> documents how far we\u2019ve come in the last few decades since the days when a night at the theater was accessible. New York\u2019s largest nonprofit theater, the Roundabout, is charging $162 for the best seats for its Cabaret<\/i> revival.<\/p>\n Writes Patrick Healy:<\/p>\n Raising prices for the theatrical version of a rerun is brazen, even by the increasingly aggressive standards of New York\u2019s nonprofit theaters, which \u2014 shielded from many of the financial pressures of Broadway \u2014 have been the incubators for such pathbreaking productions as \u201cA Chorus Line,\u201d \u201cThe Coast of Utopia\u201d and \u201cSpring Awakening.\u201d Nonprofits are where new works with homegrown actors are produced, where challenging Pulitzer Prize-winning plays are introduced, and where, until recently, ticket prices were low.<\/i><\/p>\n The story offers a good summary on the state of nonprofit theater (especially in New York), and what some of nonprofits are doing to keep costs down.<\/p>\n My sense is that part of what’s taken theater costs so high — and this is true especially of Broadway shows — is pressure to match the special effects and sensory overload that have dominated film and popular culture in recent decades. Whether lots of electronics and hardware makes a play or show better is something we can debate, and it surely varies from production to production. But better or worse, the higher cost is surely passed along to the ticket-buyer.<\/p>\n My favorite story on this important subject was by culture critic Lee Siegel, who wrote<\/a> during the Broadway run of Philip Seymour Hoffman-starring Death of a Salesman<\/p>\n Certainly few middle-class people, or at least anyone from any \u201cmiddle class\u201d that Loman would recognize, are among the audiences attending this production. What was once a middle-class entertainment has become a luxury item. Tickets for the original run, in 194<\/em><\/a>9, cost between $1.80 and $4.80; tickets for the 2012 run range from $111 to $840. After adjusting for inflation, that\u2019s a 10-fold increase, well beyond the reach of today\u2019s putative Willy Lomans.<\/em><\/p>\n